Proud nerd likes challenge of ALS research

Though Jeff Agar has no personal ties to Lou Gerhig's diease, he's driven to find a cure. ''It was something I could get my head around, some organic feeling that if I stuck to it, I could understand it,'' he said. (Erik Jacobs for the Boston Globe)
By Billy Baker
Globe Correspondent / September 8, 2008


Jeff Agar is, by his own description, a nerd. He says he was born that way. As a child, he had dreams about atoms and electrons. He read science fiction. He competed in the chemistry Olympics. For fun, he would root around in the dumpster behind the local electronic repair shop, find things the pros couldn't fix, and then fix them (his family got its first microwave oven this way).

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Agar is also, he cheerfully points out, an unusually large nerd. He's got the big fleshy build of an offensive lineman.

"But I used to be a small nerd until I was 13 or 14," he said recently from his office at Brandeis, where the boyish 36-year-old runs a lab that is getting attention for its attempts to understand the chemistry behind Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. "When I grew, I just became harder to pick on. But I was still a nerd before being a nerd was cool."

Where Agar comes from, nerdiness posed a special challenge. He grew up outside of Flint, Mich., where life, in his words, was "hardcore." Four houses on his paper route went down in drug busts on a single day, he recalls. He can hold forth at length on the science of perpetrating, and avoiding, a carjacking. "It was the wrong place to be a geek," he said.

Fast-forward to the present and Agar has a gig at a prestigious university, and a wife who is a scientist at Harvard Medical School, and four kids, and a house in Newton.

His first 36 years have turned out well, yes. But Agar knows that in his field of research science, he's at the precarious point where youth and potential must translate to results. Starting your own lab is one thing; succeeding is another.

In his lab, Agar is studying how a mutation in one little part of a protein is enough to kill a previously healthy person, and how the differences in those mutations influence life span (depending on the type of ALS-causing mutation, people can die quickly or live for many years).

Bob Brown, a neurology professor at Massachusetts General Hospital who discovered the protein mutations that Agar is studying, applauds him for taking the chance. "In general, it tends to be understudied, so we always think it's wonderful when a brilliant young scientist chooses to study ALS."

Brown said that Agar's core hypothesis - that the instability of one protein somehow underlies the death of the motor neurons that control muscle movement - is "an important way to think about disease in general, and the way one might treat it, which is the real goal."

Unlike many in the field, Agar does not have a personal connection to ALS. "I just felt it," he said. "It was something I could get my head around, some organic feeling that if I stuck to it, I could understand it, figure out what makes this thing tick."

Finding success studying ALS, which has no effective treatments, is not exactly a safe bet.

"You look around and see that people are getting older and we have an energy problem," he said. "If you're a young scientist, you might want to think of one of those fields."

But ALS fit what he said he has always known he would do with his life - he would become a scientist, he would study something "brutal," and he would try to fix it.

As he pulled up 3D images of the protein on a monitor, he stopped to pick up a photo of his family, including two stepdaughters who will be starting at Brandeis in the spring, and said that his good fortune is the one thing he can't get his head around. "It doesn't feel real," he said.

"I feel like an impostor, like I pulled one over. If it were someone else, I would say it would be a small miracle."

The setting of his life has moved from "about the most dangerous place" to live, to one of the safest, Newton. That kind of transition, he says, has its own challenges: "My kids don't lock their bikes and it drives me crazy."


Hometown: Ortonville, Mich.; lives in Newton.

Family: Wife, Nathalie Agar, is starting a lab to study brain cancer at Harvard Medical School. They have four children: Alexandrine, 18, and Noémie, 17, both of whom will be at Brandeis this spring; Chloé, 7; and Xantine, 5.

Education: Studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Michigan in Flint, graduating in 1995; earned his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Georgia in 2000.

Hobbies: Basketball, boxing, and skiing, and spending time on the ocean with family.



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