Chapter One

Beginnings
Philadelphia, 1928–48
Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no
longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and
everything was possible.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

When he was about eight years old, Leonard Hayflick had a scare that caused him to run to his mother
in tears and imprinted itself vividly on his memory. Hiking one day with friends in Cobbs Creek Park,
near his home in southwest Philadelphia, he slipped when crossing the creek on stepping-stones. One
of his sneakers got soaked.

The young boy immediately panicked. Polio is spread through contaminated water, and the terror of
the paralyzing, sometimes-fatal disease was acute in the mid-1930s. Hayflick sat down, crying, and
took his shoe and sock off, desperately rubbing his foot with the nearest chunk of dirt or grass he could
find. He went home to his mother, who tried to comfort him.

His fears were understandable. What had been a rare disease in the nineteenth century had become all
too common in the twentieth. Annual summer surges in polio cases had mothers keeping their children
out of public swimming pools. Not even the most privileged Americans were safe. Indeed, because the
wealthy grew up in cleaner environments, they were less likely to be exposed to polio and to develop
protective antibodies as children. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who was running the nation
from a wheelchair, had been paralyzed by the dread disease at age thirty-nine.

In fact, infectious diseases of all kinds were a real threat in the 1930s. Children died of scarlet fever;
of influenza; of tuberculosis; of measles. There were no reliable vaccines to prevent these common
maladies. The first antibiotics wouldn’t be prescribed until the late 1930s. Hayflick remembers the
orange signs from Philadelphia health authorities that would appear periodically on the front doors of
afflicted households, proclaiming in huge black font: This house is quarantined because of the
presence of measles—or another infectious disease.

But Hayflick had not contracted polio from his brush with the water of Cobbs Creek. He was luckier
than thousands of American children in the 1930s.

Hayflick came from humble beginnings. He was born on May 20, 1928, to Nathan and Edna Hayflick,
the new, young owners of a narrow brick row house in a working-class neighborhood in southwest
Philadelphia. Hayflick’s parents were part of a Jewish migration across the Schuylkill River out of the
slums of south Philadelphia that began before World War I and continued in the 1920s. The new
arrivals launched thriving synagogues and Hebrew schools. The sidewalks were wide and the families
young. The schools were less than first-rate, but that did not tamp down the ambitions of many families
who were determined to build better lives.

Hayflick’s own father, Nathan, when he was eight years old, had been living in a south Philadelphia
row house, occupied by thirteen family members, abutting a rough red-light district. In this densely
packed neighborhood of dark, cobblestoned streets and alleys that often lacked pavement or sewers,
filth and excrement stuck in the cracks, frozen, during the winter and then thawed in the spring. Single
outhouses served dozens of people. The Philadelphia authorities, notorious for their indifference and
corruption, did virtually nothing to improve conditions. In fact, they paid attention to sanitation in
south Philadelphia only when outbreaks of cholera, typhus, or diphtheria blighted the area and
threatened to spread. The crowding and filth made the slum a perfect incubator for the devastating
influenza pandemic of 1917–18, when hospitals, homes, and morgues were overwhelmed and corpses
spilled into the street. The Hayflick clan seemed to emerge unscathed, although Nathan’s mother soon
died of tuberculosis. Nathan, in his midteens, went to work driving the horse-drawn family milk cart.

Within a few years he had landed a job at the Climax Company, a leading Philadelphia denture-
designing firm. He would advance to become a master denture designer, serving clients including
Albert Einstein. Lunching one day at a popular diner, he met Edna Silver, a quiet, thoughtful young
beauty who was also from south Philadelphia and who, like him, was the child of Eastern European
immigrants. The couple married in 1927 and moved across the river.

Their three-bedroom row house was soon full. Leonard Hayflick was born the year after they married,
and eighteen months later Edna gave birth to a daughter, Elaine. The date was November 11, 1929.
Two weeks earlier the bottom had fallen out of the U.S. stock market, launching the Great Depression.

By 1933 half of the city’s banks had failed and just 40 percent of the workforce was fully employed.
The Philadelphia County Relief Board began distributing shoes to schoolchildren—seven hundred
pairs every day. Nathan Hayflick’s wages were cut and the Hayflicks became one of ninety thousand
city families to lose their houses. They moved to a nearby rental. Eventually the family’s finances
recovered enough for Leonard’s parents to buy a modest row house in the same neighborhood, where
Hayflick spent his teenage years.

