Gary Cantor

He’s still only 26, so it’s hard to imagine that he has so much experience already, but Gary Cantor started early. He studied biology at the University of Florida and began his first laboratory work while he was still a teenager. Not long after, while still at Florida, Gary also worked a summer as an intern for Genentech in their Translational Oncology department, where he worked on a very important breast cancer treatment.

It all came naturally to him. As a young boy in Coral Springs, Florida, Gary Cantor wanted a career in medicine. At first, he wanted to be a surgeon because that’s what he saw on his favorite medical reality show on TV, but his interest shifted when he was 13 and happened upon a YouTube video of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who believed that medical research could create life expectancies of as much as 1,000 years. From then, he was hooked on medical research as a career goal.

These days, Gary Cantor sees the human body as an advanced computer and he genuinely believes that anyone who understands the instruction manual (genome), can possibly make the computer run forever. That is why Gary Cantor is sure that he can have a hand in moving medical science forward.