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Cynthia Kenyon set out to be a vet, but despite straight A grades, she dropped out and “started spiralling downwards” until her mother brought home a copy of James Watson’s The Molecular Biology of the Gene. She was hooked, graduated in biology, and went on to study E. coli at MIT. In the 1980s, she worked on the genetics of the nematode worm C. elegans at Sydney Brenner’s molecular biology lab in Cambridge, UK. Back in the US, at the University of California, San Francisco, she discovered that a mutation in a single gene doubled the worm’s lifespan (Nature, vol 366, p 461). In 2002,…