Dr. Kresimir Krnjevic and Professor Margaret Lock

Two outstanding scholars honoured with Prix du Québec

DANIEL McCABE | Over the weekend, the Quebec government paid tribute to the remarkable careers of Margaret Lock and Kresimir Krnjevic, awarding the McGill professors the Prix du Québec, the province's highest honour for scientists, scholars, writers and artists. Oddly enough neither Lock or Krnjevic planned for their current careers at the start. Lock, the winner of the Léon Gérin Award, trained as a biochemist and worked for a time as a lab technician. Krnjevic, who earned the Wilder Penfield Award, wanted to become an engineer, but was stymied by his lack of Latin. "At Cambridge [where he was enrolled], you had to know Latin to do anything  even to study engineering." He was told he would have to take a year-long course in Latin, "but I was impatient," recounts Krnjevic. He opted to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh instead. In the course of his studies, he was struck by how much researchers still needed to learn in order to treat many medical conditions. "That's really how I found myself doing the sort of work that I have done ever since. There was a real need for more research to push things ahead." And push things ahead he has. Krnjevic, a physiology professor, spent the early part of his career working on peripheral nerves and their properties. He later teamed up with Nobel prizewinner Sir John Eccles and began work which ended up rewriting much of what was known about the brain's neurotransmitters. What Krnjevic discovered was that neural chemicals glutamate and gamma-amniobutyric acid (GABA) play more important roles in determining how information travels through the brain than was previously suspected. Glutamate plays a key excitatory function, while GABA has an opposite action as the main inhibitory neurotransmitter. Acetylcholine, once viewed as a possible transmitter of information in the brain, was revealed by Krnjevic and others to play a different, though essential function. "It's more of a modulator of transmissions. It plays a facilitating function that makes the main neuro-transmitter, glutamate, more effective." Krnjevic also revealed a new role for calcium inside nerve cells. The amount of calcium present has an important influence on how active a nerve cell will be, but too much calcium leads to cell death. Taken together, these findings have had a profound influence on our understanding of the chemistry of the brain and on what we know about memory and learning at the cellular level. They've also contributed to what scientists understand about medical conditions such as strokes, epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease. In 1981, the publication Current Contents called Krnjevic one of the 1,000 most-cited contemporary scientists and named three of his papers "citation classics." And Krnjevic shows no signs of slowing down. The head of McGill's anesthesia research division since 1965, he has secured Medical Research Council funding for a new line of research  studying what happens to the brain when it loses its oxygen supply. Mental activity is dependent on brain cell functions which in turn are dependent on receiving a constant source of oxygen. While this is widely known, the neural mechanics involved in these interrelationships haven't yet been fully explained. Krnjevic hopes that his work might point to drug therapies that would help the brain compensate at times when the flow of oxygen is restricted  following a stroke, for example. For her part, Lock finally decided that the life of a biochemist was not for her. "I wasn't altogether happy with the notion that I would be spending the rest of my life working in a lab. Life in a lab felt a little too narrow  I was interested in social issues, in culture and politics." She was working in San Francisco when she came to that conclusion. Around the same time, Lock met and married her husband  the captain of a judo team bound for Japan. She spent the next year-and-a-half in Japan and when she returned to California, she decided to continue the Japanese lessons she had started. She also began a PhD in anthropology, focusing her work on the resurgence of traditional Japanese medical treatments such as acupuncture and herbal medicine. "People in Japan were very helpful to me when I did that research, but they thought it was an odd thing for me to be working on. They expected these traditions to slowly disappear, but today these approaches are more popular than they ever were." Lock, who holds appointments in McGill's departments of Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine, is no longer regarded as an oddball scholar in Japan where her work is held in high regard. "I've always been pleased by the reaction to my work there. Over the years, I've built up many ongoing relationships with people in Japan and I treasure those relationships. That support keeps me going." Her current research relates to one of the hottest issues in Japanese society  the notion of brain death  of life ending when there is irreversible brain damage and the only thing keeping patients technically alive is the assistance of a respirator. Japanese society has never accepted the concept of brain death until very recently. "In Japan, the debate over this is as emotional as the debate over abortion in North America," says Lock. Lock's most influential book  one which has captured the notice of doctors and feminists as well as anthropologists  is Encounters with Aging: Mythologies in Japan and North America, published in 1993. Lock discovered that in Japan, menopausal women report fewer symptoms than North American women  "hot flashes" or night sweats, for instance. In general, the discomfort associated with menopause is three times greater in North America than in Japan. The differences are startling. Diet, genetics and exercise all might play a role, but cultural attitudes towards menopause in the two societies also seem to be an important factor. "This is a much more complex thing than we understand it to be," says Lock, who questions how North Americans "medicalize and pathologize menopause as if there is something bizarre about post-menopausal life. It is likened to a disease. We tell women that they should receive hormonal replacement therapy  in some cases, for 30 years. But there is very little research about what the long-term implications will be." The book has won five awards including the Canada Japan Book Award from the Canada Council, the Wellcome Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain and the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the American Anthropological Association. During the Prix du Québec award ceremonies on Saturday, Krnjevic made a point of scolding the Quebec government for cutting back its funding of the province's universities. "The clear aim of these prizes is to recognize scientists and to encourage young people to think about going into science themselves. But while this is going on, another branch of the government is choking the universities, where a great deal of science takes place."