What is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere? It's so intricate and complicated, and you want to know how it works.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the fascination with the complexity of telomeres and the desire to understand their function.
Elizabeth Blackburn's statement reflects the intrigue scientists feel towards telomeres, which are crucial for chromosome protection and cellular aging. Her pursuit to unravel the complexities of telomeres illustrates a broader theme in science: the motivation to explore and understand the intricate systems that govern life and health.
In practice
In a lecture on genetics, you might say, 'As Elizabeth Blackburn pointed out, what is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere?' to engage the audience.
Cancer cells have had so many other things go wrong with them, genetic, non-genetic changes, that those cells, one of the things they then get selected for is that they have lots of telomerase because now the telomeres in those cells get maintained.
We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.
Checking your telomere length is a bit like weighing yourself: you get this single number which depends on a lot of factors. Telomere length gives a sense of your underlying health.
We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.
For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.
If we think of our chromosomes - they carry our genetic material - as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.
The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.
Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.
'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.
The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.