Shoelaces with little caps at the end that stops them from fraying. Elizabeth Blackburn has compared this to the purpose of the telomeres, which she studied. In her lectures, she used these large shoelaces to illustrate this. The telomeres are the end bits in the chromosomal DNA molecules. They are shaped to partly protect the chromosomes, but the telomeres shorten slightly with every cell division.
Elizabeth Blackburn donated the shoelaces to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2022.
