Tuesday 20 February 2018

A Profile of Gary Cantor, Durham Medical Researcher

Gary Cantor
Even as a young boy growing up in Coral Springs, Florida, Gary Cantor always knew he would have a career in the medical field. A lot of this came when he watched the medical TV reality show “Trauma: Life in the ER,” as much as he possibly could. At first, he envisioned himself becoming a surgeon, since the surgeons always looked so cool, like the kings of the hospital. That impression was challenged when he was 13, however, and he ran across a video from Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who seemed certain, even then that medical research could create life expectancies as high as 1,000 years.

Gary Cantor conducted a correspondence with Dr. de Grey for some time and was convinced medical research was even cooler than surgery. When the time came, he studied biology at the University of Florida and became a medical researcher, working in his first lab as a teenager. He also traveled to San Francisco for a four-month internship with Genentech, in their Translational Oncology department, where he worked on a research team researching a very important treatment for breast cancer. Now, Gary Cantor, Durham researcher, is currently a Ph.D. candidate. Since he’s not even 30, he will likely be helping move medical science forward for a long time to come.