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4 Headlines Professor Maurice Curtis: Honouring Philip Wrightson As a high school student in Thames, I was fortunate to have a very influential physics teacher who took physics from being a series of equations and used it to explain how the world worked. I was also fortunate to meet an elderly woman who was a scientist, one of my father’s parishioners (my father was a church minister) in Te Aroha, and she had a doctorate in physics and biochemistry. I was mesmerised by her knowledge of the world and how complex things worked. I loved talking to these people. However, my career aspirations involved professional cycling or working in a workshop of some sort – I never thought I’d end up a scientist. After a series of serendipitous events, I was offered a place in radiography training based at UNITEC and Auckland Hospital. The training was exciting, and I loved the contact with patients for whom you could be a small part of their journey through the health system and hopefully back to health. Halfway through this training I was visiting a friend in a rest home when I saw a young man who was a resident with a severe movement disorder. I spoke with one of the nurses about what condition he had and was told he had Huntington’s disease. I really felt for this man who would live out his life in a rest home despite being half the age of the other residents and with very different needs. During that period, I was also taking a compulsory course in neuroscience and I was in awe of the complexity of the brain and how important it is for everything we take for granted such as thought, memory, planning, artistic ability and so on. Previously I had probably only thought about the brain’s role in controlling muscles so we can move, an impressive feat in and of itself, but only one dimension of what our amazing brain does for us. I had to know more. Richard Faull’s name kept coming up when I enquired after who was working on brain diseases and a search of his recent papers highlighted Huntington’s disease as his interest area. I was quite persistent with Richard that I would like to do a Masters degree in neuroanatomy and, like water on stone, I wore Richard down till he said “Yes”. Subsequently I completed a PhD funded by the Neurological Foundation’s W&B Miller scholarship. I have been the grateful recipient of a number of grants from the Neurological Foundation. First the W&B Miller scholarship and then a Wrightson postdoctoral fellowship to work in Sweden, followed by a number of project grants (mostly as an assistant to other people’s projects). It is difficult to convey what a difference it makes to be able to travel abroad for postdoctoral training with a fellowship rather than being directly employed by the laboratory you work in. A fellowship provides freedom to pursue your own ideas and theories and also means you don’t have to compete with other postdoctoral fellows for funding or resources once in the new laboratory. The Neurological Foundation has funded the Neurological Foundation Human Brain bank since 1994 and working there has been the highlight of my career to date. It never ceases to amaze me how generous people are to donate their brain to neuroscience. It is humbling when families place that trust in me and the brain bank team to not just look after their brain, but also to ensure that it is maximally useful for research into neurological diseases. Working with the brain bank team to ensure that the highest quality brain tissue is available for research being carried out in New Zealand and abroad is also a highlight. Recent additional support from the Neurological Foundation has enabled us to develop new and improved techniques for brain research and to increase the number of brains we can accept. The brain bank opens many doors for international collaborations and engagement with the world-wide science community. To those who have supported the brain bank through donation of a loved one’s brain or by making donations to the Neurological Foundation – thank you! During my PhD and postdoctoral work, the major hypothesis I worked on was trying to identify and harness newly born neurons in the hope of Professor Maurice Curtis is the Deputy Director of the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank and Head of the Department of Anatomy and Medical Imaging at the University of Auckland.