Samantha Chown, Staff Contributor*
Two Dalhousie professors have been awarded the Barbara Turnbull Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize in spinal cord research. Professor James Fawcett and Dr. Robert Brownstone submitted separate grant applications that not only scored the same, but scored highest in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s competition, ending in a tie. The $50,000 grant, usually awarded to one individual, will be split by Fawcett and Dr. Brownstone.
“It’s good for Dalhousie because it put us on the map,” says Fawcett, a Canadian Research Chair in Molecular Neurobiology of Brain Repair, “It’s good because it recognizes us while we toil away in obscurity.” Fawcett laughs at his joke and isn’t too bothered by the fact he missed this past winter’s Olympic gold-medal hockey game to work on the grant, saying it was worth it in the end.
Sitting in his small fourth floor office tucked away in the corner of his lab in the Sir Charles A. Tupper building, it’s obvious Fawcett is passionate about spinal cord research. The first thing he does after introductions is whip out his laptop to show off PowerPoint presentations of experiments done in the lab. He explains each slide with an abundance of hand gestures and apologizes for being so “geeky.”
“Trying to understand how the brain works. How do we learn, how do we smell, how do you remember that you’ve smelt something when you were 4 years old and you go back and you smell that same smell and it takes you back and you have all those memories. It’s fascinating to me,” he says.
He first became interested in spinal cord research as a high school student in Hamilton, Ont.. During that time he volunteered at a spinal cord injury rehab center where he saw firsthand what happens “when the nervous system goes bad.” From then on, he knew he was interested in research, only taking a brief two year break to obtain a teaching degree and travel to teach in Botswana.
Fawcett is a good teacher. During a tour of his lab, he points out different equipment and machines and that they’re used for, he turns on a microscope to illuminate a slide of cancerous cells and then waves a test tube the size of a pen cap saying “most of our world is all in here,” pointing to a tiny drop of clear liquid. That tiny drop, he says, can be genetically engineered into a mouse that will be used for research. In the lab, Fawcett is in his element.
“It’s very creative to come up with an idea, do an experiment then to test that idea and be the first person in the world to have actually seen something. That’s what I love about it,” he says.
Brownstone, on the other hand, didn’t plan for a career in research. He first obtained an undergraduate degree in computer science before realizing he wanted to study the “real computer” — the human brain. Since 1983 he has been doing spinal cord research.
In his office in the Tupper Building, Brownstone explains the process of winning the grant. He says there are two competitions each year and the highest scoring grant of the two competitions wins the award. Each grant is reviewed by a peer committee of about 12 to 15 scientists who discuss and evaluate the grant and give it a score between zero and five. Over 100 different scientists submitted grants to be considered for this year’s Turnbull award.
“It’s usually one person because you can imagine how difficult it would be to tie when it’s down to two decimal places but coincidentally Jim (Fawcett) and I both tied. We had the same score,” says Brownstone.
They tied with a score of 4.64. Any score above a 4.5 is considered an outstanding grant.
Though they each submitted different grants, they collaborate on projects in the lab. Brownstone says his lab is responsible for the “electrical stuff” — how communication works between the spinal cord and muscles — while Fawcett’s lab is responsible for the “molecular stuff” — using genetic engineering to understand how locomotion works.
“We complement one another, which is what you want to do in science nowadays because it is so competitive,” says Fawcett.
Both these scientists devote themselves to pursuing their research. Brownstone says he spends 11 hours a day, five days a week in the lab, admitting that “my wife would say that’s a terrible under estimate.” Fawcett says he was in the lab seven days a week before kids. Now that he’s a father of two, he’s cut back to five days a week.
Brownstone says “science is all the time” and progress is made in small increments that the public doesn’t always get the chance to see. That’s one of the reasons Fawcett argues research isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle choice saying, “Even if I’m away, I’m still thinking about.”
*In the paper version, the article was misattributed as having been written by fellow Staff Contributor Samantha Ostrov. We regret the error and hope the true author, Samantha Chown, can somehow forgive us.
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