Rewiring cells: Prof. Jay Keasling blends
biology with chemical engineering to create
synthetic organisms capable of altering
nature and fighting deadly diseases.
Photographs by Marcus Hanschen

Jay Keasling carries a picture in his mind of a place he has never seen, of children he has never met. But it is an image that radically changed how he felt about his research in chemistry — and has set Keasling, a Berkeley chemical engineering professor, on a quest far grander than he ever imagined.

The picture in Keasling’s mind is of a medical clinic in Malawi, filled with thin, feverish children lying in cribs. Some die, succumbing to a virulent strain of cerebral malaria that leaves them deeply unconscious or convulsing as if they were in a devastating car accident. But the lucky ones — the ones who reached the clinic in time — receive a dose of an expensive drug called artemisinin. A day or two later, these children are on their feet, playing in their cribs.

“Playing!” Even now, almost two years after Keasling heard the searing description, he shakes his head in wonder at the magic of a chemical compound that pulls children back from the shadow of a horrible death. At the time, he had not expected to be jolted. He had just finished giving a lecture about his work, this one at Michigan State University. His slides described the science and laid out the case for the research: artemisinin drugs were too expensive for most people in developing countries. Afterward, Keasling visited with a few researchers doing related work, including one who spent half her year teaching at Michigan and the rest in Malawi, performing autopsies on child victims of malaria. Her descriptions swept away the academic tidiness of Keasling’s work. To her, artemisinin was almost a mirage: a compound derived from a plant with tremendous healing power yet out of reach of those who needed it most. As he listened to her, Keasling realized that his work wasn’t just about science anymore. If all went right, he might make the price of a dose of artemisinin plummet to the value of a U.S. postage stamp. He could save lives.

Keasling, 42, is a biological and chemical engineer. He has fused chemistry and biology in a novel way to design microbes to churn out specific products. He has helped catalyze a unique collaboration of academia, private industry, and philanthropy to move his research from the laboratory into real products. And he has found a passion that runs even deeper than the satisfaction that he has drawn from pushing the boundaries of academic science. His research has taken on the shape of those Malawi children rising, shaking off death, and playing—playing!—in their cribs.

“This is what I’m doing,” he says, with an unblinking gaze. “My plan is to make sure this gets out — and to do it to the very end.”

Students who have worked with Jay Keasling at Berkeley marvel at his steady temper, his optimism. Nothing seems to unnerve the matter-of-fact scientist with the square jaw, compact build, and fondness for Italian-made shoes. When complicated pieces of machinery are irrationally balky, or when experiments that took days to set up yield nothing, Keasling shrugs and carries on.

“As bad as the day gets,” he confides, “it’s still better than shoveling pig manure.” He means it. Keasling grew up on a farm in Nebraska, the only son of a farmer who raised cattle, soybeans, and at least 200 pigs. Keasling doesn’t like to talk about pigs. “They’re smart, but they’re mean,” he says curtly. If he never saw another pig — except as a side of bacon on his breakfast plate — Keasling would be a happy man.

But he learned a lot of lessons on the farm that have served him since the day he dusted the dirt off his jeans and headed to the University of Nebraska to study biology. The ethos of farming — the ceaseless battle between farmer and nature, each trying to bend the other to its will — was deeply etched into Keasling. Nature wasn’t something that you just admired; it was something you worked with, battled, tended, nurtured — in short, did whatever it took to get the results you wanted. “Biology is pretty robust,” Keasling says. “You don’t have to worry too much about tinkering with it.”

And farm work was continual, too, filling every moment of the day from dawn until dusk, and afterward. Keasling took to heart the core lesson of farm life: If you want to have a prayer of getting things done, you’d better get up early in the morning.

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