Brain Prize recipient ‘honoured’ to win award as a Kiwi

The 2022 Brain Prize has been awarded to a former Hamiltonian for his pioneering spinal cord research.

Salk Institute Professor Martyn Goulding told Breakfast that it was a “nice surprise” to learn about winning the prize in the past several days.

“I feel very honoured as a New Zealander to be able to receive this, because I do still consider myself to be a New Zealander and you can probably hear that in my accent.”

The Brain Prize is an international brain research award that honours scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience.

Goulding said the work which won him the prize, alongside two other researchers, was focused on mapping out the parts of the brain which controlled movement.

“We wanted to look into the spinal cord. We think of it really like the engine room of movement,” he explained.

“So we wanted to look in there and really understand what are the neurons, what are the nerve cells in there, and who do they talk to, in order to generate the movements we use in everyday life?”

The professor said he and other researchers were able to “generate a set of genetic tools and then deploy those tools” so that they could visualise the nerve cells which control movement.

“The next thing we were able to do was to actually use some other tricks, and go in and turn these nerve cells off and on and then really ask, what happens?”

“How does it change the way we move or how we execute some sort of dexterous behaviour like grasping a ball?

“The idea was if we could understand fundamentally how these networks or how this circuitry was organised, then we can go back and begin to think about strategies, for instance in terms of spinal-cord repair.”

Goulding said the knowledge and techniques would help researchers come up with new treatments or even cures for catastrophic diseases like Parkinson’s or ALS.

The New Zealander shares the prize with Professor Ole Kiehn at the University of Copenhagen and Professor Silvia Arber at the University of Basel.

They will formally receive the award at an event in Copenhagen in May.

Prof Goulding said he wished the best to young New Zealanders who were interested in science and said they could make real discoveries.

“[New Zealanders] kind of think out of the box - and I think we have some unique attributes that we can bring, and there are some questions we can answer from a perspective that maybe others don't have,” he said.