ONE OF THE FIRST EXPERIMENTS Zhou Songyang did, as a Tufts University graduate student newly arrived from China, was to try to clone Pl-3 kinase. At the time the gene was not known, although the protein sequence was. Dr. Songyang has been working on Pl-3 kinase ever since, trying to map a signaling pathway that winds through many aspects of cell growth and survival. “There is very strong evidence in worms and flies that it regulates aging, and some in higher organisms also, that it controls cell death,” he said. “We think it can prevent cells from undergoing cell death.” In 1997, Sunny Songyang, as he is called, was part of the group in Dr. David Baltimore’s lab that identified Akt kinase as part of the pathway. The following year, he became an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar. His project had two aims: to look at Akt’s regulation and its relation to cell death, and to look for other proteins in the pathway. To fulfill the second aim, he and his colleagues developed a novel technique called Enhanced Retroviral Mutagen (ERM), using retroviruses in genetic screening. "Multiple genetic screens identified many factors that regulate cell death," he said. "Most are known factors, but there were several novel factors. One of these, CISK, has similar properties to Akt. “We think it will play a role in apoptosis, and possibly have an impact on aging," he said. At 36, Dr. Songyang is an associate professor with a 10-person lab at Baylor Medical College in Houston. His wife is also a Baylor scientist, doing research in signal transduction. “We help each other out,” he said. “It really helps a lot.” They have two young children, young enough so “they are still listening to me.” Dr. Songyang has long been interested in identifying and studying the genes that regulate cell survival and senescence, two pathways that are important for aging. He said that exposure to the community of aging researchers, through lectures he attended, inspired him to add another research focus in his lab, besides signaling pathways. His group has begun to look at genetic stability and the role of telomere proteins in stability and senescence. They have identified several telomeric protein complexes. “Hopefully, someday these two pathways will meet and tell us about aging of the whole animal,” he said. “That probably would take a whole life – more than a whole life.”