Can Meditation Really Slow Ageing?

Is there real science in the spiritualism of meditation? Meet a Nobel Prize winner who thinks so.

- Jo Marchant

Meditation may seem a world away from biomedical research, with its focus on molecular processes and repeatable results. Yet, at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a team led by a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist is engaged in serious studies hinting that meditation might slow ageing and lengthen life.

Elizabeth Blackburn has always been fascinated by how life works. She was drawn to biochemistry, she says, because it offered a thorough and precise understanding, “in the form of deep knowledge of the smallest possible subunit of a process”.

Working with biologist Joe Gall at Yale in the 1970s, Blackburn discovered a protective cap on the chromosomes of a single-celled freshwater creature called Tetrahymena. The caps, dubbed telomeres, were subsequently found on human chromosomes too. They shield the ends of our chromosomes each time our cells divide, but they wear down with each division.

In the 1980s, working with graduate student Carol Greider at the University of California, Berkeley, Blackburn discovered an enzyme called telomerase that can protect and rebuild telomeres. Even so, our telomeres dwindle over time. And when they get too short, our cells start to malfunction and lose their ability to divide—a phenomenon that is now recognized as a key process in ageing. This work ultimately won Blackburn the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

In 2000, Blackburn received a visit that changed the course of her research. Elissa Epel, a postdoctoral student from UCSF’s psychiatry department, had a radical proposal.

“I was interested in the idea that if we look deep within cells we might be able to measure the wear and tear of stress and daily life,” says Epel, now director of the Aging, Metabolism and Emotion Center at UCSF. After reading about Blackburn’s work on ageing, she wondered if telomeres might fit the bill.