For biochemist, ‘retirement’ hardly means slowing down

It’s 10 a.m. on a Friday morning, and Henry Lardy is already impatient. “The darn thing runs so slow,” he says, fidgeting over his computer keyboard. He doesn’t have time to wait for e-mail.

Lardy, professor emeritus of biochemistry, has no real reason to hurry. Since formally retiring from the biochemistry department in 1988, he has been free to dally in the leisurely pursuits of retirement. But he doesn’t. Like many professors emeriti, he is still actively engaged in research and scholarship. Now 91, he comes into the office almost daily, showing virtually no let-up to a research career that has spanned seven decades.

“You know, at some universities, when a professor retires the department changes the locks on the doors,” he jokes. “So I’ve got a good thing going here.”

Lardy’s “retirement” comes on top of an illustrious career that traces to the dawn of World War II. As a graduate student under the tutelage of biochemist Paul Phillips, Lardy helped concoct a way to preserve bull semen, allowing farmers to artificially inseminate their cows with top-quality genetic material. “Overnight, the artificial insemination industry in Wisconsin exploded,” he recalls. After joining the university’s faculty in 1945, he shifted his focus to metabolism, the set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms to sustain life. His findings have contributed to a wide scope of knowledge in the field, from the synthesis of body sugars to how certain compounds inhibit brain tumors.

After Lardy retired, the biochemistry department gave him access to a small lab in the Enzyme Institute. From that space, he began to probe dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, a natural steroid that our bodies churn out in youth, but diminishes as we age. In addition to improving memory, DHEA has been shown to fight cancer and diabetes and promote the immune system. Lardy was the first to discover a stable version of DHEA that could be given as a supplement to older adults without side effects. Sales of these supplements still help support Lardy’s research, which aims to identify and assess other health benefits to taking DHEA.

Through this line of inquiry, Lardy and his research team have been able to show that DHEA likely plays a role in the division and maintenance of cells in the hippocampus region of the brain, a finding that goes a long way toward explaining the health claim that this hormone helps improve memory in old age.

Given the extended horizon of Lardy’s career, one wonders if he harbors his own personal reserve of DHEA. Just a casual browse of his bookshelves offers a glimpse of how long Lardy has been at the top of his game. There, among the weathered journals that contain his hundreds of journal publications, sits an autographed photo of President Barack Obama.

And when time for career contemplation is done, Lardy turns back to his desktop computer to fuss over e-mail, a technology that didn’t even emerge until he’d been retired for nearly a decade.