Gary Cantor, Durham Researcher

At the tender age of 26, Gary Cantor, Durham, North Carolina researcher, is already a Ph.D. candidate and can already boast of a notable career in medical research. This should surprise no one. Even when he was a young boy in Coral Springs, Florida, Gary Cantor knew he wanted a career in the medical field.

His first dream was to be a surgeon, because he watched a lot of medical reality shows on TV and he thought they looked the coolest. However, his overall goal was to give hope to the hopeless, so that dream shifted a bit when he saw a YouTube video of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who firmly believes that medical research of the genome, which he refers to as the body’s instruction manual, could increase life expectancies to as much as 10 centuries. Medical research then became his life’s calling.

When he was accepted into the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program (BBSP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a while back, Gary Cantor made Durham, North Carolina his home. He now works in the university's Genetics and Molecular Biology Department.

To Gary Cantor, Durham is Home to his Medical Research Career

When he was a young boy in Coral Springs, Florida, Gary Cantor found the medical reality show, “Trauma: Life in the ER,” on TV and something told him he wanted a career in medicine. He admired the doctors who worked to save people's lives, and he really liked the surgeons. At first, anyway.

Something happened to Gary Cantor's dream when he was 13 and he saw a YouTube video of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist, who convinced him that medical research was the key to everything. He had many discussions with de Grey over the years and Gary now looks on the human body as an advanced computer. He now understands that anyone with knowledge of the body’s instruction manual, known as the genome, may be able to make the computer run well and run forever.

Soon, Gary Cantor was studying biology at the University of Florida and he was still a teenager when he worked as a researcher in his first lab. He also spent one summer in San Francisco doing a four-month internship with Genentech in their Translational Oncology department. He was an important member of a team looking at a promising treatment for breast cancer.

After Florida, he was then happy to be accepted into the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program (BBSP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also joined the university's Genetics and Molecular Biology Department. To Gary Cantor, Durham is now home. Still only 26, he is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate, which means he has many years to make inroads in medical research.

Gary Cantor Inspired by Dr. Aubrey de Grey

Twice Gary Cantor has wrote to Dr. de Grey.  The first time was as a child when he saw a Youtube video of Dr. de Grey explaining what the Biomedical Gerontology field was which resulted in a reply inviting him to a conference in England, they were unaware of the fact that he was thirteen at the time, the second time was when he was accepted into the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in this letter he thanked Dr. de Grey for publicizing the idea that gave him a purpose in life: finding a cure for aging.

Born and raised in Coral Springs, Florida, Gary Cantor was always an active child in both thought and physical recreation.  Growing up, he was an avid chess player and won the chess championship of his Junior High School the two years he competed.  In addition to chess, he was also active in a variety of sports such as golf, soccer, football, track and field, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Krav Maga and weightlifting.

From a young age, Gary Cantor decided he wanted to pursue a career in the medical field and after hearing about the Biomedical Gerontology field, Cantor began his educational pursuits into that field.  He performed his undergraduate studies at the University of Florida where he studied biology and immediately got involved in the research departments.