Despite the difficulties his family endured during the Depression, Hayflick says he doesn’t remember
ever being hungry or aware of the family’s financial duress.

“I never had a motivation to make money, ever,” he says. “The Depression and my mother’s and
father’s experiences played no role in my outlook on life.” But it did, he told another interviewer in
2003, impact him in the following way: “Being brought up in the Depression has a lot to do with my
work ethic, my belief in myself, and [the belief] that I should have confidence in what I think is true
and correct as long as it is demonstrably so.”
In that interview he also recalled that his parents’ broad-mindedness instilled in him a bent for
challenging convention. “My mother and father were very liberal. . . . I take enjoyment in challenging
dogma. If there is anything that I challenge, it is orthodoxy.”

Hayflick was exposed to lab life early. On Saturdays he sometimes tagged along with his hardworking
father to the lab at the Climax Company. Nathan Hayflick kept his son occupied by sitting the boy in
front of a Bunsen burner with plaster molds and easily melted Melotz metal to liquefy and pour into
them. Leonard Hayflick learned from his uneducated but talented father to be at home in a lab. He also
saw in him the costs of a stunted education. His father was fascinated by all manner of scientific
questions but hadn’t the tools or the energy to pursue them: upon returning home after his thirteen-
hour workdays, he would fall asleep on the couch.

Hayflick’s mother taught him not to be afraid to ask questions. Her answers were patient and explicit
when he asked why street-corner newspaper vendors were shouting—whether their three-inch
headlines were reporting the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby when Hayflick was not yet four years
old or Hitler’s troops marching into Austria when he was nine.
A chance gift from his favorite uncle ignited a passion when Hayflick was ten or eleven years old.
Jacob Silverman, a smart, natty thirtysomething bachelor, gave his nephew a Gilbert Company
chemistry set. It came with test tubes, a test tube holder, tongs for grasping the test tubes, and an alcohol
lamp with a ground-glass head on it to cover the wick and keep the alcohol from evaporating.

The young boy was stunned to learn that the universe was composed—as was believed at that time—
of a mere ninety-two elements, and that they behaved in such extraordinary ways when they were
combined. He was entranced by the color changes, the bursts of flame, and the substances that
mysteriously precipitated out in the bottom of his test tubes. At age eighty-six Hayflick would still
have the set’s manual and alcohol lamp.

It wasn’t long before Hayflick had exhausted the chemicals and experiments that came with the set.
With a neighborhood friend named Teddy Cooper, he began biking across large swaths of southwest
Philadelphia in search of new chemicals and the glassware that would show them off to the best
advantage. The duo got to know a kind sales clerk at Dolbey and Company, a chemical and glassware
supplier near the University of Pennsylvania. The thin, bespectacled salesman eventually let them look
at obsolete supplies in the store’s basement, and they came home laden with outmoded retorts and
condensers.

Soon Hayflick was busy building his own basement lab; he walled in a corner, put in a workbench, and
mounted shelves where he proudly displayed his chemicals in labeled bottles. He and Cooper also
asked the friendly salesclerk to sell them some metallic sodium—a volatile element the consistency of
a hard stick of butter that’s kept under kerosene to mute its explosiveness and that bursts into a flame
of burning hydrogen when it’s submerged in water. The clerk told Hayflick he couldn’t do it without
a letter from his mother. Hayflick went home and composed one, which his trusting mother signed in
her beautiful cursive. Hayflick and Cooper began riding the neighborhood’s back alleys after
rainstorms. They deposited chunks of the metallic sodium in the water-filled holes where laundry poles
stood in good weather, then sped gleefully away.

By the time he graduated from high school, Hayflick had developed a keen sensitivity to injustice,
especially when it involved him. He won the Bausch + Lomb Honorary Science Award for being the
best science student at John Bartram High School but marched into the principal’s office and returned
it indignantly after learning he had placed second to a female classmate in the race for the coveted
Philadelphia Mayor’s Scholarship. That scholarship would have paid his tuition at any university or
college in the country.

