Born in 1939 I thrilled to hear elderly relatives recall the days before 1900. Only six generations of passed-on stories brought me to the days when my grandmother’s great-great-grandfather was kidnapped by British soldiers. I regretted that no family yarns had come down from even earlier times. Once I calculated that the Roman Empire had ended only 80 generations before mine.
The idea of doing research on the mechanisms of aging came when I was a Yale undergraduate. I was lucky to be befriended by Carl Woese, Don Caspar, Ernie Pollard, Dick Setlow and others in the biophysics department whom I met through a scholarship job. They included me in many free-wheeling discussions about the remarkable prospects for molecular biology that made me boil with excitement. In one session, perhaps in 1958, Carl said, “Why don’t you study aging? Nothing is known, and you are crazy enough to try.”
I ...
