Kevin Eggan
Encyclopedia
Kevin Eggan is Associate Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University
, known for his work in stem cell
research (also known as "therapeutic cloning"), and as a spokesperson for stem cell research in the United States. He was a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship
(sometimes nicknamed the "genius grant"). In 2005, he was named to the MIT
Technology Review
TR35
as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
, the son of Chris and Larry Eggan and one of five children, his father being a math professor at Illinois State University
.
After completing his bachelor’s degree in microbiology
at the University of Illinois, he applied to medical school to become a doctor, but his doubts caused him to defer in favor of a two-year internship with drug company Amgen
at the National Institutes of Health
. In 1998 he applied to study for a Ph.D. in biology
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, arriving there shortly after Dolly the Sheep
gained worldwide attention as the world's first cloned
domestic animal.
Eggan began to explore both this process and also the reasons that cloned animals often appeared to develop abnormally, with organ defects and immunological problems – his first contact with stem cell research. After finishing his PhD in 2002, Eggan split his time between a post-doctoral program with genetics
pioneer Rudolf Jaenisch
and a collaborative project with Richard Axel
, a Nobel Prize
–winning scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
, as well as spending time at the University of Hawaii
.
in Cambridge, Massachusetts
, as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology
at their Stem Cell Institute ("HSCI") in 2005. At the time, stem cell research in the United States was threatened by political pressure due to concerns over the ethics of human embryo research, and research such as this was at risk of potentially being made illegal. Federal funding for stem cell research had recently been removed, and part of his role was to obtain private funding to replace it. Eggan took on a second role as the assistant investigator for Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a philanthropical medical research group in Kansas City, Missouri
.
Eggan's research goals at Harvard were to understand how nuclear transplantation works, and to make stem cells that carry genes for specific diseases such as Parkinson's disease
, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(Lou Gehrig's disease), and Alzheimer’s. In 2006, following "more than two years of intensive ethical and scientific review", two groups of scientists at HSCI were granted permission to explore Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer
techniques to create disease-specific stem cell lines as an approach to various currently incurable conditions. Eggan was in charge of one of these two groups and senior author of their results; a renowned co-director of HSCI ran the other. The groups initially collaborated in researching diabetes before Eggan's group switched to work on neurodegenerative diseases. Harvard President Lawrence Summers
called the approvals "a seminal event".
Eggan also serves as the Chief Scientific Officer of The New York Stem Cell Foundation
.
Eggan's team reported that they had created cells similar to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a major step toward someday possibly defusing the central objection to stem cell research. These discoveries sparked extensive debate in the United States Congress
, with opponents of the use of embryonic stem cells from fetuses arguing that these or similar methods of creating stem cells from skin might be eventually used instead to satisfy the conflicting demands of medical research and morals.
Eggan himself is cautious about his team's work, with an early stage 2005 profile in Nature
noting there was still much work to do:
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, known for his work in stem cell
Stem cell
This article is about the cell type. For the medical therapy, see Stem Cell TreatmentsStem cells are biological cells found in all multicellular organisms, that can divide and differentiate into diverse specialized cell types and can self-renew to produce more stem cells...
research (also known as "therapeutic cloning"), and as a spokesperson for stem cell research in the United States. He was a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship
MacArthur Fellows Program
The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
(sometimes nicknamed the "genius grant"). In 2005, he was named to the MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
Technology Review
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
TR35
TR35
The TR35 is an annual list published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.Some of the most famous winners of the award include Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Linus Torvalds , Jerry Yang , Jonathan Ive , Mark Zuckerberg...
as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Background and education
Eggan grew up in Normal, IllinoisNormal, Illinois
Normal is an incorporated town in McLean County, Illinois, United States. It had a population of 52,497 as of the 2010 census. Normal is the smaller of two principal municipalities of the Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area...
, the son of Chris and Larry Eggan and one of five children, his father being a math professor at Illinois State University
Illinois State University
Illinois State University , founded in 1857, is the oldest public university in Illinois; it is located in the town of Normal. ISU is considered a "national university" that grants a variety of doctoral degrees and strongly emphasizes research; it is also recognized as one of the top ten largest...
