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Elizabeth Blackburn, FRS, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009, and F1000 International Advisory Board Member, gave a Keynote Lecture at the recent EMBO 2010 meeting in Barcelona. Edyta Zielinska and Kathleen Wets were lucky enough to catch her briefly between engagements to hear about her current research.

This is the first of three videos we’ll be running. Unfortunately the piano started playing just as we started talking! I’ve paraphrased what she said, after the video.

F1000: What inspired you to study the role of telomeres in disease rather than in aging?

Liz Blackburn (paraphrased): We looked at the susceptibility of real people to common diseases of aging. We can think about aging in different ways, but if we ask the question, what actually kills people in old age? in developed society it’s cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.

If that’s what happens to people when they get older—they die, largely because of those big three—then that’s a pretty central part of aging to care about. Most of the time when talking about aging, one isn’t talking about those diseases. So because what we’ve found out about telomeres and telomerases is related to those diseases, then that’s the aspect of aging I care about.

The aging field tackles a number of broad questions and how telomeres and telomerases relate to that is really evolving, and we don’t know. I haven’t been traditionally involved in the kinds of aging model studies that have been done, because that hasn’t been where my interests lay, even though that work is very interesting.