Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  Is he possessed of genius? A very nice man with a kindly face and a shy physical presence, Faull won the Rutherford Medal for his research into the human brain. His team is especially concerned with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases. He has shown that stem cells migrate through the adult brain, and create repair cells that try to replace dead or dying cells. The discovery of this hidden pathway has led to further attempts to multiply these repair cells, and hasten their progress to diseased parts of the brain.

  There is a family portrait of Faull with his wife and their five attractive adult children on his desk. He opened a drawer, and took out a box containing the replica brains of a human, a cat and a baboon. And then he led a quick guided tour of the contents of freezers containing over four hundred human brains kept by the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.

  Back in his office, Faull showed me the Rutherford Medal. It was in a velvet box. He took it out and was obviously very proud, very excited. It recognised a lifetime’s work. More than that, it recognised the value and contribution of the brains in Faull’s care. He wanted to talk about those brains. He wished to thank them personally.

  He said, ‘I was taught as a medical student that the brain was a fixed thing – once you’re born, and you’re fully developed and matured, that’s your brain for life. In fact the only thing they reckoned would happen is that you’re going to lose brain cells for the rest of your life. Well, that concept has changed because we now say the brain is plastic, and the idea we don’t make new brain cells is now garbage.

  ‘You see, there is a normal process of cell replacement that works fine for ninety-five percent of the population all the time. That’s our hypothesis. We know from animal studies that these cells multiply during the normal life of a rat, and they go down a pathway and they actually form new brain cells, especially in the smell area of the brain, but in other areas too. And we now know that because we have them they probably do the same things, but we can’t do the same experiments in humans because you can’t kill people after you’ve done it, you see.

  ‘So going on in your brain now, and in my brain, we are making, probably making, new brain cells. And the fact they have a repair process … when we first heard about the possibilities, we thought, let’s use the brains stored in our brain bank from all those incredible people who have supported our research.’

  I asked how many brains he had stored, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s around about four hundred. We don’t go around cataloguing every day. We get fifteen, twenty more brains a year. But it’s around that figure. So we thought, is this repair process versatile? Because if it is, then in a real bad disease we should see it switched on to the full. And it is: we’ve seen that new cells go flat-tack. But they’re not that magic that they can cure everything. Otherwise, of course, we’d never die. We’d never die!

  ‘But it’s there, you see. So the challenge now is: What causes these cells to multiply? And if we can help that … But they’ve got to not only multiply, they’ve got to migrate to the area where there is cell loss, and they’ve got to form the right sort of cell.

  ‘That’s one part of our research, which is pretty sexy. But we found that by accident. This medal is all about thirty years of research. I started as a med student in Otago. I grew up as one of five boys on a farm in Taranaki, in Tikorangi. A shop, a church, that’s Tikorangi. There was no history of medicine in our family. Mum and Dad only completed the first year of high school. But what they taught us was you’ve got to be true to yourself, you’ve got to be honest, you’ve got to absolutely do your best, and you’ve got to serve the community.’

  I asked if he attended church back then, and he said, ‘Oh yes, twice on a Sunday. I was a choirboy. I’m not so committed right now. But what my parents taught me, those were the seeds. And I thought I’d apply for medicine because I liked maths. I was great at maths.’

  I asked him why he thought he had a logical mind and he said, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Everyone has a mind that has tendencies which we don’t understand. If things follow logically, then that makes sense to me. But it’s also good to dream. When we’d heard that the human brain forms new cells, I showed a slide of brain tissue with Huntington’s to a colleague, and I said, “Those are probably new brain cells in there.” Everyone said that was absolute garbage. So I put a PhD student on to it, and over four years we showed it was true. So that was a dream which became a reality. But we couldn’t have done that research if we hadn’t received human brain tissue from families who were committed to trying to improve the lot of the next generation.

  ‘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 h
er 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 by the academic union, he will take his case to the Employment Court.

  These are only some of the bare facts, surrounded by all sorts of public blather about political correctness gone mad, and the supposed rottenness of universities beholden to fee-paying foreign students. How had it come to this, I wondered. Had Buchanan been an accident waiting to happen? Had hubris knocked at his door with a wrecking ball? And what was it about New Zealand that had managed to give him such a hiding?

  Buchanan grew up in South America, until his father, who worked for General Motors, was drawn up as a kidnapping target by leftist Argentine guerrillas. Back in the US, Buchanan became an academic expert on Latin American politics and international security; he was invited to Washington and worked alongside the CIA. He started teaching at Auckland University in 1997. He also served another role as a public intellectual. His ten years in New Zealand have been what might be described as vocal: he has been regularly in demand as a media commentator on security issues, especially the Zaoui case.

  He is a loud man. He shouted at me from the moment I arrived. It was as if he mistook that the world was hard of hearing; he may never have whispered in his life. He is the eldest of six children: ‘The Buchanan family is a nation of individuals, all of whom have extremely strong temperaments.’ No, he said, he wasn’t a Yank. ‘I’m a half-breed. A hybrid. Buenos Aires is my home town. I am what I am as a result of living through a couple of military dictatorships.’ Was he derelict in charm school? ‘Yes, I think I am. That may explain why I like to be by myself more often than not.’

