When Lenny Rome was growing up, his mother recalled, he had "every hobby in the world."

If he wasn't stamp-, coin- or rock-collecting, the perennially busy youngster was acting, scouting, painting, skiing, playing tennis or golf, or making movies or music on the clarinet and bassoon.

Today, Leonard H. Rome's life is just as full, only now all that enthusiasm and vigor are funneled into one thing -- his work.

A much-honored scientist, senior administrator and member of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center, he is director of the center's Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Program Area, senior associate dean for research in the School of Medicine and an associate vice chancellor for research.

As dean, he helps the medical school and faculty find large grants and gifts. Last year, Rome was instrumental in helping UCLA and UC Santa Barbara win a $100-million grant from the state to establish the California NanoSystems Institute as one of Gov. Gray Davis' California Institutes for Science and Innovation. Scientists will use the money, plus approximately $250 million in matching funds from corporate sponsors, to engineer new technologies in health care, information science and other areas at the atomic level.

"UCLA School of Medicine researchers will work to develop therapies that target specific defective genes that cause diseases, including cancer," Rome explained.

The son of an artist/homemaker and a feed-store owner, Rome grew up a late-blooming scholar in Youngstown, Ohio. "I took books home in high school so my mom would think I was studying," he admitted. "I didn't really start reading until I was in college." He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry and his doctorate in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan.

In 1985, Rome and his colleagues discovered vaults, which are mysterious, important little hunks of protein found inside human cells. They function like miniscule moving vans.

"We believe that in some cases, after drugs enter cancer cells they are designed to kill, vaults envelop those drugs and carry them away from the nucleus where they would kill the cells," Rome explained. That would explain a dangerous situation called multidrug resistance, in which cancer cells reject drugs designed to destroy them.

Now Rome and his team are set to take the next giant leap. "Within months," he said, "we could have the technology to deplete vault content in cells. If vault depletion prevents multidrug resistance, we will have taken an important step forward."

On weekends, Rome becomes a homebody, spending time with his wife and three sons. Taking up a hammer and saw, he has even built additions to his home. "I'm family-centered," he explained. "I play a little golf on Sundays, but mostly I love to mess around the house."

Excerpted from "UCLA Cancer Discoveries," a publication of the Jonsson Cancer Center.