Brain Maker.(Jonas Frisen)

Jonas Frisen had his eureka moment in 1993. Back then, scientists suspected that there was a special type of cell in the brain that had the power to give rise to new brain cells. If they could harness these so-called neural stem cells to regenerate damaged brain tissue, they might someday find a cure for such brain diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But first they had to figure out where neural stem cells were and what they looked like. Frisen, then a freshly minted Ph.D. at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was peering through his microscope at some tissue taken from a rat's injured spinal cord when he saw cells that appeared to have been enervated by the injury, as though they were busy making repairs. Frisen thought these might be the neural stem cells scientists had been looking for. It took him six years of painstaking research to make sure.

Frisen is quick to emphasize that his research is basic and that treatments are years off. But the findings so far hint at extraordinary potential. Two years ago he identified neural stem cells in the adult human brain. And he's now researching the mechanisms by which these cells grow into different types of brain cells. Rather than growing brain tissue in a petri dish and implanting it in, say, the forebrain of a Parkinson's patient, doctors might someday stimulate the spontaneous growth of new neural cells merely by administering a drug. "It sounds like science fiction," Frisen says, "but we can already do it in mice." In 2003 he will publish the results of his recent experiments. He's isolated a protein in the mouse brain that inhibits the generation of nerve cells. Using other chemicals, he's been able to block the action of this inhibitor, which in turn leads to the production of new brain cells.

Frisen honed his analytical mind at the dinner table in Goteborg, in southwest Sweden. His mother was a mathematics professor and his father was an ophthalmologist. Frisen went to medical school intending to be a brain surgeon or perhaps a psychiatrist, but ended up spending all his free time in the lab. In 1998 he got seed money from a Swedish venture capitalist to ...