Florey director reflects on a revolution in neuroscience

Eminent Melbourne neuroscientist Prof Fred Meldelsohn, director of Melbourne's Howard Florey Institute, is the Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation medallist for 2005.

The foundation awards the medal annually to researchers who have made significant contributions to research in palliative care or progressive neurological diseases.

Under Mendelsohn's directorship, the former Howard Florey Institute for Experimental Physiology in Parkville has been transformed into Australia's largest neuroscience research institute.

Its researchers have made major contributions to understanding the pathological processes that cause progressive neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, motor neurone disease, as well as epilepsy and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Mendelsohn received his award at a ceremony on at Calvary Health Care Bethlehem in Melbourne last Thursday night. Previous winners include Prof Perry Bartlett (neurological development) Prof Claude Bernard (multiple sclerosis) and Prof Colin Masters (Alzheimer's disease).

He described the award as "a great honour", but acknowledged the contributions of his staff at the Florey Institute, describing them as "unsung heroes". He predicted their research would ultimately make a difference to the lives of people affected directly and directly by brain disorders.

"I haven't actually worked on a single neurological disorder, I've tried to bring basic science to bear on problems relevant to clinical neurology and psychiatry," he told ABN.

In the mid-1980s, Mendelsohn was a pioneer in the field of mapping brain receptors using radio-labelled drug molecules.

"My main research interest has been the neuropeptides," he said. "The most ubiquitous neurotransmitters are amino acids -- fast, point-to-point amines like serotonin and noradrenalin.

"But neuropeptides are more numerous, and their coordinated activity is responsible for a concerted package of effects at extremely low concentrations."

He said neuropeptide research has led to much better therapeutics capable of blocking particular receptor sub-types, rather than indiscriminately block multiple related receptors.

"We've been hijacking these receptors for many years, without realising it -- for example, opiate drugs mimic the brain's own natural opiate peptides."

Mendelsohn said that, during the greater part of the last century, researchers saw brain and mind disorders as separate and distinct; as a result, psychiatry and neurology had moved apart.

They were now converging again. "We're now learning that both genes and environmental factors are highly relevant in psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia," he said.

The tools that have been so successful in understanding the neurological basis of dementia are also relevant to understanding mood disorders, schizophrenia and addiction.

"For millennia, people have been interested in the brain, both for its incredible inherent abilities, but also because there has been a desire to understand what went wrong in brain and mind disorders.

"The skull was a great barrier to studying the living brain and its chemistry. But in the past five years, there has been a tremendous lineup of new technologies that have given us great power to unravel brain function -- the Human Genome Project, stem cells, and neuroimaging devices are bringing it all together by providing a new understanding of the structural and functional basis of neurotransmission.

"Today we have enormously more power to investigate how the normal brain works, and what goes wrong in brain diseases.

"It's such an incredibly complex area that it's going to take well over a century to develop a thorough understanding on what goes on, but the miracle of science is that even partial knowledge can be extremely powerful.

"But Newton's laws of motion allowed us to send a space probe to Saturn, when Newton didn't really understand mass or gravity.

"Over the next few decades, we're going to see progress on a massive scale in brain science. We're already a long way ahead of where reasonable people thought we'd be 20 years ago -- we're often wrong in our predictions, because the rate of scientific progress is exponential, not linear."