Geoffrey Raisman, 1939-2017: “Opening a Scientific Door and Giving Hope”

University College London Professor Geoffrey Raisman, FRS, was a soft spoken and measured gentleman, but as a researcher he was not one to shy away from bold science. Throughout his career, he challenged conventional thinking on the nervous system's ability to repair itself from disease and injury. In the process, he gave the world both ground-breaking discoveries and hope for millions of people who suffer from spinal cord injury (SCI) and neurological decline.

Dr. Raisman died in January at the age of 77, having never relented in his more than 40-year pursuit of a deeper understanding of how cell transplantation could help regenerate disrupted signal pathways. I was fortunate to know Dr. Raisman as a colleague, and we co-edited the two-volume textbook Neurorestoratology along with Dr. Hongyun Huang and Dr. Hari S. Sharma. Dr. Raisman was also a frequent contributor to this journal^1—4.

A lover of art and literature and fluent in many languages, including classical and modern Chinese, Raisman hailed from a working-class family in Leeds and was the grandson of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Lithuania. He wrote a book about, and often told interviewers of, his upbringing, where his hardworking parents challenged him to use his intellectual gifts, which were evidenced early in his childhood. Raisman's father had put his son on a path to medical school at Oxford University with the help of an uncle who had risen to prominence in the British government, but a chance glance into a microscope changed that planned future.

“No sooner had I peered down a microscope and seen nerve cells, no sooner had I traced the strange and beautiful curves of the brain's hippocampus, than I was hooked on the sheer beauty of this mysterious structure,” Raisman wrote in 2004⁵.

His first major breakthrough was in 1969, when he introduced the world to the concept of “plasticity” to describe the ability of damaged nerve tissue to form new synaptic connections, defying the long-held scientific idea that once nerve signals were interrupted or ceased, there was no way to reconnect the pathways. “It was opening a scientific door and giving hope,” Dr. Raisman would later reflect⁶. Now, the idea of plasticity is not only widely accepted but also part of the everyday health lexicon.

In 1985, Raisman followed that groundbreaking discovery with yet another watershed finding when he first described how olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) formed nerve fibers in the nose to enter the central nervous system (CNS), elevating science's understanding of not only the complex function of those cells but also how important the sense of smell is in communicating information to our brains. His research showed that at the point where the olfactory nerves enter the brain, the OECs played a “unique door-opening effect at the surface of the brain”⁷. It would be more than a decade before that discovery provided what Raisman would later describe as the “eureka moment…of my existence.” He described that event for The New Yorker in a story published nearly a year to the day before his death, telling the writer about a paralyzed rat who had been treated with OECs.

“One evening at midnight, he had gone to visit the lab's rat enclosure—' Rats are more active in the night,' he explained—and held out a bit of crushed Chinese egg noodles. ‘It put its paw right out and took the food, and realized it could do it, and I realized we had done it,' he says. ‘To the best of my knowledge, it was the first evidence ever that you could get spinal reconnection.' The pleasure of that moment hadn't dimmed in almost twenty years.”⁸.

It was in 2014 in Cell Transplantation³ that he published his groundbreaking findings on transplanted OECs helping a paralyzed firefighter regain movement and declared the breakthrough as “more impressive than a man walking on the moon”⁹. His breakthrough work was not without controversy, even as it captured the public's imagination that a new era of being able to repair paralysis was within reach. Dr. Raisman cautioned to all who would listen that this was just the beginning of what would be a long scientific road even as the world marveled at the story of Polish firefighter Darek Fidyka, paralyzed after being stabbed in the back, who was slowly able to relearn to walk with assistance and eventually to regain the ability to live more independently.

“If we are right, we have opened the door not only to spinal cord, but to stroke and deafness and blindness,” Dr. Raisman said during a TEDTalk in 2015⁹. “…What we have done is given hope. And it should not be dismissed, because hope is hope.”

Dr. Raisman continued to pursue better ways of building the nerve bridges that allow the OECs to reestablish neural connections while also examining how those cells might be used for treatment of other diseases. Through the decades, he remained focused on the concept of plasticity— his original breakthrough—as the guiding discovery that could lead to the answers so many seek.

“For the newborn baby, plasticity lies ahead, not behind,” Raisman wrote in an essay entitled The Idea that Scandalized Brain Science. “What is important is what is not yet known. I like to tell students that the best answer they can ever give to a question is ‘I don't know.' Search begins in ignorance. Failure to recognize ignorance, persuading ourselves that we know the answer, prevents progress. The system that brain scientists study is far more complex than can ever be envisaged in our philosophy. Without humility and without a sense of humor, the search will be a grim struggle indeed.”⁵.

Dr. Raisman is survived by his wife and childhood sweetheart, Vivian; their daughter, Ruth; and four grandchildren. His work lives on at the University College of London and among his colleagues around the world who will build upon his breakthrough work. For the millions of people and their families who suffer from paralysis and neurological decline, Dr. Raisman leaves them with perhaps his most enduring legacy: The hope that sustains them in their daily struggle is not misplaced in the hands of those dedicated to this cause.