Can meditation really slow ageing?

Is there real science in the spiritualism of meditation? Jo Marchant meets a Nobel Prize-winner who thinks so.

It’s seven in the morning on the beach in Santa Monica, California. The low sun glints off the waves and the clouds are still golden from the dawn. The view stretches out over thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. In the distance, white villas of wealthy Los Angeles residents dot the Hollywood hills. Here by the shore, curlews and sandpipers cluster on the damp sand. A few metres back from the water’s edge, a handful of people sit cross-legged: members of a local Buddhist centre about to begin an hour-long silent meditation.

Such spiritual practices may seem a world away from biomedical research, with its focus on molecular processes and repeatable results. Yet just up the coast, at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a team led by a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist is charging into territory where few mainstream scientists would dare to tread. Whereas Western biomedicine has traditionally shunned the study of personal experiences and emotions in relation to physical health, these scientists are placing state of mind at the centre of their work. They are engaged in serious studies hinting that meditation might – as Eastern traditions have long claimed – slow ageing and lengthen life.

Elizabeth Blackburn has always been fascinated by how life works. Born in 1948, she grew up by the sea in a remote town in Tasmania, Australia, collecting ants from her garden and jellyfish from the beach. When she began her scientific career, she moved on to dissecting living systems molecule by molecule. 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 sequenced the chromosome tips of a single-celled freshwater creature called Tetrahymena (“pond scum”, as she describes it) and discovered a repeating DNA motif that acts as a protective cap. The caps, dubbed telomeres, were subsequently found on human chromosomes too. They shield the ends of our chromosomes each time our cells divide and the DNA is copied, 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 recognised as a key process in ageing. This work ultimately won Blackburn the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Reference:

• Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, a 2009 biography by Catherine Brady.
• The seminal 2004 paper linking stress to telomere length in mothers of chronically ill children.
• 2009 study in which telomere shortening predicted death from cardiovascular disease in elderly men.
• 2014 study showing that Native Americans with shorter telomeres were more likely to develop diabetes.
• 2011 study suggesting that a meditation retreat boosted telomerase levels.
• 2013 study suggesting that chanting meditation might boost telomerase levels.
• 2013 study linking lifestyle changes with longer telomeres in men with prostate cancer.
• 2013 study showing that women whose minds wandered less had longer telomeres.
• Blackburn and Epel’s 2012 commentary in Nature arguing for “societal stress reduction”.