William Thilly had many job titles during his life: groundbreaking researcher into human genetic mutations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and the inventor of Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal.
Dr. Thilly died on Christmas Eve at his home in Winchester, according to a death notice published in the Boston Globe by the Lane Funeral home.
He was 79. He was the husband of Elena Gostjeva, a biologist originally from Ukraine.
“He had a real good sense of humor and he wasn’t too serious about himself like a lot of professors,” Dr. Thilly’s oldest son, William, 51, said Thursday in a telephone interview from his home in Cranford, N.J. “He was kind of like an Abraham Lincoln type of person, of science, but he smiled more. He really had a very strong work ethic, always positive, a tough, determined person, more than I’ve ever seen in anybody.”
Apple Jacks was a bit of a blip/or a funny fluke in an illustrious scientific career devoted to the seriousness of genetics, stem cell, and cancer research, Thilly said.
“It’s always been a fun thing,” Thilly said. “It was probably helpful to get people listening ... a nice tool to get them to listen first and hear even bigger things.”
Social media tributes remembered Dr. Thilly as intelligent, passionate, and driven by love for his family and work.
“I will always remember Bill as my first mentor and a scientific father figure. I can’t imagine having pursued a career of medical research without the formative experiences he offered me,” said Tushar Kamath, who earned a doctorate from the school’s biophysics program in 2022.
According to Dr. Thilly’s family tribute online , he lived in Winchester, was a champion wrestler and rugby tactician, established the MIT Thilly Family Fund Scholarship, mentored numerous students, patented several inventions “and made his family laugh with the same old stories.”
Before researching human genetic mutations, Dr. Thilly landed an interview for a summer research assistant position at Kellogg’s while he was a college student at MIT in 1965, according to a 2017 article on the now-folded breakfast food blog Extra Crispy. No other student had signed up to interview, so Dr. Thilly quickly left Cambridge for the company’s Michigan headquarters.
Disaster struck midway through his internship.
Food researchers developing a cheese puff snack poured liquid cheese into a pipe extending from a high-powered, tractor-like machine, but failed to connect the two.
“High pressure cheese covered the entire research and development area, all this equipment that was impeccably maintained. There was cheese everywhere,” Dr. Thilly told Extra Crispy.
Dr. Thilly, who later remembered the incident as the “great cheese tragedy,” stayed after hours to clean the laboratory with a coworker. As a reward, Dr. Thilly’s supervisors invited him to work on his own cereal.
“They doubled my pay, put me on my own, and said, ‘What would you like to create?’” Dr. Thilly said.
Inspired by his childhood on an apple farm in Pennsylvania, Dr. Thilly began experimenting with dried applesauce and leftover O’s from a discontinued Kellogg’s brand. When that combination failed, Dr. Thilly and a full-time researcher requested a dried apple product that was sold in California. Their boss ordered an entire train car’s worth.
To keep the cereal secret from competitors, Dr. Thilly and his co-worker experimented in the middle of the night. They made a cereal prototype but Dr. Thilly had to leave Kellogg’s for the start of the fall semester.
Months later, he learned his cereal’s fate.
He opened an issue of the Globe and saw an advertisement for Kellogg’s Apple O’s, according to Extra Crispy. Kellogg’s changed the name of the cereal to Apple Jacks in 1971, the blog Back Then History reported.
Dr. Thilly, the oldest of three children, was born on Staten Island, N.Y., where he lived until the family moved to a farm in Rush Township near his mother’s family in central Pennsylvania, his son said.
Dr. Thilly’s father, also named William, was an auditor for the federal government who commuted to Harrisburg while his mother, Florence, tended chickens and the apple and cherry orchards on the farm, William Thilly said.
Dr. Thilly was a championship wrestler who graduated at the top of his high school class, earning a scholarship to MIT, his son said.
Dr. Thilly earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and a doctorate in nutritional biochemistry from MIT. In 1972, he became an assistant professor of Genetic Toxicology at the college. He served as the director of the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences from 1980 to 2001 before joining the Department of Biological Engineering in 2001, according to his MIT faculty page.
