A Reno scientist wants to cure the oldest human problem: aging
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his past January, while waiting in the Los Angeles International Airport for a flight to Reno, my mother and I got into a memorable conversation with the man sitting next to us. My mother was complaining about the prices at the airport restaurants, and this man chimed in that his bag was full of food he had brought with him. He was tall, with a receding hairline, a graying mustache and goatee, and the thin build of a distance runner. I took him for a health nut, which, as it turned out, was more true than I could have imagined.
Bill Andrews is a local biotech researcher who wants to cure aging.
We exchanged small talk, but, when I told him I was a science writer, he suddenly shifted from merely friendly to animated, and implied that our meeting was quite a lucky event. And then almost immediately, he launched into his career story, a career that sounded like a mission. His goal was simple: he wanted to cure aging. He said he had always thought of aging as a disease, and he believed it was possible to stop the process, and, thus, enable people to live for hundreds of years and beyond. He was the head of a biotech company in Reno that was trying to make that happen. He talked about telomeres, parts of chromosomes that get shorter every time a cell divides, and he said that shortened telomeres are a root cause of aging. If you could make telomeres longer, not only could you prevent aging, you could reverse it—you could turn old people young again. Through a form of gene
therapy, that’s what he was attempting to do—a biotech version of the fountain of youth. My impression of him was contradictory in the extreme: He seemed very rational yet, at the same time, what he was saying about making old people young sounded crazy. Seated in the plane, I was wondering who he was, when he came down the aisle and handed us a thin paperback. The book’s title was Telomere Lengthening: Curing All Diseases Including Cancer and Aging, and he was one of the authors. His name is Bill Andrews.
Age of innocence Andrews’s company, Sierra Sciences, is located in a nondescript, one-story building just east of the Reno-Tahoe International Airport. The company name, inscribed on a window, is hardly noticeable, and, when I arrived to interview Andrews on a Wednesday afternoon, the parking spaces out front were mostly empty, and the blinds were drawn. It barely looked like a going concern, much less like the potential birthplace of a radical change in the human condition. The conference room where we talked gave a better impression. On one wall, a row of wooden picture frames held patent certificates (“assays for TERT promoter modulatory agents,” “telomerase expression repressor proteins,” etc.) all with Andrews’s name on them. A large whiteboard was almost completely covered with outlines from a recent planning meeting.
white Clipped to another whiteboard was a bumper sticker that proclaimed “AGING SUCKS!” That sticker was a gift from Andrews’s father, who died a few years ago from Alzheimer’s. Andrews, who is 66, said that he was just 10 to 12 years old when his father set him on the career path he is still following. “I was at a house on Sunnybrae Avenue in Canoga Park,” he said. “On the front lawn with my reflector telescope, looking at stars … when my father walked out, and …he said, ‘Bill, since you’re so interested in science and medicine, I think you should grow up and become a doctor and find a cure for aging.’” The idea of curing aging was Andrews’s focus from high school through his Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia, and it carried over into his career in the biotech industry. Early on, he realized that there must be a clock in our bodies, something that ticks constantly and eventually makes us fall apart, makes us age and die. But he had no idea what that clock was or how it might work. Then, in 1993, he went to an anti-aging conference at Lake Tahoe and heard a talk by Calvin Harley, a scientist at Geron Corporation, a Bay Area biotech company focused on curing aging. Harley’s presentation was about telomeres, stretches of DNA that cap the ends of the chromosomes, like the little plastic cylinders stuck on the ends of shoelaces. He
“immortal toil” continued on page 14
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