What a Brilliant Scientist Learned from His Social Entrepreneur Father

I recently interviewed Hans Keirstead, the University of California, Irvine stem-cell researcher whose work may someday lead to treatment for paralysis from spinal cord injuries and diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The 43-year-old scientist has shown a remarkable knack for speeding the often-laborious development process for new medical treatments, in part because he's savvy about working with companies and figuring out how to get things done in the real world. When I commented that his self-taught entrepreneurial expertise was impressive, he responded, "I can't say that I was entirely self-taught. I learned a lot from my dad."

As it turns out, 69-year-old Ken Keirstead is as much of a paradigm-rocking visionary as his scientist son, and proof that a successful midlife person's second act can be even more important than his or her first. The child of a long line of Canadian missionaries, Ken Keirstead was born in 1940 in what is now KwaZulu-Natal along the eastern coast of South Africa. Despite the nation's post-1947 apartheid regime that kept blacks and whites apart, his family lived in villages among black Africans. He grew up speaking the Zulu tongue of his childhood playmates, as well as the English and Afrikaans spoken by whites.

"Africa really was a powerful influence upon me," Ken Keirstead says. In particular, he learned the expansive African concept of family, which includes not just close relatives but distant cousins and friends who don't have a blood link. "In Africa, even children born out of wedlock are welcomed into the family," he says. "Family is all about acceptance." Along the same lines, he also learned the Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu, which basically is the idea that all humans are interconnected, and that we must coexist and work together rather than divide ourselves.

"It literally means, 'I am because of you,'" Ken Keirstead says. "There's really no difference between us and others. We all bleed the same way, breathe the same air."

As a teen, he left Africa for North America to get an education, and he studied science at the Pathology Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia and business management at the College of William and Mary and Columbia University in the United States. He went on to become a high-ranking executive at pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb and head of Canadian operations for the French drug maker Sanofi-Adventis. He left Big Pharma to become a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, and played a major role in founding several successful startups. After retiring--if you can actually call it that--in the early 2000s, Ken Keirstead kept working with new businesses. His most recent venture is Soricimed, a five-year-old Canadian company that has developed and patented soricidin, a promising anti-cancer drug synthesized from, of all things, northern short-tailed shrew saliva. Ken Keirstead currently is Soricimed's vice-chairman, a job that he says takes up about half of his time.

But the other half of his schedule is even more fascinating. Eight years ago, Ken Keirstead decided he wanted to spend much of his time in Africa, his childhood home, and give back something in recognition of what Africa had done for him. He now divides his time between North America and Guinea, a country on the central-western coast of Africa. Most sixtysomethings probably wouldn't pick an underdeveloped African nation with a recent history of violent military coups as their retirement destination, but he is not a typical retiree. He focuses on his new country's positives. "Later this month, Guinea is going to have the first democratic election in its history," he says, with a certain amount of pride. He describes Conakry, the capital city, as "a very cosmopolitan place, with people from France, Russia, all over." He sees Guinea as a place with enormous potential, thanks to its tremendous mineral wealth, which includes half the world's supply of bauxite.

But most of all, Ken Keirstead says that he's hopeful about Guinea's future because of its people--who, like much of the rest of Africa, are young and eager to improve themselves. "Fifty percent of the 830 million people in africa are under the age of 20, " he says. "If they're not already highly skilled, they're very capable if given half a chance. They absorb education like a sponge, and they adapt to changing circumstances as quickly as anyone else I've seen anywhere else in the world."

Ken Keirstead has made it his mission to help people in Guinea get what they need to build that bright future. He explains that helping them is different from simply giving handouts of money or food or massive development projects conceived entirely by westerners. "In the past, someone might decide, 'Africans need wells,' and then build them a bunch of wells, without ever asking them what they actually needed or wanted. Sometimes, the thing that was implanted just wasn't compatible with the people and their culture."

Ken Keirstead started an organization, Le Groupe Lyceum, that follows a different approach. Ken and a small local staff of Guineans go to rural villages and have meetings with residents in which aid workers largely listen. "We use what Nelson Mandela calls the 'community conversation' approach," he says. "Instead of presenting ideas to them, we gradually gain their trust and then they come up with the ideas for projects themselves."

As a result of such local guidance, he began work on a residential home for some of the several thousand children in Guinea handicapped because of polio, a disease that, although eradicated in the First World, is still found in impoverished Africa. "We want to provide a safe haven for them, a place where they can get medical treatment, nutrition, go to school and learn a vocational skill," he says. "We can train them to be leather fabricators or do any number of other jobs, so they won't be forced to beg for a living." The pilot program will serve just two dozen children, but he hopes the model will catch on elsewhere in the country.

Another of Le Groupe Lyceum's projects is microfinance. Ken Keirstead provides small loans to help Africans start their own small businesses. "People have plenty of good ideas, but they don't have any savings or access to banks to get loans," he says. "We're not talking about a lot of money. We're lending them $100, $250, maybe $450 for a really big project. They're businesses that make sense in Guinea. For example, we lent fishermen money to buy new nets and better safety equipment. They work on a river estuary that's full of fish, and now they're able to catch more and sell them at the market. We also provided $100 to a local women's group, who wanted to grow peanuts and other vegetables, and another group who wanted to set up an operation to smoke fish, which they need to do because they don't have any refrigeration."

As Ken Keirstead points out, it doesn't necessarily require a ton of money and an elaborate bureaucracy to change people's lives. He's got a lean organization, with modestly-paid employees who travel around the country in battered used cars, without ever coming close to a fancy hotel. He's financing it through a network of about 1,000 small donors, people who give $1,000 or $500 or even smaller sums because that's what they can afford. He hopes eventually to build his donor base to 3,000 to 5,000 people. That's all he needs, because he's focusing on improving Africa in bits and pieces, a few polio patients or fishermen at a time. And he hopes to change Western attitudes toward Africa in the same incremental fashion."

"Gradually, we're hoping that people will come to see Africa as something other than a terrifying mystery," he says. "It's going to become a blank page, on which a new story can be written -- by the Africans themselves, with our help."