Dr. Thilly’s personal and professional lives were so interwoven that he and his first wife, Diane, raised their son and daughter right on MIT’s campus in Cambridge.
William Thilly said until he was about 7 they lived in a penthouse-like apartment with a view of the Charles River reserved for graduate students and their families on the top of MacGregor House dormitory .
His bedroom window looked out over Fenway Park and the Citgo sign. They would ride the elevators down to “the big cafeteria” for dinner. There were pool tables. His parents hosted parties.
“It was pretty unique,” Thilly said. “I didn’t know until we left.”
And, yes, they did eat Apple Jacks, along with other sugar cereals for breakfast.
From the MIT campus, they relocated to Winchester.
For decades, Dr. Thilly led MIT’s Mortality Analysis Laboratory. Dr. Thilly’s research originally aimed to discover the origins of disease-causing genetic mutations in humans and resulted in the first quantitative measure of the potential of chemicals to cause mutations in 1976. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Dr. Thilly’s lab developed two independent means to measure mutations in human tissues and a protocol to scan mutations in human organs and populations, Dr. Thilly’s faculty page stated.
In the 2000s, Dr. Thilly and his team discovered that point mutations — when a single nucleotide pair is changed, inserted, or deleted from a DNA or RNA sequence of a genome — arise in certain stem cells of fetal organs, when polymerases, the enzymes that create DNA molecules, make “unforced errors.”
Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil worked with Dr. Thilly on therapies for cancers that Dr. Thilly suspected arise from genetic errors and mutations.
“He had an idea that certain types of cells would become embryonic stem cells for cancer, and then a cancer tumor would emerge from that,” Kurzweil said in a phone interview Saturday.
Dr. Thilly hypothesized that metformin, a drug for Type 2 diabetes, would kill the embryonic stem cells that lead to cancer, Kurzweil said. The drug has since been shown to decrease the risk of certain types of cancer.
Data scientist Karl Rexer frequently collaborated with Dr. Thilly’s lab to analyze Centers for Disease Control data on disease rates in the US. Rexer’s data analysis supported Dr. Thilly’s research on how stem cell mutations cause disease. Rexer first heard about Dr. Thilly’s work when the two scientists, who lived just a few miles from each other, met on the sidelines of a soccer game both of their sons were playing.
“His mind was so sharp for some of these biological theories and trying to prove them,” Rexer said in a recent phone interview.
Over the years, Rexer got to know Dr. Thilly as an “unusual, opinionated, wonderful guy” whose stories spanned from his college days on the rugby field to working on malaria vaccinations in Thailand.
In the lab, Dr. Thilly was “no-nonsense” and held his employees to high standards of work, Rexer said. He had a gift for identifying young talent and “championing and standing up for them” as they advanced their careers.
Kurzweil also said he was able to get people to passionately commit to their jobs.
“He made a lot of progress on cancer because of the nature of his personality,” Kurzweil added. “He was able to get people to understand the reasons for his ideas and get excited about them.”
Kamath said that Dr. Thilly offered him his first research stipend and welcomed his family over for meals at the drop of a hat.
“He would go out of his way to make anyone feel comfortable and have his door always open should any difficulty arise amongst his friends and mentees,” he said.
Rebecca Kusko, who was one of the first to graduate from MIT’s biological engineering undergraduate program, said Dr. Thilly was her mentor for two decades.
“Bill was odd in a lovable way. I’ll never forget barging into his office (unannounced of course) because I was about to fail a class and he very calmly stopped his important MIT professorly work, put down his cold soup which he was eating directly from the can, and listened to my blubbering ramble,” she wrote in an email. “He offered me not only sage advice but also a soup can and a spoon in case I wanted to join in the meal.”
A celebration of life will be announced.
Dr. Thilly leaves his wife, Gostjeva, five children, William, Grethe, Walte, and Audrey Thilly and Fedor Gostjeva; a brother, Walter; a sister, Joan Harmon, and two grandchildren.
Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.