I’ll never forget how startling it was to hear a serious scientist say, “We might be able to do something about this.” The average fly in his bottles died at around 60. In 1998, when Benzer was 77 years old, he announced the discovery of a mutant fruit fly he called Methuselah. At MIT, Lenny Guarente was dissecting the genetics of aging in yeast, and he seemed to be getting somewhere too. elegans and looked young and sleek almost to the end. In 1993, she had announced the discovery of a mutant that lived about twice as long as the average C. At the University of California, San Francisco, Cynthia Kenyon was dissecting the aging of the worm C. I’ll never forget how startling it was to hear a serious scientist say, We might be able to do something about this. I was writing a book about him, and in the late 1990s he used to talk about aging in his Fly Room at Caltech in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, even though it was just the two of us and a thousand fly bottles at three in the morning. It was the great molecular biologist Seymour Benzer who got me interested in the idea that aging might be malleable.
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