Professor Cynthia Jane Kenyon

Cynthia Kenyon earned her B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976 and her Ph.D. in Biology from MIT in 1981, where she discovered that DNA damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She received her post-doctoral training on the genetic basis of growth with Professor Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. Her subsequent career has been truly meteoric. She joined the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as an assistant professor of biochemistry and Biophysics in 1986, and became a full professor within only 8 years. In 1997, she was awarded the prestigious Herbert Boyer Distinguished Chair of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Professor Kenyon is noted for her work on the genetics of aging in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a tiny nematode developed by Brenner as an experimental animal model for research on molecular biology and genetics. During the early part of her career, she discovered that Hox genes, previously known to pattern the fruit fly segments, were also responsible for body-patterning of C. elegans. These findings demonstrated that Hox genes are not simply involved in segmentation, as originally thought, but instead formed part of a much more ancient and fundamental metazoan patterning system. Kenyon’s groundbreaking discovery in 1993 that a single-gene mutation (called daf-2) could double the lifespan of C. elegans, sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. Her findings led to the discovery that an evolutionarily conserved hormone (Insulin/IGF-1-like) signaling system influences aging in other organisms, including mammals. This work inspired many scientists worldwide and opened new avenues for identifying genetic, metabolic and environmental factors that can influence the aging process. She published numerous research papers and reviewed articles in prestigious journals. Her studies suggested that clinical signs of aging were not inevitable and that the process of aging could be slowed down and its untoward effects could be eliminated or delayed.

Professor Kenyon’s outstanding contributions to the science of aging have been widely recognized. She is the recipient of a Searle Scholarship, a Packard Fellowship, and an Ellison Medical Foundation Fellowship. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and one of the founders of Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a firm which seeks to apply the results of research for making drugs to slow down the aging process.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.