.
After completing his bachelor’s degree in microbiology
Microbiology
Microbiology is the study of microorganisms, which are defined as any microscopic organism that comprises either a single cell , cell clusters or no cell at all . This includes eukaryotes, such as fungi and protists, and prokaryotes...
at the University of Illinois, he applied to medical school to become a doctor, but his doubts caused him to defer in favor of a two-year internship with drug company Amgen
Amgen
Amgen Inc. is an international biotechnology company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. Located in the Conejo Valley, Amgen is the world's largest independent biotech firm. The company employs approximately 17,000 staff members. Its products include Epogen, Aranesp, Enbrel, Kineret,...
at the National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
. In 1998 he applied to study for a Ph.D. in biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, arriving there shortly after Dolly the Sheep
Dolly the Sheep
Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in Scotland...
gained worldwide attention as the world's first cloned
Cloning
Cloning in biology is the process of producing similar populations of genetically identical individuals that occurs in nature when organisms such as bacteria, insects or plants reproduce asexually. Cloning in biotechnology refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments , cells , or...
domestic animal.
Eggan began to explore both this process and also the reasons that cloned animals often appeared to develop abnormally, with organ defects and immunological problems – his first contact with stem cell research. After finishing his PhD in 2002, Eggan split his time between a post-doctoral program with genetics
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
pioneer Rudolf Jaenisch
Rudolf Jaenisch
Rudolf Jaenisch is a biologist at MIT. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating transgenic mice to study cancer and neurological diseases....
and a collaborative project with Richard Axel
Richard Axel
Richard Axel is an American neuroscientist whose work on the olfactory system won him and Linda B. Buck, a former post-doctoral scientist in his research group, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004....
, a Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
–winning scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a United States non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded by the American businessman Howard Hughes in 1953. It is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United...
, as well as spending time at the University of Hawaii
University of Hawaii
The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...
.
Stem cell research
In August 2004, Eggan moved to Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology
Molecular biology
Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...
at their Stem Cell Institute ("HSCI") in 2005. At the time, stem cell research in the United States was threatened by political pressure due to concerns over the ethics of human embryo research, and research such as this was at risk of potentially being made illegal. Federal funding for stem cell research had recently been removed, and part of his role was to obtain private funding to replace it. Eggan took on a second role as the assistant investigator for Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a philanthropical medical research group in Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
.
Eggan's research goals at Harvard were to understand how nuclear transplantation works, and to make stem cells that carry genes for specific diseases such as Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...
, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , also referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a form of motor neuron disease caused by the degeneration of upper and lower neurons, located in the ventral horn of the spinal cord and the cortical neurons that provide their efferent input...
(Lou Gehrig's disease), and Alzheimer’s. In 2006, following "more than two years of intensive ethical and scientific review", two groups of scientists at HSCI were granted permission to explore Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer
Somatic cell nuclear transfer
In genetics and developmental biology, somatic-cell nuclear transfer is a laboratory technique for creating a clonal embryo, using an ovum with a donor nucleus . It can be used in embryonic stem cell research, or, potentially, in regenerative medicine where it is sometimes referred to as...
techniques to create disease-specific stem cell lines as an approach to various currently incurable conditions. Eggan was in charge of one of these two groups and senior author of their results; a renowned co-director of HSCI ran the other. The groups initially collaborated in researching diabetes before Eggan's group switched to work on neurodegenerative diseases. Harvard President Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist. He served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama until November 2010.Summers is the...
called the approvals "a seminal event".
Eggan also serves as the Chief Scientific Officer of The New York Stem Cell Foundation
New York Stem Cell Foundation
The New York Stem Cell Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in the Spring of 2005. NYSCF is dedicated to accelerating cures for the major diseases of our time through stem cell research...
.
