Reeve’s Name Lives On in UC Irvine Research

When Orange County heiress and equestrian Joan Irvine Smith saw Christopher Reeve on TV in 1995, she was impressed not only by the actor but also by the fact that he didn’t blame his horse for the injury that paralyzed him earlier that year.

Smith wrote to Reeve, offering to donate $1 million to establish a spinal-cord research center at UC Irvine if he would donate his name. Not knowing Smith or UCI, Reeve did what celebrities do with so much of their mail: He threw it into his kook file.

But Smith persisted. Two months after writing that first letter, she and Reeve spoke on the phone. He told her he didn’t know if he could physically handle being involved with the center. “You played Superman,” she told him. “Now you can be Superman.”

Reeve, 52, died Sunday from complications of the spinal cord injury he suffered in the horseback riding accident. But the Reeve-Irvine Research Center is going strong.

With 65 researchers, it has become one of the nation’s leading facilities for spinal cord research, ranking with Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Miami.

“His name is worth its weight in gold in terms of the recognition it brings to the center and the immediate association to what we do here,” said Maura Hofstadter, the center’s director of education and scientific liaison.

It was Reeve’s cachet, for example, that brought Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, Jane Seymour and 560 others to a San Juan Capistrano dinner and auction in 1996 that raised $80,000 for the center.

The center, part of the UCI College of Medicine, concentrates its research on two areas. The first is what happens in the body immediately after the injury that increases the disability, and the second is how to treat the injury.

Fifteen years ago, doctors thought there was little hope for those with spinal cord injuries because the nerves could not regenerate. Ten years ago, Hofstadter said, researchers began to realize that the spinal cord could heal but that it needed a lot of help.

Two potential treatments developed at Reeve-Irvine have shown promise in mice and rats and are expected to be tested on humans in the next few years, Hofstadter said. One tweaks the body shortly after the injury to prevent the immune system from destroying tissue. The other uses stem cells to help in regeneration of the central nervous system.

The Reeve-Smith center also decides how to distribute about $1.5 million annually in state money to spinal cord researchers in California. Since the program began four years ago, the number of proposals the center receives has nearly doubled.

The center also annually awards the $50,000 Christopher Reeve Research Medal to scientists who have made critical contributions to spinal cord repair.

Susan Howley, director of research at the New Jersey-based Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, said the UCI center’s work gave the actor “an enormous sense of appreciation and excitement,” and he remained close to it.

Reeve made visits to the center for fundraising events three times and met on other occasions with researchers there, said Tania Cusack, the center administrator. “Pretty much any time we asked him to support us with fundraising efforts, he obliged us,” Cusack said.

Oswald Steward, director of the center, visited Reeve two or three times a year at his home in Bedford, N.Y., whenever he was on the East Coast. “He’s been an amazing motivator to all of us,” Steward said. “He’s changed the way we think and operate in our field.”

Besides her donation to start the center, what brought Smith and Reeve together was their love of horses. Smith is a partner in a horse show facility in San Juan Capistrano that has been used for the Olympic show jumping trials and has been host to other national-level competitions.

She said she talked to Reeve, his assistant and his wife several times a year. She gave him one of her horses, a Holsteiner-thoroughbred mix, which she kept for him at her farms. She named it Icon.

“I named it for Christopher being the icon for research on spinal cord injuries,” she said.