Neuroscientist's Corner

Roger Barker says that he was inspired to become a clinician researcher after meeting the great neuroscientist David Marsden. As Barker puts it, “the minute I met David Marsden I wanted to be David Marsden, a person equally at home in the clinic and the laboratory”. When I visited the 51-year-old Parkinson’s and Huntington’s researcher during a recent visit to the UK, he seemed to be well on his way to accomplishing that goal.

Swedish neuroscientist Patrik Brundin keeps a picture of his father on his office wall as a reminder of why he became a Parkinson’s disease researcher. In 1974, when the Brundin family lived in Darlington, in the north of England, a local neurologist Dr Saunders diagnosed Patrik’s father, Bertil, with Parkinson's disease. Bertil Brundin –-an executive for a Swedish lawnmower company called Flymo–- was put on the just released medication, L-dopa. Patrik remembers his mother asking the neurologist “would it arrest the disease”? To which Dr.