Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.
Interpretation
The speaker developed a deep interest in biology from a young age, inspired by a love for animals.
In this quote, Elizabeth Blackburn reflects on her childhood fascination with animals that led her to find biology as a captivating field of study. This highlights how early passions can shape our career choices and interests, showcasing the natural curiosity that influences our journey in life and science.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about career paths, you could share this quote to illustrate how childhood interests can influence adult choices.
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 best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. D.N.A. This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest.
Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.
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