Cynthia Kenyon is a structural biologist who trained at MIT and at Cambridge University under the legendary Sydney Brenner, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1993 she stunned the world by announcing that her lab had suppressed a single gene in Caenorhabditis elegans worms—nematodes only a millimeter long favored by geneticists as model organisms—and doubled their normal life span.
Recently, with a few more changes, she has extended their life span sixfold. Usually the worms live about 20 days. Her worms lived more than 125 days. More startling, the worms remained robust almost until they died. Kenyon is the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco. She is also the cofounder of Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a company that plans to apply her findings and those of other researchers to create a human antiaging pill.
I understand you wanted to be a writer when you entered the University of Georgia.
K: Yes, I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways. My mother worked in the physics department as an admin, and one day she brought home a copy of James Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene. I looked at it, and I thought: This is really cool, you know, genes getting switched on and off. And I thought: I’ll study that. I loved the idea that biology was logical. A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that’s where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.
What you’re talking about is a whole new approach to disease, to health care.
