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Upon a beautiful morning in Southern California in the spring of 1987, I, the young and recently graduated PhD student, was suddenly and "violently" awakened by the strange and loud sound of a rather bizarre musical instrument originating from the first floor of the beautiful residence of my new postdoctoral supervisor, located in Altadena, north of Los Angeles. I was to find out later that the intriguing music was not coming from a violin, but from a century-old fiddle. The musician handling the instrument, Caleb E. Finch, a prominent neurobiologist and leading authority in the field of senescence, also was passionate for old-time Appalachian music and was a darn good fiddler. This is how my two-decade-long friendship began with a most unusual man of unbound imagination and an unstoppable passion for science, history, and music. It may come as a surprise in our field of research that Finch and his old friend Eric H. Davidson, a Caltech cell biologist, were both trained in mountain fiddling in the clawhammer banjo-picking style of the legendary Uncle Wade Ward. Finch and Davidson formed the Iron Mountain String Band in 1963 in order to keep this musical legacy alive. The band regularly tours colleges and folk festivals around the continental U.S.
Caleb (Tlick) Finch is a chaired professor at the University of Southern California's top-rated Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. He was, until recently, codirector of the USC Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in Los Angeles. His research has led to several breakthroughs in the role of sex hormones during aging, in the understanding and possible treatments of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and the central role played by the immune system during aging and in response to neurodegenerative conditions. Tuck remains today undoubtedly one of the world's most recognized scientists in the field of aging research. Famous among many of his former postdocs for the expression "dogma-lysis exercise," Finch never found himself imprisoned in his theories or his own point of view. In his mind, evolution goes well beyond life forms; it applies as well to concept and thoughts.
Finch has received most major awards in biomedical gerontology, including the Sandoz Premier Prize in 1995 and the Ipsen Longevity Award from the European Ipsen Foundation. In...