Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel Prize for her discoveries about telomeres and the telomerase enzyme. She recently did a Google Hangout(视频群聊) with Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina which included taking questions from attendees(参加者) via social media. 

  “Can telomeres actually grow longer and response to exercise?”

  “Well, we don’t know if telomeres actually grow with exercise, but what is known is, I’ll give you a great example of a study. We didn’t do it. Twins. So they looked at twins. This is a big study. And they said, of the twin who’ve actually done exercise, the one who did exercise and the one who didn’t, so you’d be able to find a lot of twins it turns out, in that situation. And they said, who’s got the longer telomeres. And it was twin who did some exercise. The one who didn’t had shorter telomeres. And yet their genes are the same. So you see that tells you something quite nice.

  And of course, well, you say, was it really the exercise, or was it something else that was different between the twins. And that’s where epidemiology studies have to be done so carefully. But over and over again, we keep finding that same result. That the exercise, is associated with a personal who will have less telomere shortening. And so it looks like now, it really is the exercise that’s somehow keeping the shortening process from being too fast.”

  The entire 27-minute Google Hangout with Mariette DiChristina and Nobel Laurent Elizabeth Blackburn is on our website. Just google “Hangout” and “Elizabeth Blackburn”.