The Oxford and Cambridge Club, Pall Mall, London. I’m sniffing the potted shrimp while my lunch guest – a rich glint of enthusiasm in his eye – expands on the sexual equipment of a moth. “Your male gypsy moth,” he declares, “has smell sensors that can pick up the odour of an available female 12 miles distant. Your dog smells a bitch on heat from half a mile.” He is Professor Geoff Raisman FRS, a world-class British neuroscientist who has just announced an imminent cure for spinal-cord injury.
He noses his lobster bisque. “Our smelling sensors,” he says, “die and rise again every 60 days. We’re going to use the cells that make pathways for the nerve fibres of those neurons to make the lame walk.”
After a pause, he asserts with biblical resonance: “One day we’ll use them to make the blind see, the deaf hear and the dumb talk!”
This is the story of a scientist who has uncovered the deepest secrets of paralysis after injury, not through wishful thinking and guesswork, but through unflinching focus over 40 years on one of nature’s strangest quirks.
The mechanics of spinal-cord injury have been known for decades, and Raisman has been intimately involved in their discovery. While still in his twenties, he staked a niche in the history of neuroscience by showing that the brain and central nervous system have an astonishing capacity to reorganise themselves after loss or trauma. He called it “plasticity”.
Born and raised in a poverty-stricken district of Leeds, obdurate in his decision to marry the girl of his dreams at 18, thus risking his university education before it even got started, Raisman has always been, by his own admission, “bloody-minded”. As a young researcher he was dubbed a scientific heretic for insisting that a damaged brain and spinal cord can repair themselves; but he has proved his critics wrong. He has always followed his instincts, backed by long-term systematic experiment. He is now about to put to the test in human patients his theory that plasticity can be manipulated to cure some of nature’s cruellest afflictions.
Stem cells, primitive “mother cells”, which in theory can transform into many kinds of tissue or many blood types, are heralding a new era of medical science, with vaunted cures for everything from diabetes to Alzheimer’s. They are also the stuff of scientific flatulence and soiled nests: 2005 will go down in biotech history as the year when an eminent South Korean professor, Hwang Woo-suk (personal salary, $3m per annum), was found to have fabricated results in two papers published in America’s top research journal, Science. Hwang’s papers involved the cloning of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes. His published pictures of cloned human stem cells were fakes. Worse: Nature magazine reports that many stem-cell lines in the laboratories of the world are duds because of a confusion between tagging a cell and correctly identifying its properties. The principle is simple: you can wear a tutu but it doesn’t make you a ballerina.
Yet if Raisman has anything to do with it, 2006 will be remembered as the year British biotechnology took the first step towards an authentic cure for spinal-cord injury in humans, with a promise of greater things to come. He aims to do this not with cells taken from embryos, but cells from high in the nose of a spinally injured patient. It’s a procedure, he claims, that can be applied to damaged optic nerves and deficits from stroke injury, such as loss of speech, hearing and movement. The plausibility of his proposal is in the fine detail: the relentless experiments, clinical trials and scientific papers that constitute his life project.
There have been other bids to use nasal cells for spinal-cord therapies, in Lisbon, Rio and Shanghai; the results have been ambiguous and short-lived. Raisman explains that, unlike most other attempts, his research programme has scientific depth and depends on monitored trials that eliminate chance dramatic remissions and slight improvements prompted by physiotherapy.
Raisman does not see himself in a race with these other attempts to exploit nasal cells, nor do any of his rivals. As he says, “Elsewhere, doctors are using nasal cells as a shot-in-the-dark treatment rather than as systematic, scientifically based trials.” His work has been acclaimed by top peer-group scientists.
Alastair Compston, a professor of neurology at Cambridge and the editor of the journal Brain, says: “Raisman is the business! His proposal has emerged from meticulous, step-by-step basic science.”
Professor Tim Bliss of the National Institute for Medical Research (MRC) echoes the verdict: “Raisman stands for scientific integrity. If anybody can pull it off, he will!” The head of the MRC, Professor Colin Blakemore, recently hailed Raisman’s laboratory work on rat and mouse models: “He has effected the first and only demonstration of breathing with high spinal lesions and has developed this work right through to the stage of clinical trials.” Last year Raisman won the coveted Christopher Reeve gold medal for research into spinal-cord injury.
Raisman’s proposal finds its origins in the vast, mysterious environment of the nerve cells, or neurons, of the brain and the central nervous system. We are born with over 100 billion neurons, the biological computing mechanisms that regulate thought, action and sensation. They send and receive messages that control the entire organism of the body. It has long been known that, apart from those extraordinary olfactory nerve cells in the nose, neurons do not replicate or regenerate when they die: you only ever lose them. But you have a lot to lose, and the loss of neurons is often compensated for by the flourishing growth of neighbouring neuronal branches known as dendrites, which take over the space vacated by a deficit.
