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Work by Maria Blasco, Calvin Harley, Michael Fossel, Woodring Wright and Shay and Ronald Depinho in particular are of interest but there are literally thousands of articles relating to telomerase, telomeres and the biology behind it.

For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.

I was using very unconventional methods to sequence the telemetric DNA, originally.

In 1978, Elizabeth Blackburn, working with Joe Gall, identified the DNA sequence of telomeres. Every time a cell divides, it gets shorter. But telomeres usually don't. So there must be something happening to the telomeres to keep their length in equilibrium.

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.

We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

I agree Maria Blasco has achieved amazing things with telomerase induction and we are hopeful this will translate to the human model.

I've always been fascinated by what you can learn from looking into your DNA.

When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.