JOSEPH BANKS (February 24, 1743–June 19, 1820): English naturalist, botanist, and former president of the Royal Society who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage round the world. With Lord Sydney a staunch advocate of starting a colony in Australia at Botany Bay on Cape Banks. Namesake of the flower called the Banksia.
NIR BARZILAI (December 23, 1955–): Israeli-born American endocrinologist and professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York best known for his work to elucidate genes that enable members of Ashkenazi families to live over 100, hormones that control lifespan, and the effects of metformin on lifespan.
ELIZABETH BLACKBURN (November 26, 1948–): an Australian American Nobel laureate who, with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, discovered telomerase, the enzyme that extends telomeres. In 2004, she was controversially dismissed from the Bush administration’s President’s Council on Bioethics, allegedly for her advocacy of stem cell research and politics-free scientific enquiry.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE (December 16, 1917–March 19, 2008): British science fiction writer and futurist known as the “Prophet of the Space Age.” Spent most of his adult life in Sri Lanka foreseeing the advent of space travel and satellites. Advocate for protection of gorillas. Polio in 1962 led to postpolio syndrome.
ALVISE (LUIGI) CORNARO (1464 or 1467–May 8, 1566): Venetian nobleman and patron of arts who wrote four books of Discorsi about the path to health and longevity that included fasting and sobriety.
EILEEN M. CRIMMINS: American demographer at the University of Southern California who was the first to combine indicators of disability, disease, and mortality to predict healthy life expectancy. She showed that the prevalence of dementia in women stems largely from their longer life.
RAFAEL DE CABO (January 20, 1968–): Spanish-born scientist at the National Institutes of Health, an expert in the study of the effects of diet on health and lifespan in rodents and primates.
BENJAMIN GOMPERTZ (March 5, 1779–July 14, 1865): British self-educated mathematician who is best known for the Gompertz-Makeham Law of Human Mortality, a demographic model (1825). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and then an actuary at Alliance Assurance company, founded by his brother-in-law Sir Moses Montefiore with his relative Nathan Mayer Rothschild.
LEONARD P. GUARENTE (June 6, 1952–): American molecular biologist and professor at MIT, best known for codiscovering the role of the sirtuins in aging and the necessity of NAD+ for sirtuin activity, linking energy metabolism to longevity.
ALEXANDRE GUÉNIOT (1832–1935): Centenarian and French physician who wrote the book Pour vivre cent ans. L’Art de prolonger ses jours (To Live a Century). He attributed great significance to the “hereditary vital force” that he suggested determines the natural duration of human life at no less than 100 years.
JOHN B. GURDON (October 2, 1933–): British biologist who in 1958 cloned a frog using a nucleus from an adult tadpole’s cell, demonstrating that aging can be reset, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Shinya Yamanaka in 2012.
DENHAM HARMAN (February 14, 1916–November 25, 2014): American chemist who formulated the “Free Radical Theory of Aging” and the “Mitochondrial Theory of Aging.” Harman was a founder of the American Aging Association, ran two miles a day until he was 82, and eventually died at the age of 98.
LEONARD HAYFLICK (May 20, 1928–): American biologist who invented the inverted microscope; best known for his 1962 discovery that normal mammalian cells have a limited capacity for replication. The Hayflick limit on cell division overturned a long-held belief promulgated by the French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel in the early twentieth century that normal cells in culture would proliferate continuously.
STEVE HORVATH (October 25, 1967–): Austrian-born American professor at the University of California at Los Angeles known for his pioneering work on epigenetics and aging and for codeveloping algorithms that predict the age of organisms based on DNA methylation patterns, known as the Horvath aging clock.
SHIN-ICHIRO IMAI (December 9, 1964–): Japanese-born American biologist known for his Heterochromatin Hypothesis of Aging, his work on mammalian sirtuins, and the discovery with Lenny Guarente that sirtuins need NAD+ for their activity.
