Leslie Gordon, a scientist and mother of a child with a premature aging syndrome, is doing everything she can to find a cure for the disorder. On 10 October 2002, physicians Leslie Gordon and Scott Berns were heading out to celebrate their ninth wedding anniversary. Then the phone rang. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and Maria Erik...
Olivia Pereira-Smith moved from Bombay to Berkeley to pursue science. Focusing initially on experiments that merged cells, she built a career in gerontology and a successful working relationship with her husband and research partner. In the late 1970s, Olivia Pereira-Smith was working as a technician with cell biologist James Smith, her husband, at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake P...
The question of why and how organisms age has preoccupied Trey Powers since he was 14. By the time he was a high school senior, he had conducted his first experiments in a gerontology research group at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine. Today Powers is a third-year grad student at the University of Washington, Seattle. When he isn't probing the mechanisms of aging in baker's yeast, he races in sail...
Matt Kaeberlein fermented a breakthrough in the genetics of yeast aging. His next feat: starting a biotech firm. Biologist Matt Kaeberlein (pictured left) looks like he just got out of boot camp. He's tall, burly, has a crew cut, and exudes an air of self-confidence--not exactly the stereotypical nerdy scientist. "If you lined him up with a bunch of drill sergeants, ... he'd fit right in," says c...
Been there, done that. Biochemist-in-training Bridget Williams tells other students the good, the bad, and the ugly about getting a Ph.D. in science. Her labmates nicknamed her Sensei, which means "mentor" in Japanese. Bridget Williams (pictured left), a 28-year-old biochemistry graduate student at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, is often the first person peers...
William Sonntag's early interest in psychology launched his studies of how growth hormone influences aging of the brain. Every now and then, William Sonntag (pictured left) does something you wouldn't expect of an esteemed scholar. Two years ago, for instance, Sonntag and his wife, MaryAnn, flung themselves out of an airplane at 13,000 feet and hurtled to Earth. "My wife had a great time; she was...
Irrepressible Paola Timiras survived World War II to champion education on aging. She's still going strong. Over lunch at the Women's Faculty Club at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, neuroendocrinologist Paola Timiras (pictured left) is discussing a radical mission: creating an undergraduate major in gerontology. "Faculty, space, and financing," Timiras says, ticking off each item on ...
Vicki Lundblad won first prize at the science fair in seventh grade. Today, she's unraveling the mechanisms that cells use to protect the ends of their chromosomes. A few years ago, Nobel laureate Tom Cech visited geneticist Vicki Lundblad (pictured left) at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Cech was collaborating with the younger professor on research involving telomeres, the DNA-and-protei...
Edward Masoro began studying calorie restriction and life-span in 1975, when he was 51. Now 78, his appetite for gerontology is far from sated. Physiologist Edward Masoro could be the only professor who's ever needed a helmet in the line of duty. At the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (UTHSCSA), where he worked for 23 years before retiring in 1996, he paced back and forth...
Caleb Finch, a biogerontologist and bluegrass fiddler, has woven diverse themes into a research opus on aging. In the late '60s at Rockefeller University in New York City, biology graduate student Caleb "Tuck" Finch gave a talk on his Ph.D. research, titled "Cellular Activities During Aging in Mammals." He recalls that afterward, pathologist Peyton Rous, who had recently won a Nobel Prize for dis...
Ten years ago, geriatrician Thomas Perls couldn't understand why his 100-year-old patients were never in their rooms. He started looking into why, and he hasn't stopped since Like most doctors, Thomas Perls was trained to accept the view that aging inevitably brings on a litany of chronic illnesses, leaving elderly people senile and decrepit. So in 1992, Perls was prepared for the worst when, as ...
In pursuit of his research objectives, Marc Tatar has chased butterflies, dodged rattlesnakes, and chomped on termites. Now he's leading the pack in efforts to decipher how hormones control aging in fruit flies. Marc Tatar (pictured left) is recounting his days as a stalker. "You sneak up on 'em," he says, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper. "You sneak up, you sneak up ... and then you snap...
A software engineer is the last person you'd expect to see dissecting the biology of aging. But Aubrey de Grey's radical views have stirred up debate in the field of gerontology. In a gaggle of gerontologists, Aubrey de Grey sticks out. It isn't just his strikingly long and voluminous brown beard that sets him apart, nor the fact that the tall, slender Brit often talks at such a fast and fervent ...
Molecular biologist Brian Clark works tirelessly to discover and develop connections among Europe's biogerontologists. Sit down for a chat with British-born molecular biologist Brian Clark (pictured left), and it doesn't take long before the names start dropping: Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's double helix; Sydney Brenner, pioneer in studying roundworm cell differentiation; Marshall Nirenb...
Rudi Westendorp is one of those rare individuals whose work unites geriatrics, clinical epidemiology, and the biology of aging. In 1985, Rudi Westendorp was a first-year medical resident in internal medicine in Leiden, the Netherlands. Like the other male residents in his department, he initially went without a tie under his white lab coat, but senior doctors wanted him and the rest of the junior...
After playing saxophone in Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, and Boston, Adam Antebi has stepped up to his most challenging gig yet: deciphering the links between endocrinology and longevity in the nematode. When Adam Antebi (pictured left) graduated from high school in Highland Park, New Jersey, in 1979, his fellow seniors voted him not only Class Brain, but also Most Talented, Best Instrumentalist, Most Art...
Florian Muller was 12 when he first imagined that genetic engineering might someday extend life span. A dozen years later, he's still pursuing that vision: As a first-year grad student, he is investigating whether interventions that reduce oxidative damage could stretch longevity or ameliorate age-related diseases. Five years ago, evolutionary biologist Steve Austad offered a graduate seminar ent...
Cell biologist Judith Campisi's lab has fermented new insights into cancer and the biology of aging. The closest thing to a diploma on the walls of cell biologist Judith Campisi's office at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California, is a certificate from a course in wine tasting that she took about 15 years ago. Campisi, 55, is a serious wine connoisseur who makes regul...
Adam Gazzaley, neurobiologist and photographer, began his studies of cognitive aging with a microscope. Now he's peering through the wide-angle lens of whole-brain imaging. Neurobiologist and native New Yorker Adam Gazzaley was the first person in his family to go to college. He was nearly the first of the clan to get expelled, too, after he blew up a toilet at the State University of New York (S...
