‘After doing medicine, I did my PhD on the rat brain. Then I came here and teamed up with a neuropathologist and we started looking at Huntington’s brains in humans. Every few months or so a brain from Hokitika or Wellington or wherever would arrive, and the family would want us to give a report, and that’s what we did. Spent months doing it.
‘And now we’ve built up the brain bank, and that’s why I describe our research as a partnership with the community. This medal – they own at least half of it, or probably all of it. It is such a critical link. I get phone calls now in the weekends from people saying, “Listen, Mum’s really going downhill now. We just want to let you know so she can have a post-mortem quickly and you can get the brain.” They’ll often get the rest-homes to call me before calling them.
‘I did neurosurgery as a young house surgeon, but it took me fifteen or twenty years to learn the obvious: you have to listen to the families. They’re the experts. They know the disease backwards. We talk to them and build up individual case histories. And because of this, we talk at conferences with incredible in-depth knowledge of the human brain. No other group in the world really has the same knowledge. We collaborate with about fifteen other groups – and they’re the top groups: we don’t collaborate unless they’re first-class. But we always ask families for their permission to send tissue from their mum or dad for special analysis in Switzerland, in Cambridge.
‘Often it’s the person with the disease who’s come and seen us during life, filled in all the forms. We tell them, “You’ve got to discuss this with your family.” Because the brain is a family gift. We never own your brain. We are the custodians of it for life.
‘And then when we get the brain, I always talk to the family, always tell them, “Yep, the brain’s arrived fine.” They’re so relieved. And during the funeral – this doesn’t happen every time and I never ask for it – they will send us a cheque for $260, or $2000, whatever, from donations collected at the funeral of the person whose brain we have.
‘And we not only have to look at diseased brains. You have to look at normal brains to compare them. The only way you can do that, because the brain always has to be fresh, is get brains from people who die unexpectedly, often from road accidents. We have special consent officers who work in the mortuary, who will phone families. It’s all women who do this job for us.’
I asked him whether he was going to donate his brain and he said, ‘Theoretically, I would certainly donate my brain. But all our brain tissue is anonymous.’
Finally, I asked him whether he believed in the soul, and he said, ‘Absolutely. When you see a person who’s anaesthetised, they’re just a lump of meat. They aren’t conscious. Then they wake up, and suddenly they are! But they weren’t.
‘So … I just think we’re never going to completely understand the brain or consciousness. Using our brain to interpret ourselves – it’s just too much. We need a supervisor.’
[November 25]
24 Paul Buchanan
The Unquiet American
He was sitting around at home waiting for the phone to ring. It didn’t ring. Telecom had once again stuffed up its connection to the few hundred people living in quiet damp seclusion in Karekare on Auckland’s west coast. Meanwhile, his pretty daughter Alejandra had arrived from North Carolina with just the clothes she was standing up in – her bags had got lost via her LAX flight. In short, when I met American academic Paul Buchanan – fifty-three, unemployed, in disgrace for a private moment of rash behaviour made excruciatingly public – I immediately had the feeling that he was living through one of those times in your life where if anything can go wrong, it will.
Actually, these are rare and happy days. His daughter flew to New Zealand to give him away: he got married this weekend. He expected that Green MP Keith Locke, Ahmed Zaoui’s lawyer Deborah Manning, and perhaps Zaoui himself would attend the wedding. It was held in his backyard, next to the aviary where he keeps rainbow lorikeets; the couple exchanged vows on a deck with a spa bath and generous views of Arcadia.
His wife is Kate Nicholls, aged twenty-nine and a former student in the political studies department of Auckland University – the department where Buchanan worked as a senior lecturer until he was sacked after he sent his famously offensive email to Asma Al Yamahi, an MA student from the United Arab Emirates. Yamahi wanted an extension on her essay. She said her father had died. Buchanan didn’t believe her. He wrote, ‘You are close to failing in any event, so these sorts of excuses – culturally driven and preying on some sort of Western liberal guilt – are simply lame. Prove that your father died and you were distraught and unable to complete assignments … and perhaps you might qualify for an extension to get a C−.’
He apologised. He granted her an extension. She handed in the essay. He gave it a C−. But the email was leaked, and Buchanan was sent packing. He wants his job back. He is claiming unfair dismissal. Backed
