I asked him if he genuinely thought that the police raids had set back race relations a hundred years. He said, ‘For Tuhoe at the moment, yes. But in general, no.’
[November 18]
23 Richard Faull
Day of the Dead
All the while that Professor Richard Faull talked during our interview in his office at the University of Auckland’s School of Medicine – two days after he collected the country’s most distinguished award for science, the Rutherford Medal – I wondered what was going on in his brain. He talked a lot. Was it a blue streak, or might some other colour show up on the magnetic resonance imaging technology used on brain tissue in his laboratories? He talked without pause, quickly, often in italics. He wasn’t outraged by interruptions, merely surprised, and he waved the questions away: the cells directing the flow of his language were in a hurry, they poured on to the sidewalks and streets of his cerebrum, briskly but very politely brushing past each other on the motor-neuron pathways that led to his long, long speech curling up on my tape recorder.
Is he possessed of genius? A very nice man with a kindly face and a shy physical presence, Faull won the Rutherford Medal for his research into the human brain. His team is especially concerned with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases. He has shown that stem cells migrate through the adult brain, and create repair cells that try to replace dead or dying cells. The discovery of this hidden pathway has led to further attempts to multiply these repair cells, and hasten their progress to diseased parts of the brain.
There is a family portrait of Faull with his wife and their five attractive adult children on his desk. He opened a drawer, and took out a box containing the replica brains of a human, a cat and a baboon. And then he led a quick guided tour of the contents of freezers containing over four hundred human brains kept by the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.
Back in his office, Faull showed me the Rutherford Medal. It was in a velvet box. He took it out and was obviously very proud, very excited. It recognised a lifetime’s work. More than that, it recognised the value and contribution of the brains in Faull’s care. He wanted to talk about those brains. He wished to thank them personally.
He said, ‘I was taught as a medical student that the brain was a fixed thing – once you’re born, and you’re fully developed and matured, that’s your brain for life. In fact the only thing they reckoned would happen is that you’re going to lose brain cells for the rest of your life. Well, that concept has changed because we now say the brain is plastic, and the idea we don’t make new brain cells is now garbage.
‘You see, there is a normal process of cell replacement that works fine for ninety-five percent of the population all the time. That’s our hypothesis. We know from animal studies that these cells multiply during the normal life of a rat, and they go down a pathway and they actually form new brain cells, especially in the smell area of the brain, but in other areas too. And we now know that because we have them they probably do the same things, but we can’t do the same experiments in humans because you can’t kill people after you’ve done it, you see.
‘So going on in your brain now, and in my brain, we are making, probably making, new brain cells. And the fact they have a repair process … when we first heard about the possibilities, we thought, let’s use the brains stored in our brain bank from all those incredible people who have supported our research.’
I asked how many brains he had stored, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s around about four hundred. We don’t go around cataloguing every day. We get fifteen, twenty more brains a year. But it’s around that figure. So we thought, is this repair process versatile? Because if it is, then in a real bad disease we should see it switched on to the full. And it is: we’ve seen that new cells go flat-tack. But they’re not that magic that they can cure everything. Otherwise, of course, we’d never die. We’d never die!
‘But it’s there, you see. So the challenge now is: What causes these cells to multiply? And if we can help that … But they’ve got to not only multiply, they’ve got to migrate to the area where there is cell loss, and they’ve got to form the right sort of cell.
‘That’s one part of our research, which is pretty sexy. But we found that by accident. This medal is all about thirty years of research. I started as a med student in Otago. I grew up as one of five boys on a farm in Taranaki, in Tikorangi. A shop, a church, that’s Tikorangi. There was no history of medicine in our family. Mum and Dad only completed the first year of high school. But what they taught us was you’ve got to be true to yourself, you’ve got to be honest, you’ve got to absolutely do your best, and you’ve got to serve the community.’
I asked if he attended church back then, and he said, ‘Oh yes, twice on a Sunday. I was a choirboy. I’m not so committed right now. But what my parents taught me, those were the seeds. And I thought I’d apply for medicine because I liked maths. I was great at maths.’
I asked him why he thought he had a logical mind and he said, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Everyone has a mind that has tendencies which we don’t understand. If things follow logically, then that makes sense to me. But it’s
