A Nobel laureate is put through a test

Scientists are trained to be sceptics,and Elizabeth H Blackburn considers herself one of the biggest.

Scientists are trained to be sceptics,and Elizabeth H Blackburn considers herself one of the biggest. Show her the data,and be ready to defend it. But even though she relishes the give and take,Blackburn admits to impatience at times with the questions some scientists have raised about one of her ventures. Its just such a no-brainer,and yet people have such difficulty understanding it, she said.

At issue is a lab test that measures telomeres,stretches of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes and help keep cells from ageing too soon. Unusually short telomeres may be a sign of illness,and Blackburn,who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on telomeres,thinks measuring them could give doctors a chance to intervene early and maybe even prevent disease. A company she helped found expects to begin offering tests to the public later this year.

Other researchers have raised doubts about the usefulness of the measurement,which does not diagnose a specific disease. But Blackburn,64,a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California,San Francisco,says she has been convinced by a decade of data from her own team and others,linking short telomeres to heart disease,diabetes,cancer and other diseases.

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After moving to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow,she began studying telomeres in a one-celled organism,Tetrahymena,that she cheerfully calls pond scum. Scientists had long suspected that telomeres protected the ends of chromosomes,but no one knew how.

Each time a cell divides,its telomeres shorten,and if they get too short,the cell cannot divide any more. But somehow,in healthy cells,the telomeres were being rebuilt. Blackburn deciphered the structure,finding that telomeres consisted of six DNA units,repeated many times. She and a researcher at Harvard,Jack W Szostak,determined that there must be an enzyme that keeps restoring the telomeres.

Blackburn moved on to the University of California,Berkeley,and in 1984,Carol W Greider,a graduate student in her lab,found the enzyme: telomerase. Blackburn,Greider and Szostak shared the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.

In 1990,Blackburn began studying cancer,teaming her deep knowledge of cell biology with that of physicians who saw every day what mutated cells could do to patients. Her projects include studies in mice to find out whether blocking telomerase can fight cancer.

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A little more than 10 years ago she began to collaborate with Elissa Epel,a psychologist at the university who studies chronic stress. As data linking telomeres to stress and health accumulated,people began asking if their telomeres could be measured. Blackburn began to think it reasonable to offer a test to the public and she helped found a company,Telome Health,in May 2010. The test is nonspecific: It does not diagnose a particular disease,but it may indicate something that is wrong.

Its not a crystal ball to tell you how many years youve got left or any such nonsense, Blackburn said.

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