Dr. Ergun Sahin, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Sahin’s research on telomeres is critical to us and the medical community understanding how and why we age.  Also, how diseases affect our bodies, which usually sets in as we get older.

Needless to say, filming with someone at his level at the oldest university in America was a most memorable experience.

Telomeres

Telomeres are repetetive sequences at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes. Due to the absence of the enzyme that makes these ends, telomerase, Telomeres get shorter duing human ageing in many tissues. Short telomers compromise the normal function of cells and tissues and are throught to cause ageing. Maintaining normal telomere length has been proposed to be a startegy to prevent ageing.