As our understanding of human biology deepens, new doors are opening. Many lead to hope for people suffering from terminal and chronic illness.. and some lead to our age-old friend, temptation. The wish to be healthier and live longer can blur into a desire for immortality, while the urge to cure or alleviate disability slides into ambition: to be better, stronger and more intelligent.

This is the theme of Homunculus, a novel by Professor Oleg Krishtal, a Wellcome Trust-funded neuroscientist at the Bogomoletz Institute in Kiev, Ukraine, who recently joined the Trust's International Biomedical Interest Group. The central character, a neuroscientist, longs to be a genius, and suffers a huge blow to his ego when he realises his girlfriend, also a scientist, is more intelligent than he is. His obsession is reflected in his experiments: he implants embryonic tissue in rats' brains to see whether they become more intelligent. The experiment appears to work, and as he watches the experimental rats grow much cleverer than their peers, an audacious plan takes shape in his mind.

He convinces his girlfriend that he has Alzheimer's disease and can only be cured if stem cells from the embryo of his unborn child are implanted into his brain. Although the idea distresses her, she agrees to go along with his plan. After performing the operation on him, however, she leaves him and disappears.

The neuroscientist recovers from the operation and returns to his laboratory, eager to find out whether the transplant has worked. To his exultation he feels himself turning into the powerful, inventive scientist he had always longed to be, designing his experiments and making discoveries swiftly and surely. As he works, he feels as if he and his son are both living and working together inside his head.

This happy illusion is destroyed when he tracks down his girlfriend and finds her with a baby. The operation she performed on him was a sham and his new-found intelligence the progeny of belief, rather than any material difference in his brain. "This is a novel about strength of faith," explains Professor Krishtal, "which, as you know from the Bible, can move mountains."

His philosophical treatise, To the Singing of Birds, similarly explores the power of the mind, this time in the context of evolution. "In this book I conclude that biological evolution - the propagation of 'selfish DNA' whose only aim was to evolve and spread - resulted in the development of human consciousness. Our consciousness is what now enables us to make scientific advances and evolve a billion times faster. It has become the latest, ultimate tool of evolution."

In the meantime, Professor Krishtal has also been making significant contributions to the scientific literature in neuroscience. With Professor Dimitri Kullman at the Institute of Neurology, London, his partner in a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Initiative Grant (CRIG), he has been investigating the action of the neurotransmitter glutamate on receptors outside the synapse. The work is highly molecular but such studies will begin to tell us how the concerted and coordinated activities of neurons underlie the behaviour of characters such as Professor Krishtal's fictional researcher.

Professor Krishtal and his team are not the only Trust-funded researchers at the Bogomoletz Institute, an internationally renowned centre for studies of nerve physiology. Five other CRIGs and an International Research Development Award at the institute support collaborations with the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester, and the Institute for Medical Research, St George's Hospital Medical School and University College London.

Developed countries have access to a large market of new highly skilled young postdoctoral scientists, who train in the former Soviet Union then go abroad to work. "This happens on a large scale. At the moment, about 130 postdocs from the Bogomoletz Institute alone are working abroad, the majority of them in the USA and the European Union."

The Trust's collaborative grant schemes are designed to improve and sustain the capacity for high level research in an institute like the Bogomoletz, creating conditions conducive to the retention or return of talented scientists.

"The Wellcome Trust is one of the most significant funders here," says Professor Krishtal. "The Bogomoletz Institute is the main centre of excellence for neuroscience research in eastern Europe and these awards are helping to keep alive our tradition of excellent science. Although the brain drain has not been stopped, in several cases it has been reversed; people return home and establish their laboratories here."

Homunculus has been translated into French and is published in Paris once a year under the title Moi et Mon Double.

External links

• Professor Dimitri Kullmann at the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy, Institute of Neurology at University College London: Research interests

Further reading

Asztely F, Erdemli G, Kullmann D M (1997). Extrasynaptic glutamate spill-over in the hippocampus: dependence on temperature and role of active uptake. Neuron 18: 281-293.

Semyanov A, Kullmann D M (2000). Modulation of GABAergic signalling among interneurons by metabotropic glutamate receptors. Neuron 25: 663-672.

Walker M C, Ruiz A, Kullmann D M (2001). Monosynaptic GABAergic signalling from the dentate gyrus to CA3 with a pharmacological and physiological profile typical of mossy fiber synapses. Neuron 29: 703-715.

Semyanov A, Kullmann D M (2001). Kainate receptor-dependent axonal depolarization and action potential initiation in hippocampal interneurons. Nature Neurosci. 4: 718-723.

Jouvenceau A, Eunson L H, Spauschus A, Ramesh V, Zuberi S M, Kullmann D M, Hanna M G (2001). Human epilepsy associated with dysfunction of the brain P/Q-type calcium channel (CACNA1A). The Lancet 358: 801-807.

Rea R, Spauschus A, Eunson L H, Hanna M G, Kullmann D M (2002). Variable K+ channel subunit dysfunction in inherited mutations of KCNA1. J Physiol. 538: 5-23.