Work to date
Eggan's work has succeeded in developing a technique of merging stem and skin cells that has obtained considerable public attention as an a possible avenue to avoid moral objections regarding stem cell research in the context of serious illness. It suggests that ultimately, treatment of serious illnesses and understanding of stem cell development may be possible to obtain without recourse to human embryos – a highly desirable state of affairs politically, given the concurrent controversy over stem cell research in the United States.Eggan's team reported that they had created cells similar to human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a major step toward someday possibly defusing the central objection to stem cell research. These discoveries sparked extensive debate in the United States Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
, with opponents of the use of embryonic stem cells from fetuses arguing that these or similar methods of creating stem cells from skin might be eventually used instead to satisfy the conflicting demands of medical research and morals.
- "Eggan's technique provides a window into exactly what happens to turn back the clock in cells during cloning--and, indeed, in the normal process of creating sperm, eggs and embryos. Somehow, aging is reversed, and old cells become young again. As Schatten puts it, the one-way freeway of life has an exit ramp. Understanding what happens when the cell is reprogrammed is one of the main goals of studying embryonic stem cells. But right now, the only way to solve that problem is to clone embryos, which is a difficult and expensive process.
Eggan himself is cautious about his team's work, with an early stage 2005 profile in Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
noting there was still much work to do:
- The hybrids still contain two nuclei: one from a skin cell and one from an embryonic stem cell. So they have an abnormally high amount of DNA, and Eggan needs to work out how to remove the embryonic stem cell's DNA. Eggan adds that he has only just begun working with the hybrids, so it is not clear what they will or won't be able to do. "It's frustrating," Eggan says, "because they're implying that our work is a solution, which it is not yet. These are ideas in their most nascent stages."
Work as spokesperson
Forbes noted in Eggan's 2007 profile that:- "Eggan is also becoming one of science's more outspoken voices, defending the necessity of pursuing embryonic cell research through all available means as a way of understanding scourges [such as degenerative diseases]."
Publications
Eggan's five most highly cited publications are:- Humpherys, D; Eggan, K; Akutsu, H; Hochedlinger, K; Rideout, WM; Biniszkiewicz, D; Yanagimachi, R; Jaenisch, R. "Epigenetic instability in ES cells and cloned mice": ScienceScience (journal)Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
, 293 (5527): 95-97 JUL 6 2001, Times Cited: 288
- Rideout, WM; Eggan, K; Jaenisch, R. "Nuclear cloning and epigenetic reprogramming of the genome. ScienceScience (journal)Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
, 293 (5532): 1093-1098 (2001). Times Cited: 250
- Eggan, K; Akutsu, H; Loring, J; Jackson-Grusby, L; Klemm, M; Rideout, WM; Yanagimachi, R; Jaenisch, R. "Hybrid vigor, fetal overgrowth, and viability of mice derived by nuclear cloning and tetraploid embryo complementation," Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesProceedings of the National Academy of SciencesThe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences...
, 98 (11): 6209-6214, May 22, 2001. Times Cited: 191
- Humphreys, D; Eggan, K; Akutsu, H; Friedman, A; Hochedlinger, K; Yanagimachi, R; Lander, ES; Golub, TR; Jaenisch, R. "Abnormal gene expression in cloned mice derived from embryonic stem cell and cumulus cell nuclei." Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesProceedings of the National Academy of SciencesThe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences...
, 99 (20): 12889-12894 (2002). Times Cited: 157
- Bortvin, A; Eggan, K; Skaletsky, H; Akutsu, H; Berry, DL; Yanagimachi, R; Page, DC; Jaenisch, R. "Incomplete reactivation of Oct4-related genes in mouse embryos cloned from somatic nuclei" Development, 130 (8): 1673-1680 (2003) Times Cited: 143
Awards
- Winner of Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award in 2003 sponsored by the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
- Honored in Popular Science's fourth annual "Brilliant 10" in 2005
- Technology Review Magazine's "Innovator of the Year" in 2005
- MacArthur Fellows ProgramMacArthur Fellows ProgramThe MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
2006 - People Magazine's "Sexiest Genius" in 2006