  Does he regret coming to New Zealand? ‘No, not for a moment. The best decision I’ve made in my middle life was to emigrate here – uh, recent events notwithstanding …’

  Brought up in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, worked inside the Pentagon, studied and taught in Chicago, Arizona, Florida – and brought down by small, mean, pinched, stupid New Zealand. Of course he regretted the email: ‘That was a temper tantrum, one borne of a very frustrating day.’ When he pressed ‘Send’ he sent himself to an oblivion. The phone was never going to ring: although he does some consulting work, Buchanan has rendered himself unemployable. Perhaps he shouted at me because he wanted to be heard – he was loath for me to leave, so I hung around for three hours. He seemed an unreal figure, lost and bewildered, an outcast left to rot in a damp forest with the squawking lorikeets. I wanted to like him and I did; he has so much intelligence and energy. The worst I thought of him was that he seemed reduced to being a harmless eccentric.

  When I asked whether he had ever wanted to work for the CIA, he said no, he wasn’t a person to betray trusts. ‘But I could have made a lot of money doing it. I fancied I might have made a great covert operative.’ This seemed preposterous. I asked him what covert abilities he possessed. He said, ‘Observational skills. I like to watch. I should rephrase that: I like to observe people. Mostly in their political interactions, but if I were a very old person I would not go to malls and sit around and watch people. I’d go to airports. If I’m going to observe a crowd, I’d rather I did it well, and airports are far more interesting places.’

  He’ll soon have some experience of that: he is off to live in Singapore. ‘My wife has a job there, and since I don’t we figure the best thing to do is follow the employed person, and come back as required for the litigation.’ One reason I liked him is because he has an American optimism. He said, ‘My wife and I have dreams. Our original dream was to retire here. That still is a dream of mine, it’s just that the route is a little more circuitous than I anticipated. But my intention is to come back as soon as possible …

  ‘I think I’m going to win my court case. And I think that, with some luck, I can be very persuasive in making my case for reinstatement. I think I have a lot to contribute to the university and society in general.’

  He said, ‘I’m a much more humble and chastened person now.’

  There may well have been something Nietzschean about Buchanan. Now, though, he was like Superman doomed to live out his years as Clark Kent. Buchanan is a lifelong competitive triathlete, but something happened. It took a while for him to talk about that.

  I asked him whether he was hopeless with people. He said, ‘Probably so. I sometimes think of myself as no-nonsense, telling it like it is. But what I’ve learned is that it comes across as arrogance, and at worst bullying, and at a minimum is undiplomatic in the extreme. The irony is that those very traits are what allowed me to work well in the Pentagon. I had excellent relationships with numerous military officers. I think I’m very well-regarded in the intelligence community. But in academia those traits seemed to be ill-suited.

  ‘Therein lies the tale. One of the reasons I thought academia was a safe haven for me is that it was the place where you were really judged on the merits of your work. And your work was the product of your mind. It didn’t matter where you were on the academic totem-pole. It was all about the strength of your ideas and your convictions, and you could talk straight to people without causing offence, and certainly without causing retribution. And it turns out that academia is far from that.

  ‘Academia is a very neurotic state. The trouble is my neuroses are not those of most academics. I worry about physically breaking down. After years of doing endurance racing, which is quite a joy to me, the fact I may not be able to do it has psychological consequences for me.’

  What was he talking about? He said, ‘I had a near-death experience last year. And then two major, major surgeries within six months. They were of such a nature that I will never be the same. I do expect to compete in triathlons again. In the past, it was always to compete for a podium spot; now, finishing would be the objective … I think I can beat it. I think I can do it.’

  He was being very obtuse about the surgery. He would not elaborate. Later, while I hung around the house, he told me. You don’t want to know.

  On the record, I asked him whether he felt physically chastened and humbled. He said, ‘Actually, that contributed to some of the issues. It’s certainly no excuse for anything that I’ve done, but to see the body fail … it took a mental readjustment, one that I wasn’t fully prepared to do … I clearly was stressed out and wound too tight. I was dealing with physical issues of some magnitude.’

  The death of the body, and then the death of a brilliant career. The way Buchanan seemed to grope at the air around him, like a man who was lost and was trying to figure out how he had got there and why it had
happened to him, suggested that he was suffering what I think of as a symptom of trauma: a need to relive it, an addiction to the experience. Was he, in fact, traumatised by his sacking? He said, ‘It has been the worst thing that has happened to me in New Zealand by a far, far stretch.’

  By the time I left, the phone was back on and Alejandra’s luggage had been found. I walked backwards up the driveway and he was still hollering, a castaway signalling that he was still alive.

  [December 2]

  25

  Adam Rickitt

  The Guy Whose Head Exploded

  Two hundred years of settlement and still the English come, blinking in the bright New Zealand light, happy to be here, tickled by the scenery, put at ease by the warm welcome, excited at the possibilities of opportunity and commerce in these lazy sensual isles at the end of the world. Adam Rickitt said, ‘Hopefully I’m a good chap.’ Slim, pretty, twenty-eight, house-trained in expensive boarding schools in the English countryside, he has recently taken out permanent residency in New Zealand.

  We met on a humid December morning at the Shortland Street studios. Rickitt said, ‘I love working on this show. It cares about acting. It cares about story line.’ He plays the role of Kieran Mitchell, an English backpacker who fell for Libby, then had an affair with Claire but became a suspect when she was found strangled to death, and the stress caused his brain to explode. Fortunately, surgeons restored him back to health.