CYNTHIA J. KENYON (February 21, 1954–): American geneticist who showed that Daf-2 mutations double nematode worm lifespan, after studying under Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner using nematodes as a model organism. Kenyon is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and vice president of aging research at Calico.
JAMES L. KIRKLAND: American physician and biologist working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, New York; a pioneer in the study of senescent “zombie” cells and the development of drugs called senolytics that kill them.
THOMAS B. L. KIRKWOOD (July 6, 1951–): South African–born biologist and associate dean for ageing at Newcastle University, UK. Proposed the Disposable Soma hypothesis, the idea that species aim to balance energy and resources between reproduction and building a robust, long-lasting body.
PIERRE LECOMTE DU NOÜY (December 20, 1883–September 22, 1947): French biophysicist and philosopher who noticed that the wounds of older soldiers healed more slowly than those of younger ones. His “telefinalist” hypothesis that God directs evolution was criticized as unscientific.
CLIVE M. McCAY (March 21, 1898–June 8, 1967): American nutritionist and biochemist who spent decades at Cornell University researching the soybean and flour. Best known for his early work confirming that calorie restriction extends the lifespan of rats. In 1955, he and his wife published “You Can Make Cornell Bread.”
PETER B. MEDAWAR (February 28, 1915–October 2, 1987): British biologist born in Brazil whose work on graft rejection and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance was fundamental to the practice of tissue and organ transplants. Realized the force of natural selection declines with age due to reduced “reproductive value.”
ARTHUR PHILLIP (October 11, 1738–August 31, 1814): British admiral of the Royal Navy and first governor of New South Wales who sailed to Australia to establish the British penal colony in Botany Bay that later, after moving one harbor north, became the city of Sydney, Australia.
CLAUDE E. SHANNON (April 30, 1916–February 24, 2001): American mathematician and engineer who worked at MIT and is known as the “father of information theory.” His paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948) solved problems of information loss and its restoration, concepts that laid the foundation for the TCP/IP protocols that run the internet. His hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was his relative.
JOHN SNOW (March 15, 1813–June 16, 1858): English anesthesiologist and leader in the adoption of anesthesia and medical hygiene; best known for his work tracing the source of a cholera outbreak arising from the Broad Street pump in Soho, London, in 1854.
LEO SZILARD (February 11, 1898–May 30, 1964): Hungarian-born American physicist and humanist who proposed the DNA Damage Hypothesis of Aging. Wrote the letter that resulted in the Manhattan Project. Conceived of the nuclear chain reaction, nuclear power, chemostat, electron microscopes, enzyme feedback inhibition, and cloning of a human cell.
CONRAD H. WADDINGTON (November 8, 1905–September 26, 1975): British geneticist and philosopher who laid the foundations of systems biology and epigenetics. His Waddington Landscape was proposed to help understand how a cell can divide to become the hundreds of different cell types in the body.
ROY L. WALFORD (June 29, 1924–April 27, 2004): American biologist who rejuvenated the field of caloric restriction. One of eight crew members inside Arizona’s Biosphere 2 from 1991 to 1993. In medical school, reportedly used statistical analysis to predict the results of a roulette wheel in Reno, Nevada, to pay for medical school and a yacht, and sailed the Caribbean for over a year.
H. G. WELLS (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946): British science fiction writer who foresaw air raids in World War II, tanks, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and the internet. Best known for The War of the Worlds, The Shape of Things to Come, and The Time Machine. His epitaph is from A War in the Air: “I told you so. You damned fools.”
GEORGE C. WILLIAMS (May 12, 1926–September 8, 2010): American evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, known for developing a gene-centric view of evolution and “Antagonistic Pleiotropy,” a leading theory about why we age; essentially that a gene that helps young individuals survive can come back to bite them when they are older.
SHINYA YAMANAKA (September 4, 1962–): Japanese biologist who discovered reprogramming genes that turn regular cells into stem cells, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Gurdon in 2012.