“You mean this is a Fountain of Youth gene?”
She nods, delighted that I have made this connection. Yet I don’t know what to make of a woman who has just told me that I or my children might live into the twenty-fourth century. I remember a mid-seventeenth-century poem written by Andrew Marvell about growing old, “To His Coy Mistress”:
But at my back I always hear,
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall be no more found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity.
This is the poet’s attempt to persuade his lover to make up her mind about having sex with him, because life is short, and they both might grow old and die at the rate she is going. But what if life weren’t short? What if what works on Kenyon’s worms really will work in humans?
One outcome would be that a modern-day coy woman would be able to put off her would-be lover for decades, or even centuries—and would require a rewriting of Marvell’s lines to something like this:
Take your time, my coy lass,
Time’s winged chariot won’t pass,
For three or four hundred years, if ever.
1
Cynthia Kenyon talks with the slightly exaggerated facial expressions of someone telling and receiving juicy gossip—expressions of “Oh my gosh!” And “No way!” Her voice is soft and light, and she frequently says “cool” and “neat.” Yet her enthusiasm is infective. “Life’s too short to not be around nice people,” she says, this woman who is delving into the mechanisms of how to make life considerably less short.
As we talk—and she talks very quickly, as if she won’t have time to say everything she wants even if she lives for four hundred years—she offers me peanuts. I take a couple of nuts as Kenyon instantly shifts the topic we are talking about—she does that often—and explains to me that she has totally changed her diet, eliminating most sugars, including those found in processed flour. Hence the peanuts. An experiment with her tiny worms is responsible, she says; that experiment proved that sugar switches on a genetic sequence that increases the amount of insulin produced by the organism, and also shortens its life span. For Kenyon, this was startling because it fit with her lab’s previous discovery that decreasing the amount of insulin in the body extended the worm’s lifespan. “It was a revelation,” Kenyon says. She also drinks red wine and green tea, which her lab and others have shown help repair cells and contribute to an increased life span.
Kenyon’s talk about immortality and a diet based on the molecular biology of a millimeter-long nematode make one wonder whether she had spent too much time at organic Zen retreats in California’s Big Sur. Either that, or this is the sort of con job perpetrated on the gullible conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon five hundred years ago when natives in La Florida assured him there was a fountain with rejuvenating waters; all he had to do was go back on board his ships and sail to a different part of Florida far away from their villages. But Kenyon is serious. Her title alone tells you this: the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. She trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the LMB in the United Kingdom at the same time Doug Melton was there. Kenyon trained directly under the legendary Sydney Brenner, the “father” of C. elegans research. In the sixties, Brenner had chosen this tiny creature to use as a model to figure out how genes work in a simple organism. With fewer than one thousand types of cells and a minimal number of genes for an organism with a simple nervous system and other key organs, C. elegans has the added advantage that it is translucent—its heart, neurons, and other innards can be clearly seen through a microscope.
For two decades, Brenner toiled over this little roundworm, which gave him great insight into the workings of other organisms, such as humans. Brenner also trained dozens of young scientists at the LMB, including Kenyon, to help unfold the secrets of its genetic mysteries. In 2002, Brenner won the Nobel Prize for his work with the worms; along with two former students, John Sulston and Robert Horvitz. Nobel watchers see Kenyon as a contender for the big prize if her research holds up in higher mammals. Kenyon’s work also has attracted commercial investors. In 1999, Kenyon cofounded a company with her fellow longevity expert Leonard Gaurente of MIT and Cindy Bayley, a founder of Kari Stefansson’s company, deCode. Appropriately named Elixir, the Boston-based company has raised $36.5 million to see whether they can turn her research and that of others into a true Fountain of Youth in a pill. Some say such a pill is decades away, or impossible, and Kenyon herself admits that none of this may work with humans. But she is hopeful.
I met Cynthia Kenyon in 2003, when she had extended the life span of worms by only twofold. At that time, she had just moved her lab from the main UCSF campus to the university’s new silver-skinned lab complex at Mission Bay, a stretch of land in south San Francisco being revitalized beside the bay where a sprawling navy shipyard and warehouses used to be. In her office is a copy of Alice in Wonderland and James Watson’s classic textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene, along with other textbooks and journals about worms. Hanging on the wall is a framed one-page article about Kenyon from Glamour, a question and answer column called “Women Right Now.”
“Might there be a way to put off physically aging for an extra few decades?” asked the columnist Judith Newman.
“Maintaining youthful beauty longer—wouldn’t that be great!” answered Kenyon. “All I can tell you for sure is that my worms not only acted younger, they looked younger. So you can draw your own conclusions. One thing that’s likely: How you look as you age is hereditary. Some of my family members, for example, look younger than their real age. And people have mistaken me for thirty, even twenty-five.”
“How old are you really?” asked Newman.
“I’m a hundred and fifty.”
Kenyon frequently appears in the media, combining a rare ability among scientists to communicate effectively with nonscientists with a truly fantastic story. Before she worked on aging, she told the writer Stephen Hall, author of Merchants of Immortality, hardly anyone outside the scientific community paid attention to her work. But as soon as the aging work began, she was inundated. “Night and day, night and day,” she told him. “The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don’t want to get old. And you can see—read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They’re all about aging.” I mention to her my concern about Marvell, and the difficulties poetry might face if the issue of aging and growing old was extended off into the distant future. She stops for a moment, smiling and thinking, a mannerism that says she hadn’t really thought about that. Then she has an answer: “We’ll write new poems.”
I’m still skeptical until I see the evidence with my own eyes in a video on Kenyon’s computer monitor: A normal, three-day-old worm in the prime of life, a C. elegans, is wriggling in a gelatinous broth of nutritious bacteria. At thirteen days in this worm’s normal life span it is sluggish, its head barely stirring as death approaches. The next images show the mutant worm tweaked by Kenyon to suppress or “knock down” the regulator gene called daf-2. At the ripe age of twenty-five days, the worm is still squirming away. “This video says more than twenty Nature articles,” says Kenyon.
Her original research announcing the doubling of the worm’s life was published in Nature in 1993. Until her discoveries, scientists were unaware of these genes’ role in regulating the highly complex process of aging, which involves hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual factors in cells and organs. Her surprising findings launched Kenyon