When Dr Verayuth Praphanphoj was a high school student, biology wasn't his favourite subject. It didn't seem "tangible", unlike mathematics and physics, in which he excelled.

Now at age 43, Verayuth is a leading researcher in medical genetics, with a focus on the association between mental illness and the human genome, which has biology at its heart. He is head of Rajanukul Institute's Centre for Medical Genetic Research.

His findings recently led to the development of a breakthrough testing method for unexplained mental retardation. They appeared in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in August.

His next project is even more challenging, in both the country's medical research circles and the world's. He hopes to discover which parts of the human genome relate to depression, a very rare study in the field.

"There is nothing clear-cut about mental illnesses," Verayuth says.

If successful, the study will improve diagnosis and treatment of the psychological illness before it becomes an alarming health threat in the next 15 years as projected

by the World Health Organisation.

"Genetic [studies] provide new hope for all diseases, from diagnosis and treatment to altering the genes [to prevent them]," he says.

Curiosity is a basic characteristic of scientists. Born to a Chinese-Thai merchant family in Sukhothai, Verayuth was an inquisitive boy. To little Verayuth, curiosity did not kill the cat, but it broke a lot of things in the house, which he eagerly disassembled to find out what was inside.

He began to realise that his keenness in searching for answers to this curiosity was akin to what they called "sciences" at school. He loved studying the subject and pursued it through college.

"It's kind of fun, researching a lot of things," he says.

When studying at prestigious Triamudom Suksa high school, where science branched into physics, chemistry and biology, he did not love all subjects of the discipline. He liked biology least; it wasn't concrete enough for his taste.

"It's not the one-plus-one-will-be-two," he says. He did well enough in the subject, though his performance

didn't compare to the marks

he received in those he preferred.

In just his first year at Triamudom Suksa, Verayuth and his team won the country's annual competition in the mathematics examination and was first runner-up in a major physics competition.

Things might have gone just fine had he chosen to pursue engineering or some other

discipline instead of medicine. When Verayuth decided to attend medical school, he

had to work harder on bio-

logy for the entrance examination.

He was partly inspired by the medical professionals he met while visiting his grandmother as she suffered through the advanced stages of cervical cancer before her death. He found the work of these doctors interesting and not as dreadful as he had thought.

At Chulalongkorn University's medical school, he found biology completely different from what he had learned in high school. It was more appealing to him, as it focused on humans rather than the plants and animals he had studied in the past.

"It's closer to human beings. … we were studying ourselves, from what was visible to the naked eyes to that which could be seen only through a microscope," Verayuth recalls.

After completing medical school, Verayuth went to work at a small community hospital in Saraburi where he developed a passion for paediatrics through his work in rural Nong Saeng district. "If we provide [children] with good healthcare, then they will become healthy grown-ups," he says.

After three years in Saraburi, Verayuth decided to go for specialist training to become a paediatrician. During his three years of training, also at Chulalongkorn University, he worked as a physician at the Rajanukul Institute in Bangkok, which has a reputation for treating mentally retarded and physically challenged children.

"I learned there how underprivileged those children were. They were given too little attention and faced so much social stigma," he says.

Every day, he faced the same questions from parents: Why did their kids have Down syndrome? How could they be treated? Was there a way to prevent the disease? Verayuth did not have precise answers to those questions until he met Dr Chawala Thienthanu.

While serving as director of Rajanukul around the time Verayuth finished his paediatric training and began working full-time for the hospital, Chawala inspired Verayuth to become a researcher of medical genetics.

She had introduced pregnancy testing for Down syndrome using the chromosome technique, which was rather new to the country at the

time

"Genetics must be the answer, and it could help the patients I treated day after day," Verayuth says. After a couple of years helping Chawala with the new field of research at Rajanukul, Verayuth received a fellowship to train in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1999.

Genetic research was

booming at the time. The field of studies received a great deal of attention worldwide, in particular when former US President Bill Clinton excited the world by announcing in 2000 that the entire sequence of the human genome had been mapped.

Verayuth's research proposal at Johns Hopkins was on the genetic causes of mental retardation.

"Mental retardation is the other side of the coin to being a genius. And if there really is a set of genes that makes a person a genius, it must be the same genes that make another mentally retarded," Verayuth says.

He hypothesises that the only difference in that ideal set of genes is that they do not function well in the mentally retarded and work perfectly in the genius. His ultimate dream is to one day find those genes.

After three years of training and research at Johns Hopkins, Verayuth brought home more than a certificate presented by the American Board of Medical Genetics and five peer-reviewed published studies - the world-class tool to improve diagnosis and treatment of mental disease through genetic research.

"To research for new knowledge, we do need some good tools. And by good tools, I mean neither a [superb] microscope nor a DNA-extracting machine, but proper and right research planning," Verayuth says. "It's a matter of your thinking process."

Aside from his depression project, Verayuth's ongoing projects include one aimed at improving the treatment of children with Down syndrome by stopping certain genes associated with the disease.

This has been undertaken for over a year by two graduate students advised by the doctor.

Testing with cultured tissue, they have successfully stopped the genes and are now testing on real tissue taken from Down syndrome children and stored in Rajanukul's Tissue Bank, which was set up by Verayuth.

While working hard to help the children of others, Verayuth once forgot about his own at home. Though they are perfectly healthy and require no new medical knowledge to live a good life, they do need time with their father.

When Verayuth first returned from the US, he had a great deal of work to settle the research at Rajanukul and little time for his nursery-teacher wife, son, now 13, and daughter, three.

Now, Verayuth says, he can balance his time between work and family. The "Come home soon, Dad" note on his desk reminds him leave work on time these days. Each day after work, he says, he heads straight home to be with his kids, then works some more at home after they go to bed.

Although he concedes he has not come closer to finding the set of genes responsible for both genius and mental retardation, Verayuth believes he is on the right track.

At the very least, he says, "These days, when I check patients, I can tell them more. I have more choices [of treatment] for them and high hopes.

"This lets me know it [genetic research] is the right way to go.

"Being a [medical] researcher is like being an addict. There are always challenges ahead waiting for me to find the answer."

Arthit Khwankhom

The Nation