Prizes

“The most important breakthrough of the decade in the battle against cancer”

“When I was a kid in the Bronx, I was a classic example of the guy who got sand kicked in his face.”

Nobody kicks sand in this man’s face anymore.

The acknowledged leader in the brave new science of genetic engineering, Professor Sandy Raven has already made history by receiving the first federal approval for clinical trials on reversing the aging process.

Still in his early forties, with many more productive years in front of him, Raven has paved the way not only for increased human life span, but for the potential arrest of fatal illnesses and the regeneration of tissue in wasting diseases like muscular dystrophy and, ultimately, Alzheimer’s.

Raven has received numerous awards and is widely regarded as a likely Nobel winner—if the selectors in Stockholm don’t see his near-billionaire status as compensation enough.

In many ways, his personality is reminiscent of Bill Gates’s, another unconventional genius-magnate (Time April 16, 1984) who, as a college dropout, founded Microsoft Corporation, the computing software giant, and is now one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Raven’s lifestyle is fairly eccentric. Though Cal Tech, where he is a professor of Microbiology and Director of the Institute of Gerontology, provides him with sixteen thousand square feet of laboratory space on two floors of the tallest structure on campus, he prefers to work in the special building he constructed for himself on his seventeen-acre walled estate near Santa Barbara.

Raven is fanatical about privacy. The grounds of his palatial estate are patrolled around the clock by an undisclosed number of security guards. The security measures can, in part, be attributed to the enormous commercial potential of his research, but sources close to him—who emphasize that “nobody but his father is really close to him”—suggest that Raven has personal motives for his obsession.

Yet, on the rare occasions he appears in public, he is affable and good-natured. With engaging self-deprecation, he describes his own somewhat inauspicious beginnings: “Like one scientific view of the creation of the world, my career began with a Big Bang.” At the age of eleven, he tried to make hydrogen and oxygen by the electrolysis of water. “Unfortunately,” he recalls with a sheepish smile, “I sort of just missed by a molecule and nearly blew up my parents’ kitchen.”

Raven brackets this with a more traumatic explosion. Psychologists have noted that many of the most creative minds have come from affection-starved childhoods—Sir Isaac Newton, abandoned at birth, is the classic example. Raven seems to fit this paradigm. He recalls his single respite from scientific studies was “daydreaming.”

The only child of Pauline and Sidney Raven, he had just entered Bronx High School of Science when his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married a wealthy jeweler and relinquished custody of her young son.

Sandy could have gone to live with his father, who had moved to Los Angeles, but he was determined to finish at Bronx Science, and he spent the rest of his childhood shuttling from one grudging relative to another.

The elder Raven—whose name may be familiar to film buffs as the producer of the cult movie Godzilla Meets Hercules—began as manager of Loew’s Grand theater.

Indeed, Sandy’s fondest early memories are of the Saturday afternoons father and son spent together, “munching endless boxes of popcorn” and watching Burt Lancaster dueling with brigands and Gene Kelly leaping over fire hydrants as he sang in the rain.

In his senior year, young Sandy’s project on the transmission of genes in fruit flies won him a Westinghouse Scholarship to MIT. By the time he was studying for his doctorate, the scientific world was about to experiment on humans.

The field of genetic engineering seemed not to have existed as a discipline when Sandy was growing up, although some of its techniques, used to breed corn and cattle, had been practiced for millennia. Now, the “new farmers” wore white coats and worked indoors.

Spending a dozen years on the MIT faculty, Raven was able to observe pioneering research firsthand when working under Professor Gregory Morgenstern, who eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his findings on liver cancer.

During this period Raven married Morgenstern’s daughter Judy. The union produced a girl—and a divorce. Dr. Raven is adamantly silent about both.

At the age of thirty-two, he was offered a full professorship at Cal Tech in Pasadena, where he began to assemble a team for his new area of research—the fight against aging.

Raven was not the first gladiator in this arena. In recent years, geneticists the world over have been making hitherto undreamed-of strides in what is arguably the greatest—and most difficult—challenge ever to face mankind.

Unlike certain diseases that can be pinpointed to specific places on a particular chromosome, the aging process is controlled from at least a hundred different sites on the human genome—the sum total of genes in a person’s body.

Several important discoveries served as point of departure for Raven’s own work. At the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. Carl Barrett located an area that determines longevity on Chromosome One. Doctors James Smith and Olivia Pereira-Smith of Baylor have traced another to Chromosome Four.

Raven’s first major breakthrough came when he identified a group of genes that caused degeneration in skin cells. In various trials he succeeded in reversing it, at least temporarily. But he entered a domain entirely his own when he succeeded in “immortalizing” some of the genetic components of skin rejuvenation.

This “Ponce de Leon” discovery—a media coinage that makes the scientist cringe—has turned Sandy Raven into a kind of folk hero. The press has touted him as the creator of the ultimate Hollywood dream: a chemical that holds out the promise of eternal youth.

Though he announced his discovery in a highly technical article in the academic journal Experimental Gerontology, his biochemical magic was quickly translated into headlines for laymen and disseminated by the wire services of the world.

The reaction was electrifying. Calls flooded the university switchboard. Mail came to his lab literally by the sackful. Curiously, this proved a disheartening experience for Raven.

“Instead of feeling proud, I felt guilty that I had not done enough. I mean these were not just women wanting to lose their wrinkles. Most of the messages were desperate cries from people who wrongly presumed that I was already capable of reversing any soft tissue damage. They pleaded with me to save their loved ones’ lives, and I was left with a feeling of terrible frustration and—yes—failure.”

Both the sensitivity and humility characterize the man.

And yet, despite Raven’s disconsolate air, he has in fact prepared the way for the development of genetic procedures to conquer many killer pathologies.

Raven remains a reluctant hero, still quixotically determined to avoid the limelight. He wryly dismisses his new celebrity status with typical self-effacing good humor:

“Let’s face it, I have the charisma of a soggy bagel. If I can make the cover of Time, the nerds are conquering the world.”

Other major figures in the field have a more respectful attitude.

“Sandy’s achievement was probably the most important breakthrough of the decade in the battle against cancer,” says his admirer and former father-in-law, Gregory Morgenstern of MIT. “It dwarfs anything I’ve ever done. He deserves all the honor and glory—and money—that I’m sure he’s going to get.”

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