Born in Hungary, Laszlo Zaborszky was one of the first professors to be interviewed for a position at the newly founded Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers–Newark in 1990 and joined the center in 1993. Although he is a physician by training, Zaborszky spends all his time in the lab unraveling the secrets of cholinergic cells in the basal forebrain – cells that are destroyed in Alzheimer’s disease. In between his busy work, he also found time to launch a scientific journal, Brain Structure and Function. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific institution in Hungary.

FOCUS: How did you become fascinated by the brain?

Zaborszky: During the 1960s in Hungary, I took several neuroanatomy classes from János Szentágothai, a brilliant visionary scientist. He wrote a book on the cerebellum with the Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles. He introduced me to this dynamic science with his vivid 3D images no one else could make in those days. He talked to me about the conferences in the United States that he was attending. It was a time when every day brought a new discovery in the field of neuroscience.

FOCUS: You study cholinergic cells in the basal forebrain. What makes these cells so interesting?

Zaborszky: It is these cells that are destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. Our theory is that the basal forebrain is associated with attention. Everything we see and hear is translated into neural stimuli in the prefrontal cortex, where a response is formed. Then, the basal forebrain, through its projection to various cortical areas, amplifies important stimuli and suppresses others. This makes it possible for people to pay attention to certain tasks and discard other signals from their surroundings. In addition to memory loss, attention deficit is an important aspect of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer patients cannot filter the right stimuli out and are not able to perform simple tasks, like drawing a clock.

FOCUS: You came to the United States in 1981. What attracted you in American research?

Zaborszky: I like the fact that scientific research and clinical care go hand in hand. A close association between basic and preclinical research, however, was not typical in those times in Eastern Europe.  For a short period during the 1970s, I worked as a physician in an East German pediatric neurosurgery clinic. Operations on children with neurological problems didn’t have much effect, and this was a frustrating experience. I decided that the best way for treatments to progress was to employ knowledge from the lab. When I got an offer from the Department of Neurology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I jumped at the opportunity.

FOCUS: The urban campus in Rutgers-Newark must have been a big transition. What inspired you to come here?

Zaborszky:  When I started at Rutgers in 1993, the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience had just been founded. The center gave me the chance to work in an environment of integrated neuroscience research. The term ‘neuroscience’ wasn’t coined until the late 1960s. Until that time, people were investigating the brain from different fields, such as psychology, electrophysiology, and, in my case, anatomy. There was hardly any contact between those fields.

FOCUS: What is the Holy Grail in your research?

Zaborszky: We are investigating why cholinergic cells are more vulnerable to degeneration than other brain cells. Is it their genetic makeup, or is it the connections that the cells make with others cells? To find out what this means, we are examining the function of the neurons in the basal forebrain and studying the connections that one neuron makes. With microscopy and computational techniques, we make a kind of 3D map of neurons or neuronal networks to study their communication patterns with other cholinergic and noncholinergic cells. With this knowledge, we hope to construct a model that would allow us to predict how the disease progresses in humans.

FOCUS: You received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that expires this year. What’s next?

Zaborszky: Together with a German research institute, we mapped basal forebrain cells from postmortem human brains. These maps can be compared with activations in living persons’ brains. Healthy volunteers were placed in an MRI machine and assigned a random series of numbers. When the numbers were in sequence, they were asked to press a button. We discovered that the basal forebrain was active during this task. I would like to test the function of cholinergic cells in elderly patients. If we see a diminished activation in these people, we can perhaps use this kind of test as an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. We still don’t have a treatment, but we know that stimulating the brain and memory can slow down the progression of the disease.

FOCUS: You were a doctor in Hungary. Don’t you miss your patients?

Zaborszky: I miss the contact with the clinic very much. That is why I am trying to obtain funds for clinical studies, so that I can stay close to the patients. The patients have always been my motivation for scientific research: to bring lab results to the clinic and to help people.

FOCUS: What do you spend your time on when you aren’t working?

Windsurfing during the summer, skiing in winter, and going to the city to listen the New York Philharmonic’s concerts, an all-season favorite.