Director's profile
Peter Brown
I originally went to university to study Biology with an Industrial Placement. It was only during my Industrial Placement at the Institute of Animal Physiology (now Babraham Institute, Cambridge) that I discovered my passion for Physiology. On completing my degree, I studied for a PhD in Physiology at Babraham before moving to UCLA in Los Angeles for two years as a Post-Doctoral fellow. During this period I worked on the function of the absorptive cells in the intestine, but whilst in the United States I became fascinated by the cells of the choroid plexuses (tissues which secrete cerebrospinal fluid in the brain) and I have continued to study these cells (amongst other things) in Manchester.
... whilst in the United States I became fascinated by the cells of the choroid
plexuses (tissues which secrete cerebrospinal fluid in the brain) ...
I use cell physiological techniques in my experiments, these methods such as electrophysiology to measure ion movements across cells membranes, and intracellular flurorescence to monitor intracellular Ca2+ (an important physiological signal) are the mainstays of much physiological research. For me they have the huge advantage of generating data in “real-time”, i.e. there is no hanging around for waiting for the results. This is great because it means at the end of the day you can go home (or to the pub) knowing that your experiments have (or quite often haven’t) worked!
During my time in Manchester, Physiology has changed substantially as we have embraced the experimental opportunities offered by molecular genetics, and the data generated by the Human Genome Project. Such developments present new questions to Physiologists as well as providing novel methods to solve established problems.