“It was a bitter, bitter disappointment,” Hayflick said emphatically during a 2012 interview, sounding
as if he could still taste the letdown nearly seventy years later. “It was clearly a consolation prize. The
first prize was given to a girl ‘apple polisher’ whose mother sent pies and gifts to her teachers.”

Temple University offered him a scholarship, but Hayflick didn’t accept it. He had his sights set higher.
He wanted to go to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, known to many as “Penn.” The
university sat on an ivied hundred-acre campus in west Philadelphia that Hayflick’s father passed on
the streetcar on his way to work. It was founded by Benjamin Franklin. It had a medical school as old
as Harvard’s. And its history was peopled with leading medical and scientific figures like the physician
William Osler and the anatomist and paleontologist Joseph Leidy. As he prepared to graduate from
high school in January 1946, Hayflick applied to Penn and was accepted. His parents scraped together
the nearly $250 that would pay his tuition for the spring semester.
Hayflick was a slight seventeen-year-old who stood less than five feet nine inches tall, and he found
himself lost in a sea of former servicemen who were flooding the university on the GI Bill. Not only
was Hayflick intimidated, but it soon became apparent that his parents couldn’t sustain the tuition,
especially with his sister preparing to enter college too. So, shortly after his eighteenth birthday in May
1946, Hayflick took a leave of absence from Penn and enlisted in the U.S. Army. The support of the
GI Bill would pay his tuition when he returned to Penn and—crucially, it would turn out—would also
provide $75 in monthly living expenses.

In the army Hayflick learned to repair antiaircraft guns at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland
and later landed at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was chosen for a job as a teacher in a program that
allowed army recruits to finish high school. The classes didn’t attract many soldiers, and Hayflick
happily used the time in his small office to read. The position also came with a chauffeured car that he
regularly summoned to drive him to the post’s library.

When Hayflick, by then almost twenty, reenrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of
1948, he was unsure what academic route to pursue. He took chemistry, math, zoology, and English;
he also recalls enrolling in an accounting course at the Wharton School of Business. But he was soon
distracted from his studies because his family was in crisis.

In the late 1940s Nathan Hayflick was persuaded by his nephew, Norman Silverman, to leave the
Climax Company after three decades to join Silverman’s fledgling denture-designing business, Victory
Laboratories, just over the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Silverman was a charming,
ambitious young entrepreneur and a relative newcomer to denture design. Nathan Hayflick was by now
a master craftsman, but not a businessman. The partnership turned into a disaster as the two men’s
personalities clashed. Nathan Hayflick fell into a depression that concerned his son so much that
Leonard Hayflick began cutting classes, leaving Penn at midday to cross the river and take his father
to lunch in order to get him out of the lab for a couple of hours.

Nathan Hayflick didn’t have an exit strategy: his old job at the Climax Company had been filled. He
was a man in his late forties with a grade-school education and a craft. Leonard Hayflick decided there
was only one way out for his father. Nathan Hayflick needed to go into business for himself, bringing
his loyal clientele of dentists with him. While a student at Penn, Hayflick set about building his father
a laboratory. He had absorbed enough of the denture-designing craft by osmosis to be sure that he
could do it. The entire effort would have to be accomplished on a shoestring: the four Hayflicks were
now surviving on the $75 in monthly living expenses that the GI Bill provided to Leonard Hayflick.
Through a distant relative, Hayflick located rental space above the Latin Casino, a popular center-city
nightclub. With the help of Al Ketler, a close friend and fellow Penn student who was skilled in
carpentry and plumbing, Hayflick equipped the lab with a plaster bench, grinding instruments, water
lines, and a casting machine that he and Ketler built out of a fifty-gallon steel drum. He and Ketler
sneaked into the ancient building’s basement, confronted a tangle of wires and pipes, selected a likely-
looking gas pipe, and cut it with a metal saw, allowing them to run an extension to supply the lab’s
Bunsen burners. “We were young and not too smart,” Hayflick recalled in a 2014 interview.
“Fortunately, we didn’t die.”
What did suffer were Hayflick’s grades. He didn’t think he had a choice; it was a matter of his family’s
economic survival. In the end, the Nathan Hayflick Dental Laboratory opened, the senior Hayflick got
back on his feet, and his son turned back to his studies.