Clinical Chemistry 59:10
1534–1536 (2013)
Inspiring Minds
Prepared by Misia Landau
Ulf-Håkan Stenman
Finland lies huddled in the Baltic Sea—a sliver of forests and lakes caught between Norway, Sweden, and
the looming stretch of land that is Russia. It is no wonder that the Finns have maintained a sizable and welltrained army at all times. Ulf-Håkan Stenman did his
military service in 1960, at the age of 19. When he
wasn’t performing drills and maneuvers with his brigade, he liked to draw.
“His big dream when he was young was to be a car
designer. He was making sketches of different cars all
the time,” said Börje Thorström, who served with him
and would become one of his closest friends. Occasionally, they would have contests to see who could take a
machine pistol to pieces and put it back together again.
Stenman, known to his friends as Uffen, was by far the
fastest—a testament to his physical agility but also to
his habit of thinking from first principles. “His logical thinking is extraordinary,” said Thorstrom, an
engineer.
Those deductive powers were evident years later
when Thorstrom’s wife Eva fell and injured her knee.
Stenman, who is professor emeritus in the department
of clinical chemistry at the University of Helsinki,
called a few days later. Thorström told him about Eva’s
accident and that the local hospital had given her a
plaster cast and sent her home. “Uffen said, ‘May I
speak to her?’ . . . On the telephone, he made a completely different diagnosis. He sent her to Helsinki to a
special hospital to get operated on,” Thorström said. It
turned out she had torn three tendons. “Her doctor was
there seeing her and couldn’t make the right diagnosis
but Uffen could do it over the phone. It’s amazing— he
has such a special grip on everything,” Thorström said.
Stenman—who gave up his dream of designing
cars to pursue a medical career— has used those same
Sherlockian skills to tackle some of the biggest challenges in clinical chemistry. In the early 1980s, he and
colleagues purified a protein from the urine of a
woman with ovarian cancer and would use it to develop an immunoassay so sensitive that it is still in use
20 years later. Pursuing the protein with his trademark
doggedness, he revealed it to be a complicated character, both inhibiting and promoting cancer. He would
go on to identify markers for other insidious diseases
such as prostate, renal, and bladder cancer and
pancreatitis.
Stenman possesses a capacious creative mind and
an ability to see connections that aren’t obvious. “He’s
thinking out of the box very much,” said Patrik Finne,
a researcher in the department of clinical chemistry at the
University of Helsinki. Warm and engaged upon meeting,
Stenman can sometimes appear lost in thought. “My
1534
first impression of
him was that he was a
philosopher. In the
middle of a sentence
he could stop and
think about something,” said Henrik
Alfthan, a clinical
biochemist at the
University of Helsinki and a longtime
colleague and collaborator. “Somehow I
realized that he was
not quite aware that I was around, for a split second
only. When I got to know him better, I realized that he
is sharp like a knife.”
Behind his elegant, if modest, facade, Stenman inhabits a wildly rich yet extraordinarily ordered interior
universe: a vast library where everything is categorized
and accessible. “It’s very easy for me to remember results from 30 to 40 years ago. One of my strengths is I
can combine [these] different pieces of information,”
he said. It’s enough to intimidate his students. Years
ago, when Finne was doing his PhD, he and the other
doctoral students asked Stenman how he always
seemed to know more about the details of their projects
than they did. “He explained that when you read very
much, you get more and more shelves in your mind.
You can put stuff on those shelves. You get more infrastructure in your mind to put things on and things start
to get connected. Then it’s quite easy to remember new
things because you have a place for them,” said Finne.
Born in the winter of 1941, Stenman grew up in a
small Swedish-speaking village in the west of Finland,
not far from the coastal city of Jakobstad. His father
Evald, a calm and kind man, was a talented teacher.
“He was very good with children and young people,”
said Stenman. His mother Greta was a beautiful and
uncommonly intelligent woman. When the youngest
of her three boys turned ten she became a regional correspondent for a Helsinki-based newspaper.
Religious, though not very churchgoing, she raised
her sons with a light touch. “I don’t remember that she
interfered with my life very much,” said Stenman. During the long sun-lit days of summer, he would hike in
the surrounding woods or fish in the nearby river, usually in the company of his best friend, his younger
brother Svante, who would later become an associate
professor of pathology and internal medicine. During
the winter, they would ski, coming inside only to have a
meal.
Inspiring Minds
Though he was later obsessed with cars, airplanes
were his first passion. He spent hours building model
planes, first from kits and later from scratch. Math and
physics came easily and for a while he thought he’d be
an engineer but a high school biology teacher inspired
him to study medicine. After his year of military service, he began his medical studies at the University of
Helsinki. He lived with his older brother, who would go
on to an illustrious career in physics, becoming a professor by the age of 35. “I learned from him how to
study,” he said.
Stenman received his medical degree in 1967. He
spent three years as a house officer in a Helsinki hospital clinic and then embarked on his doctoral research—
isolating a vitamin B12 binding protein with Ralph
Gräsbeck, who invented the concept of reference values. After finishing his thesis in 1975, Stenman began
working with a young and brilliant clinical chemist,
Erkki Ruoslahti, who would ignite in him a passion for
cancer research. Being in the lab— hunting down tumor markers—was a perfect fit, a place to use his agile
hands and mind.
In 1976, a year after receiving his PhD, he was invited to spend a year at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California. By then he was married and
had two young boys. He first saw Ingrid when he was at
medical school. Beautiful and clever, she was hard not
to notice. But it was in a student club— he was chairman and she was secretary—that they officially met.
“The first thing [I noticed] was probably her looks and
then I got to know her. It just got better,” he said.
