Cynthia Kenyon

person · earth · San Francisco, California

American molecular biologist, at the University of California San Francisco for most of her academic career and later a vice-president at Calico, the Alphabet-funded ageing research company founded in 2013. Her laboratory's 1993 Nature paper showed that a mutation in daf-2 more than doubles the lifespan of C. elegans while leaving the animals visibly healthy and active, and that the effect requires daf-16. The finding did two things: it demonstrated that lifespan is under genetic control rather than being simple wear, and it converted ageing from a descriptive subject into an experimental one. Kenyon has been careful in print about the distance between a nematode and a person, which distinguishes her from a good deal of the commentary her result generated.