It is the case that Gary Cantor studied biology at the University of Florida as a teenager because he wanted to become a medical researcher at some point. It is also the case that, even now, while still only in his 20s and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina, he already has significant experience in that field. He began working in his
first lab when he was still a teenager and, on summer, while still at Florida, he traveled to San Francisco for a four-month internship for Genentech in their Translational Oncology department, where he worked on a very important treatment for breast cancer.
Looking back, it seems as if all of this was a natural fit. He always knew he wanted a career in medicine, since he was a young boy growing up in Coral Springs, Florida, and he became enthralled by a medical reality show on TV. At first, he admired the coolness on the doctors on that show, especially the surgeons. He knew he wanted to save lives when he grew up and that medicine was the way to do that. That dream was altered slightly when he was 13 and he came upon a YouTube video from a medical researcher who convinced the young boy that medical research was the key to everything.
The doctor who posted that video, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, is a biomedical gerontologist who believes strongly that medical research can create life expectancies as high as 1,000 years. He corresponded with Dr. de Grey and realized that he wanted to do that type of research. These days, Gary Cantor, Durham researcher, can envision the human body as an advanced computer As such, he firmly believes that anyone with knowledge of its instruction manual (genome), can possibly make the computer run forever. These days, Gary works in the Genetics and Molecular Biology Department at the University of North Carolina, where he, at the tender age of 26 and a Ph.D. candidate, feels that he is just beginning to move medical science forward.
