Before: his faculty portrait. After: from the photo shoot we arranged for his new chapter.
Where he stood
Bruce Kendall spent thirty-seven years as a scientist, including twenty-eight as a professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. He used mathematics to understand how plants and animals interact with each other and their environment, and how to protect them. His research contributed to the design of California’s network of marine protected areas.
In 2016, his wife, Michelle, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. A scientist herself, she looked for research on plant-based medicine for her kind of cancer and found that no one was doing it. So she paid for it herself: a three-year study with a researcher in Israel. The results were promising, but they came too late to save her. Before she died in 2023, she asked that the work become her legacy.
Then Bruce’s own retirement arrived. He was closing his life’s work and holding hers at the same time.
“I don’t know if my late wife’s legacy is mine to carry forward.”
What he chose
We began with The Whole Picture. Bruce told his whole story, from the algebra his father drew in the sand when he was three, to riding a bicycle alone across the country after college. Along the way, he saw his life’s work in a new light: not only the study of ecosystems, but the study of kindness.
Then Legacy in Motion. Michelle’s research needed someone to speak for it in a field Bruce had never worked in. His first test was a major medical research conference, and he was afraid of looking foolish. We spent two months preparing him. He went ready and confident, and came home with two things: the right people to call next, and one firm rule. He will take the work as far as it needs to go, and hand it only to a partner who will see it through. Around him, we gathered the right people: a photographer for his new chapter, a designer and developer to build the Canna Onc Research website, and patent attorneys to protect the discovery. We continue to build his team as the work needs it.
THE CANNA ONC RESEARCH WEBSITE WE BUILT
Then Life and Legacy Design. With the university no longer setting his days, Bruce is choosing what they are for: his practice, his travel, the people he wants close, and the research, placed inside a full life rather than taking it over.
And Finishing Well: a retirement celebration designed around him. At sunset on East Beach in Santa Barbara, about fifty friends gathered. One by one, they told Bruce what he and his work had meant to them. He said his thank-yous and his goodbyes to the career he was leaving. Then, to mark the end of one chapter, with his whole community witnessing him, he walked into the ocean and came back out to begin the next.
What stands now
Bruce is retired, and freer than he has been in years. As co-founder of Canna Onc Research, he holds the worldwide rights to what Michelle’s study discovered: a combination of plant compounds that killed ovarian cancer cells in laboratory tests. Four peer-reviewed studies back the findings, and the company is preparing for the next stage of testing.
The research began as Michelle’s. Continuing it is Bruce’s choice, on his own terms.
In his words
“I feel way more confident now. I don’t have to live up to any titles. It’s freedom.”
If you or someone you know is standing where Bruce stood, we would be glad to talk with them.
If someone you advise is standing here, we would be glad to talk with you first.
