University Professor Caleb “Tuck” Finch has been described as “this century’s Charles Darwin.” With his white beard, Finch resembles the best-known pictures of the English naturalist.

But the similarity goes farther. Like Darwin’s theories of evolution, Finch’s discoveries have changed the way that scientists look at animal and human aging. Finch, who holds the ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Chair in the Neurobiology of Aging, is ranked in the top half-percent of the world’s most cited scientists.

The founding principal investigator of the USC Alzheimer Disease Research Center (ADRC) and its director for 20 years, Finch was honored at a Sept. 26 symposium celebrating the center’s 25th anniversary.

Finch’s work “leaps from basic science to bedside,” said Helena Chui, chairman of the Department of Neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and director of the research center for the last five years.

The wide range of speakers and topics that Chui assembled for the symposium illustrated the breadth of Finch’s influence – from basic mechanisms of development, longevity, aging and neurodegeneration, to genetics, epidemiology, biodemography, prevention, treatment and even the role of chance in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The original proposal to the National Institute on Aging for the Alzheimer Disease Research Center in 1983 was pulled together in a matter of weeks as a joint project with the University of California, Irvine, after UCLA decided to go in alone. The proposal turned out to be “highly competitive,” recalled Finch, who holds appointments in USC College’s biological sciences, anthropology and psychology departments as well as in the USC Davis School of Gerontology.

The USC-UCI center was one of the first five in the country funded by the National Institute on Aging, along with The Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, the University of California, San Diego, and Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

“The early goals of the center anticipated the national agenda for years, not because we haven’t been growing, but because the vision and leadership that Tuck put forward was just on target,” said Carl Cotman, professor of neurology, neurobiology and behavior at UC Irvine.

Cotman was co-director of the joint center until encouraged by the National Institute on Aging to establish a separate Alzheimer center on his campus.

Cotman described the USC-UCI consortium as “really pace-setting and a compliment to Tuck that he was the first Ph.D. director of an ADRC. There were very few basic scientists at that time who also branched into clinical areas.”

Over time, the USC Alzheimer Disease Research Center has played a “major role in developing Alzheimer’s disease as a biomedical discipline,” Finch said.

Now one of 32 in the nation, the center is part of USC’s Memory and Aging Center, which has clinics at USC’s Health Sciences campus, Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey and the Eisenhower Medical Center in Coachella Valley.

Chui said the research center focuses on “understanding the interface between Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral vascular disease,” the two major causes of cognitive impairment and progressive dementia in late life.

Today, Finch is pleased to see that “now we have a community of researchers on both USC campuses who are leaders in the neurobiology of aging. We have had a training grant on neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of aging for 25 years.”

His teaching and mentoring of doctoral students, undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows has been “part of Tuck’s excellence,” said Gerald C. Davison, dean of the USC Davis School of Gerontology.

Four of the speakers were former postdoctoral fellows in the Finch lab who now lead national efforts to translate basic science discoveries to new treatment strategies for Alzheimer’s disease.

“One thing I’ve always been struck by in Tuck is that he is sort of an adult faculty version of the Renaissance Scholar Program that USC has had for a couple of years at the undergraduate level,” Davison said. “Tuck’s intellectual scope is amazing. He’s really a paradigm for what we try to do at the Davis School of Gerontology, to try to bring a multidisciplinary approach to the study of developmental processes into old age.”

Chui called Finch “encyclopedic.” One of his four books has more than 4,000 references, she noted. He also is an author of more than 350 research articles. He has received numerous awards, including the National Institute on Aging Lead Award and the Sandoz Premier Prize, gerontology’s highest honor.

Finch earned his undergraduate degree in biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. “His adviser wondered why he was getting into aging, since all it had to do with was vascular disease and cancer,” Chui said. “But Tuck saw untouched, undiscovered land.”

After the symposium, she said, he was heading – like Darwin – to a group of islands off the coast of South America to study aging turtles and, of course, finches.

For more information about the Alzheimer Disease Research Center or clinical trials for memory disorders, visit http://www.usc.edu/adrc or http://www.usc.edu/memory or call (323) 442-7600.