Kevin Eggan


Kevin Eggan is a Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, known for his work in stem cell research, and as a spokesperson for stem cell research in the United States. He was a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. 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.

Biography

Background and education

Eggan grew up in Normal, Illinois, 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.

Stem cell research

In August 2004, Eggan moved to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology at their Stem Cell Institute 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, 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.

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 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, 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:

Work as spokesperson

Forbes noted in Eggan's 2007 profile that:

Publications

Eggan's five most highly cited publications are: