Smash hit

Neurons send and receive their signals through myriad branch-like nerve fibres. They communicate with their neighbours by firing chemical substances across minuscule terminals known as synapses. There are more combinations of signals in the massed neuronal undergrowth than there are particles in the known universe. Neuronal signals are strengthened when we learn skills, such as a language or a new sport. Those neurons we fail to use atrophy and eventually die. Raisman tells me that when he gazed at neurons and their nerve fibres through an old-fashioned light microscope, they appeared motionless, “like a forest of trees, silent in a windless sky”. But when he first observed them through an electron microscope (with orders of magnification in the millions), “it was like snorkelling through a kelp forest… All was in a state of flowing motion… continual change”.

As he gazed into this jungle of the brain and central nervous system in the mid-1960s, he was inspired to propose his theory of “plasticity”: the first step in his bid to mend a broken spinal cord.

When a neuron dies, the synapses decay and break down irretrievably. But then the nerve fibres of neighbouring healthy neurons sense a vacuum and extend new branches to compensate. Raisman likes to compare this phenomenon to a Hindu god with many arms and hands. “Losing a neuron is like the god losing an arm and accompanying hand. But it’s as if a neighbouring arm sprouts new hands to make up for that loss.” He gives me another image: “Imagine a ring of dancers holding hands. One drops out and the ring is broken until the dancers on either side join hands around the empty space, completing the ring again.”

Raisman’s theory of neuronal plasticity was not well received in the 1960s, because it challenged a sacred cow of neurology. When neuronal connections in the
spinal cord are lost, by falling off a horse, say, like the late Christopher Reeve, scar tissue forms at the site of the break and the affected neurons die. Neurologists were once convinced that the devastating effects of spinal-cord injury, which can involve all bodily functions, including breathing, were not just the result of the barrier caused by scar tissue, which quickly grows at the site of the damage, but were simply due to the fact that neurons lost in an accident are never replaced. Yet now there was Raisman’s plasticity bombshell: “The neurons don’t grow back,” he declares, brightly, “but the branches of the neighbouring healthy neurons move in to take their place.”

So why do these new connections fail to link up with their corresponding partners on the other side of a scar? Is it because of the density and hostile environment of scar tissue? Or are there other factors? Raisman’s answer – discovered in the nerve cells of the nose – lay more than 20 years ahead. Meanwhile, he sat on his controversial idea of plasticity: “It’s amazing how unwilling the world is to accept new ideas, even when they are positive ones.”

He published his plasticity paper in 1969, and in 1978 wrote an article entitled What Hope for Repair of the Brain? His life’s work lay before him.

Raisman’s scientific personality – maverick and obstinate to the point of obsession – was shaped by his background and confirmed by his behaviour in early manhood. Born in 1939, he was the only son of a deaf Jewish tailor, whose family, headed by a notorious gambler, had come from Lithuania to the north of England in the previous generation. Raisman’s father was earning just £3.50 a week in the 1950s in the sweatshop tailoring factories of Leeds: a wage equivalent to about £5,000 a year today.

His father had a sense of poetic wonder for the natural world. “When I was a child,” Raisman says, “he would take me up onto the hills near Leeds and dig his hands deep
into the soil. ‘Feel the warmth of the soil, Geoff,’ he would say.” Geoff’s father wanted his son to be a doctor.

Raisman is fiercely proud of his upbringing in working-class Leeds. Its influence often shows in his indignation when he perceives members of the medical profession to be patronising their less well-educated patients. “I mean, the sort of consultants and medical scientists who refer to a sick boy as Mrs So-and-So’s Little Willy.”

Raisman passed the 11-plus, attended Roundhay grammar school, Leeds, and won a scholarship, aged 17, to Pembroke College, Oxford. Intrigued by the hieroglyphics of ancient languages, he had wanted to read archeology. His father, who made him his first suit to take to university, persuaded him to read medicine. “I had always shared a bed with my uncle Myer at home,” says Raisman, “but now for the first time I had a bed to myself and a servant to make it and to wash my dishes.” Shortly after arriving at Oxford, though, he broke with the strict convention of the time to marry Vivien, his childhood sweetheart.

They were just 18. His father was devastated, suspecting that Geoff would now drop out. The college authorities were also angry and withdrew his scholarship. But Raisman was obdurate: “They didn’t seem to appreciate the drive of my endocrine glands!” he muses. He successfully applied for a grant from his local authority, and his young wife gave up her university place in Edinburgh and came down to Oxford to work as a secretary to help keep them. They lived in one room out on Headington Hill.

Today, Raisman talks of his devotion and debt to his father and Vivien, and to his first anatomy and physiology tutors at Oxford. One of them, Max Cowan, a leading facilitator in post-war British biotechnology and the son of a miner, saw his student’s potential as a serious scientist and set him on the path to a doctorate in neuroscience. The other, his anatomy teacher Percy O’Brien of Pembroke College, was “a fiery little Irishman”, brilliant but eccentric. “Like one of those Buddhist teachers,” says Raisman, “O’Brien would punch me in the chest for emphasis during tutorials… When he spoke to Vivien, though, he used to hit her over the head.”