Cynthia Kenyon didn’t plan on becoming a famous scientist when she grew up. In fact, if anyone had told her she was going to be one of the leading researchers in lifespan and genetics, she probably would have gently contradicted that person.
“In high school, I was all set on a career as a symphony musician,” she says. Kenyon recalls practicing French horn for hours every day, and eventually she made it to first chair. The problem was, “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was terrible at the French horn. I had almost no talent. I would miss notes and people would get mad at me. It was so unpleasant that I finally quit.”
After giving up her dream of becoming a professional musician, Kenyon entered the University of Georgia and embarked on an “odyssey for a passion.” She describes considering “a zillion” majors, studying everything from dairy science to Russian literature.
In her junior year, she gave up on college altogether and dropped out to work on a farm. Kenyon probably wasn’t farming material either because she remembers, “kind of languishing for a while until my mother brought me a copy of the book `The Molecular Biology of the Gene’ by James Watson.” Watson was one of the scientists who decoded the double helix of DNA and propelled biology toward a molecular understanding of how cells really work.
Her mother’s gift of a biology textbook accomplished more than just convincing Kenyon to give college another try. Kenyon recognized that the explosively growing field of genetics research would satisfy her “quest for truth.”
As she tells it: “I went back to school and for the first time learned that there were little gadgets inside cells that allowed genes to be switched on and off. I realized that biology was sensible, that we could understand it the same way we understand electronic circuits. I was intrigued. This offered a way to learn about life.”
Finally on the right path, Kenyon flourished. The former dropout graduated as valedictorian and went on to get her doctorate in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a postdoctoral stint in Cambridge, England, she landed a faculty position at the University of California at San Francisco, one of the top medical research facilities in the world.
Of her rocky beginnings, Kenyon observes: “It taught me that what you should try to find is not only something that you like, but something that you’re good at. It’s not enough to just work hard, you have to have some talent for it.”
Judging by her success in academia, Kenyon has considerable talent for biology. She’s a tenured full professor at UCSF, the journals Science and Nature have published her work, and she has spoken at conferences all over the world. Her most recent honor, an appointment as UCSF’s Herb Boyer Distinguished Professor, demonstrates the authority Kenyon has gained in her field. Boyer, a UCSF professor emeritus, was one of the discoverers of recombinant DNA, the gene-splicing technique that gave birth to the biotech industry and gave researchers their most valuable tool to manipulate genes and understand how they work.
Most top scientists work hard and contribute to their fields without ever gaining recognition outside the cloistered world of academic research. Kenyon is an exception, having appeared on the Discovery Channel and on two interviews with Tom Brokaw. Her co-star in these appearances is a mutant nematode (a small worm) whose life expectancy is double the norm for its species. The nematode, C. elegans, fondly called “The Worm,” is one of the animals scientists use to study genes. The worm usually lives about 14 days, but Kenyon’s lab discovered that a particular mutant strain stretches out its life for 30 days or more. And it’s not doddering, Kenyon says. “After two weeks, the normal worm is basically in a nursing home, or dead already. It’s lying quietly, it looks old. In contrast, the altered worm is still active. It isn’t just hanging onto life, it’s out on the tennis court.”
The best part, Kenyon explains, is that “everything else we know about the worm, we find happens in a similar way in humans. Muscles are made the same way, cells divide the same way, the body plan is set up with the same mechanism. Everything else that we thought would be different is the same. So it’s a reasonable guess that if there’s a little gadget that ages the worm, there will be a similar gadget that ages us.”
Her work won’t necessarily make people live twice as long, Kenyon cautions, nor is that her goal. The ethical problems would be thorny, to say the least. Besides, “humans could die of something else, heart attacks, for example.” But she’s certain that if science could unlock the mystery of how one gene keeps an animal active and healthy for so much longer, “we could harness that information and put it to work to improve the quality of old age for people.”
Kenyon enjoys her fame, recounting with amusement how her lab crew was on a plane without her, returning from a worm meeting, and there she was on the TV screen in a snippet from a recent interview. But what she enjoys most is her day-to-day life as a scientist. She speaks with pride of the graduate students she teaches and the joy of sharing with them the thrill of discovery.
Sharing discoveries is vital to scientists, and Kenyon obviously relishes the collaborative and social aspects of her work. She chuckles dismissively at the stereotype of the lone researcher, whose only company is a microscope and Bunsen burner. In contrast, Kenyon describes a network of biologists all over the world whom she sees regularly at conferences and who’ve become good friends.
“Many of the most successful scientists are gregarious people who love other people,” Kenyon says. “They enjoy making other people happy, and it shows in way they love to teach, the way they give great talks. It’s a very social environment.”
Asked if it troubles her that women are still a minority in the scientific community, Kenyon replies: “One time I attended a women’s group, and a professional woman from another field came to talk to us. She said, `You might not want to believe it, but there’s discrimination in your field.’ I left that meeting feeling bad and went to a science gathering, where we have lunch with other faculty and someone talks about the projects in their lab. I never would have noticed before, but that time I did notice that the speaker was a man. I had a question, but I thought, `Oh no. Maybe he’ll think since I’m a woman I shouldn’t ask.’ I was inhibited from asking the question, and I learned that it’s personally very dangerous for me to have an underdog attitude.”
Kenyon believes in fighting discrimination but admits that she’s uncomfortable talking about it. What works best for her is to focus on the work, on the ideas. “I’m a scientist. I’m a fine scientist who happens to be a woman.”
Of all the reasons Kenyon loves being a scientist, she seems to appreciate most the gift of science’s insights into how life works. “For example, if you look outside at a beautiful tree, you can think, `What a fine old tree. It has a beautiful trunk, its leaves rustle in the wind, it even has a nice smell in the spring. It’s beautiful.’ But in addition, as a scientist you could think, `That tree is taking carbon dioxide out of the air, and it has little machines in its leaves that let it make more leaves. It’s making tree from air.’ There’s that additional appreciation, and that adds another dimension.”
Kenyon definitely shatters the stereotype of the cool, analytical scientist. She remains that undergraduate student who embarked upon a “quest for truth,” who sought to unlock life’s mysteries. And science not only gives Kenyon joy and meaning personally, she believes basic scientific research benefits us all. The biotech industry, she explains, with its promise of a barrage of new pharmaceuticals, arose from basic experiments with bacteria.
“We’re not turning our backs on humanity,” Kenyon says of herself and her fellow researchers. “We’re bringing things to light that will be useful in the future.”
She describes how rapidly scientific knowledge is expanding and how biologists have learned more in the past 10 years about how animals grow and develop than they knew in all the years before. Pressed to hazard a guess about whether her lifespan work will have an effect within her own lifetime, Kenyon says: “No one can predict the future. But it’d be nice to live that long.”