It turns out she had grown up in Jakobstad and,
though five years younger, had attended the same
school as him. Though they shared similar interests—
she was studying chemistry, math, and physics and
would become a schoolteacher and later a school
principal—their dissimilarities also helped make the
marriage work. “She is very good at sensing what people feel and think and I’m better at thinking about
numbers and experiments,” he said. Outgoing, warm,
and highly social, she balanced his more introverted
tendencies. They were married in 1967 and three years
later had their first son, Jakob. The second one, Matthias, was born in 1972.
The boys were 4 and 6 when they arrived in California. The whole family reveled in the warmth of the
climate and the people. Stenman plunged into his
work. At the time, tumors were thought to produce
substances that would provoke rejection reactions by
the immune system. His task when he arrived was to
find these so-called tumor-associated transplantation
antigens. “I eventually found nothing,” he said. But he
became convinced that it would be possible to detect
tumor-associated antigens, generally speaking, in
urine. On his return to Helsinki, he set out to find
them.
Working with colleagues, he purified the ovarian
cancer marker tumor-associated trypsin inhibitor
(TATI) and developed it onto an immunoassay that is
still commercially available in Europe and Asia. Initially, Stenman and his colleagues suspected TATI was
working to inhibit another cancer-causing protein, a
hunch that was confirmed a few years later when they
found it expressed in close association with a matrixdegrading protein, tumor-associated trypsin (TAT).
But the story turned out to be more complicated. “We
thought TATI would be protective, not enhancing, but
we have shown it can actually promote aggressive
growth,” Stenman said. He and his colleagues believe
that TATI activates a receptor for epidermal growth
factor (EGF), which stimulates tumor growth.
How to block the duplicitous protein is just one
conundrum occupying Stenman’s library of a mind.
Another is how—and when—to test for prostate cancer. In 1991, Stenman, working with Alfthan and another biochemist, Jari Leinonen, found that prostatespecific antigen (PSA) forms a complex with an
enzyme and that the proportion of this PSA complex,
relative to free PSA, is higher in men with prostate cancer. In fact, it appears to go up the more aggressive the
cancer. “The key [in prostate cancer testing] is to identify aggressive forms and you can do this by identifying
different forms of PSA in cancer patients,” he said.
Stenman rises at 6 AM—in broad daylight or utter
darkness depending on the season. After doing some
email or writing in his small library, he sits down with
his wife to a breakfast of coffee, cheese, salami, and
tomato juice. He leaves his home in Grankulla, a suburb of Helsinki, around 8 AM and drives his Audi A4 to
his office at the University of Helsinki. There, surrounded by piles of papers, he meets with students,
follows up on lab results, talks with colleagues— often
simultaneously. “A lot of things are going on. The
phone might be ringing—and he always answers the
phone—and the conversation is not continued for a
moment. It seems like his mind is going from one place
to another quite much,” said Finne. “He is very easily
available to researchers—maybe too much because
he’s always answering the phone, or when someone’s
knocking on the door, he’s always opening it and always ready to discuss,” said Finne.
Yet Stenman’s attention to detail is legendary. One
day many years ago, Finne came to his office with a
draft of his first scientific paper. The next day he came
back and saw that Stenman had covered his paper with
comments. “He had changed everything, corrected it. I
gave him the next version. I was already convinced that
now we would soon be able to submit it. And again he
had corrected everything. It was full of comments— he
Clinical Chemistry 59:10 (2013) 1535
Inspiring Minds
had even changed his own changes all over again. A
second time, I did the revision,” he said. “The paper
went through the process 15 times and the number of
corrections became a little bit smaller. It continued to
be corrected over and over again. He must have spent
very much time on that paper. I counted it up—I had
35 versions of the paper before we submitted it. He did
this with everyone. I really learned how to write a scientific paper.”
Usually, Stenman leaves the office around 3 or 4 in
the afternoon and returns home. In the winter, he
might head out with his wife for some cross-country
skiing around a nearby lake and come back for a sauna.
Weekends and holidays they might drive up to their
house in Lapland, where they are often joined by their
sons and their families. When not sidelined by an arthritic knee, Stenman likes to downhill ski with his sons
Jakob, a surgeon, and Matthias, a dentist, and their
children. “I’m terribly much enjoying watching my
grandchildren grow up,” he said. Matthias’s oldest son,
Otto, appears to have inherited Stenman’s deductive
powers. When Stenman turned 70, Otto made a toast.
“He said, ‘You must have been charming to be able to
get grandma,’” Stenman said.
He and his wife also have a home on an island in
the Baltic, which is where they like to spend their summer vacations. On a given day, he might meet up with
Thorström, who has a house nearby. The pair remain
1536 Clinical Chemistry 59:10 (2013)
close with each other, and also with two more army
chums. Every other summer, during the third weekend
in July, all four meet, along with their wives. “We’re
each very different in education and career but we have
stuck together for 53 years,” said Thorstrom. “If
Uffen’s a friend, he’s a friend for life.”
Stenman—who has travelled widely for conferences as well as vacation—always makes his way back
to Helsinki. He loves New York, Shanghai, Barcelona,
and Rome but, in the end, seems to consider the city—
and the University of Helsinki where, counting medical
school, he has been for more than 50 years—the best of
all possible places. “I’ve been able to do what I do and
be portrayed in Clinical Chemistry as an ‘Inspiring
Mind,’” he said. “I couldn’t have achieved better than
that anywhere.”
Sponsored by
the Department of Laboratory Medicine,
Boston Children’s Hospital
Misia Landau
e-mail [email protected]
DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2013.204164