Stem Cell Rock Star

By Patrick J. Kiger / Photographs by Joseph Escamilla

 Published August 2010

Sci-fi movies and TV sitcoms have conditioned us to envision a scary smart, paradigm-shifting, scientific genius as a pale, distracted-looking guy with taped-up glasses, who speaks in an incomprehensible technical argot and exudes a cracklingly tense, impatient ambience, like a human Tesla coil about to spark the gap. Meeting Hans Keirstead is a shock of a different sort.

The UC Irvine stem cell researcher who startled the world by enabling paralyzed rats to walk—and aims someday soon to do the same for humans—is in his second-floor office at the Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, where the afternoon sun streaming through the window accentuates his tanned, finely chiseled features and the highlights of his lush mane.

On his desk is a high-end MacBook running what appears to be a gigantic queue of iTunes downloads, and on the wall behind him hangs “The Jam,” an enormous poster of the history of rock music drawn by his brother, artist Michael Evans Keirstead. In the corner is Keirstead’s slightly battered Martin Backpacker guitar, damaged when Men’s Vogue borrowed it for his photo shoot.

At 43, the Canadian-born Keirstead, who was lured to UC Irvine in 2000 from the University of British Columbia by the promise of funding for a world-class facility, looks less like a neurobiologist and one of the fastest-rising stars of the scientific world than he does a youthful clone of Eagles drummer Don Henley. You half-expect him to embark on a hockey-arena tour this fall. Instead, he’s working with Geron, a Northern California biotech company, to launch the first federally approved clinical trial of a stem cell treatment for humans with spinal cord injuries, called GRNOPC1, based on his discoveries at UC Irvine. And instead of a Grammy, the gleaming trophy sitting nonchalantly on the edge of his desk—between framed photos of Keirstead riding a motorcycle and posed alongside his personal helicopter—is a plaque he recently received from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

“I don’t mean to brag,” Keirstead says, with the sort of shaken-not-stirred serenity that makes you believe he really means it, “but I just got back from the NIH, where I received this. The reason I love it so much, and that I’m so honored, is that it’s an endorsement by the think-tank scientific institute in America. This is the NIH saying, ‘Hans, you’re on the right track.’ And I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of that. Because one does experience a lot of antagonism from people who don’t understand the corporate realm and the priorities. People think I’ve made millions from the Geron deal, but I didn’t take a cent.

“I have made money from other ventures—making therapies and doing little spinoffs to try to increase my personal income … but people assume that’s my primary motivation—just to make money off [discoveries]. I’ve walked away from so much money, I can’t tell you.”

Indeed, he can’t tell you precisely how much money he has walked away from. But in Geron’s case, it might be an awful lot, because if the stem cell treatment for spinal injuries succeeds, it possibly could work for a much wider range of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and stroke.

But Keirstead, who could become the 21st century’s Jonas Salk, has set out to do something far more ambitious at UC Irvine. He’s fashioned himself into a prototype for a revolutionary new breed of university researcher. Part academic and part entrepreneur, he runs his lab with the market-oriented methods and urgency of a for-profit business, and is adept at doing big-dollar deals with companies—that is, when he isn’t lining up investors to start one of his own.

His goal is to radically speed up the drawn-out, cumbersome, and dicey process of transforming discoveries into medical treatments that can improve, or save, lives. To accomplish this, he has been willing to leverage his good looks and charisma to become a celebrity scientist, a media-friendly spokesman for stem cell research who’s no less comfortable appearing on “60 Minutes” or in the pages of a men’s fashion magazine than he is in the Journal of Neurotrauma.