SIR RICHARD FAULL

Brain research guru

Asilver thatch of hair dips behind the desk as Sir Richard Faull fossicks. He pops up a moment later, cradling the object of his life’s work.

Its pleats of personality, memory, passion fold in on each other, a United States of cells that speak different languages, yet communicate with each other.

‘‘It’s the beauty of it,’’ he explains. ‘‘That this is who and what you are.’’

The object in question is a real human brain, preserved in resin, that is Sir Richard’s constant companion. Minutes later he repeats the duck dive, this time emerging with a pink pottle from which he tweezers a mini version – the brain of a rat.

‘‘It’s not a tidy office,’’ he apologises. ‘‘Because if I were to keep this office tidy, that means my mind would be dull. The fact I can reach under the desk and find a brain in a jar – that’s living.’’

Dapper in baby blue pinstripes, the brain research guru is a Kiwi David Attenborough, welling with an enthusiasm his 71 years show no signs of dulling.

It’s 8.30am, but Sir Richard has already been at it for a couple of hours. He’s trying to cut back on talks (there’s been an avalanche of requests since he was knighted in the New Year’s Honours). But there are still families of degenerative disease victims to work with and 71 research groups to coordinate through his Centre for Brain Research.

Through the security doors across the floor (gloves and protective booties on) is the human brain bank he established in 1993. It doesn’t look much – a series of industrial chest freezers. But they are chests of hope for people fighting off those thieves of the mind – neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, Motor Neurone and Alzheimer’s.

Packed inside are tissue samples donated by families desperate for answers – the building blocks of the brain that Sir Richard has spent a lifetime studying, to understand how damage might be slowed or stilled.

Alongside the preserved brains, Sir Richard’s Auckland University office sports obscure scientific texts, photos of his wife Diana, his five children and four grandchildren, and a framed photo of Mt Taranaki.

It’s a nod to his childhood, where his parents ran the general store in rural Tikorangi, inland from New Plymouth.

Rural schooling was limited but Sir Richard was fuelled by a sheer love of knowledge. At home, he rigged a massive aerial across one paddock to pick up short wave radio. BBC, Radio Switzerland, Radio Peking, Radio Moscow, Voice of America – the same news from different perspectives.

He never realised it, but that’s exactly what he’s done with the Centre for Brain Research he set up in 2009. It’s a lightning rod for doctors, scientists, psychologists, nutritionists, all looking at the same problem through a different lens.

Before moving to Dunedin to study medicine, Sir Richard had never been south of Taranaki. Within about a decade, he was working with worldleading brain scientists at Nasa, MIT and Harvard, after a PhD looking at how the cerebellum controlled movement in rats put him on the research map. There he was, getting a CIA clearance and watching Cold War spy planes take off on their daily missions, while he learned from the masters.

On returning to New Zealand, he set up a research project looking at the brain regions controlling movements associated with devastating Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.

The life-changing breakthrough came not in the lab, but when families terrified their loved one had died of Huntington’s (meaning they might all carry the dominant gene) asked him to examine their relative’s brain. This was the 80s, a decade before the Huntington’s gene was discovered. But the disease leaves a characteristic fingerprint of degeneration, so Sir Richard could quickly confirm whether or not Huntington’s had ravaged the brain.

But what surprised everyone, was that when they went to give the brains back, families said, ‘‘Please, keep it for research’’. And so the brain bank was born.

‘‘They said, ‘It’s critical, for our children’. That was transformational, because I slowly switched from doing research on rat brains to the human brain.’’

Sir Richard and his collaborators have since used that research treasure trove to look for links between cell degeneration patterns and differences in the person’s symptoms. They were the first to reveal that the adult human brain constantly creates new cells, rather than dying a slow death.

They’re working with international teams to create a sheep model of Huntington’s, to try to turn down the danger gene before symptoms appear. And they’re focusing on the next great epidemic – Alzheimer’s and dementia.

‘‘Alzheimer’s is not going to be cured by a pill,’’ Sir Richard says. ‘‘That’s stupid, when you look at the complexity of the disease.’’

But there is hope. Stem cells have potential but have been over-sold. To poke them into the brain to make a specific kind of brain cell remains a dream at present.

There’s the possibility of brain implants – Sir Richard’s team are working with health innovators Living Cell Technologies on a cell implant for Parkinson’s.

But the best hope is a package of support, from diet to lifestyle to creating stimulating environments instead of lumping dementia sufferers together, so they drive each other down.

If you could delay Alzheimer’s onset by just five years, you could reduce its prevalence by 50 per cent, as people die instead of other things.

‘‘You never give up, because a little effect is going to be a huge effect.’’

Being a scientist in New Zealand is tough, with little funding or recognition, Sir Richard says. But he admits he’s obsessed. This year, he and Diana are taking a river cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam. It will be their first holiday completely unrelated to the brain.

They’ll have to carry him out of here in a box, he jokes. Why carry on? To give hope to the one in five families affected by brain disease.

‘‘We’re not going to tell them they’re going to live forever. We’re going to give them quality of life as best we can. There’s no better legacy than that.’’

‘‘Alzheimer’s is not going to be cured by a pill. That’s stupid, when you look at the complexity of the disease.’’