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trials on reversing the aging process.
    Still in his early forties, with many more productive years in front of him, Raven has paved the way not only for increased human life span, but for the potential arrest of fatal illnesses and the regeneration of tissue in wasting diseases like muscular dystrophy and, ultimately, Alzheimer’s.
    Raven has received numerous awards and is widely regarded as a likely Nobel winner—if the selectors in Stockholm don’t see his near-billionaire status as compensation enough.
    In many ways, his personality is reminiscent of Bill Gates’s, another unconventional genius-magnate (
Time
April 16, 1984) who, as a college dropout, founded Microsoft Corporation, the computing software giant, and is now one of the wealthiest men in the world.
    Raven’s lifestyle is fairly eccentric. Though Cal Tech, where he is a professor of Microbiology and Director of the Institute of Gerontology, provides him with sixteen thousand square feet of laboratory space on two floors of the tallest structure on campus, he prefers to work in the special building he constructed for himself on his seventeen-acre walled estate near Santa Barbara.
    Raven is fanatical about privacy. The grounds of his palatial estate are patrolled around the clock by an undisclosed number of security guards. The security measures can, in part, be attributed to the enormous commercial potential of his research, but sources close to him—who emphasize that “nobody but his father is
really
close to him”—suggest that Raven has personal motives for his obsession.
    Yet, on the rare occasions he appears in public, he is affable and good-natured. With engaging self-deprecation, he describes his own somewhat inauspicious beginnings: “Like one scientific view of the creation of the world, my career began with a Big Bang.” At the age of eleven, he tried to make hydrogen and oxygen by the electrolysis of water. “Unfortunately,” he recalls with a sheepish smile, “I sort of just missed by a molecule and nearly blew up my parents’ kitchen.”
    Raven brackets this with a more traumatic explosion. Psychologists have noted that many of the most creative minds have come from affection-starved childhoods—Sir Isaac Newton, abandoned at birth, is the classic example. Raven seems to fit this paradigm. He recalls his single respite from scientific studies was “daydreaming.”
    The only child of Pauline and Sidney Raven, he had just entered Bronx High School of Science when his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married a wealthy jeweler and relinquished custody of her young son.
    Sandy could have gone tolive with his father, who had moved to Los Angeles, but he was determined to finish at Bronx Science, and he spent the rest of his childhood shuttling from one grudging relative to another.
    The elder Raven—whose name may be familiar to film buffs as the producer of the cult movie
Godzilla Meets Hercules
—began as manager of Loew’s Grand theater.
    Indeed, Sandy’s fondest early memories are of the Saturday afternoons father and son spent together, “munching endless boxes of popcorn” and watching Burt Lancaster dueling with brigands and Gene Kelly leaping over fire hydrants as he sang in the rain.
    In his senior year, young Sandy’s project on the transmission of genes in fruit flies won him a Westinghouse Scholarship to MIT. By the time he was studying for his doctorate, the scientific world was about to experiment on
humans.
    The field of genetic engineering seemed not to have existed as a discipline when Sandy was growing up, although some of its techniques, used to breed corn and cattle, had been practiced for millennia. Now, the “new farmers” wore white coats and worked indoors.
    Spending a dozen years on the MIT faculty, Raven was able to observe pioneering research firsthand when working under Professor Gregory Morgenstern, who eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his findings on liver cancer.
    During