Sunday 24 July 2016

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.