Appliance of science leads John to honour

Feb 6 2010 by Hannah Davies, The Journal

HANNAH DAVIES speaks to the region’s Sir John Burn on why aspirin could be the modern wonder-drug, bringing the Centre of Life to the region and his beginnings in the coal trade.

JOHN Burn, 58, is about as far removed from the scatterbrained stereotype of a scientist as you can get.

He is charming, erudite, and as at home in the Durham pit villages where he grew up as in the higher echelons of society he’s joined.

John himself recognises this ability to connect and attributes it to the working-class entrepreneurial charm he inherited from his father.

But it is John’s groundbreaking work as a geneticist which has projected him into the public eye and led to his inclusion into the New Year's Honours list with a knighthood.

Among his many achievements John can add bringing the Centre for Life to the region and Science City, leading research which uncovered the importance of folic acid in preventing spina bifida in babies and the importance of aspirin in reducing cancer.

John is quick to point out he is not solely responsible for any of these things but in all he played a major part.

He clearly has a brilliant mind but isn’t above drumming in a covers band, Famous Last Words, alongside a fellow group of scientists. A knight who plays rock, everything from Mustang Sally to The Killers covers, isn’t exactly common, but you get the sense that mixing up expectations is a part of what’s brought John to where he is today.

He is also a family man and married wife Linda, 57, in 1972 while still a medical student.

John was born in West Auckland, County Durham, into a rented two-up, two-down terrace to parents Harry and Margaret Burn, and elder sisters Joyce, now 64, and Lilly, 67. His parents have now passed away .

Typically his extended family lived throughout the village, where many of them still reside, and untypically his father possessed a rather brilliant streak of entrepreneurship.

Harry Burn designed ice-cream vans and gradually made enough money from that to move his family, when John was eight, to the large former vicarage at the end of the street.

Harry went out of business when John was 12. Around the same time as the need for ice cream vans began to falter, Dr Richard Beeching made his cuts in the UK’s railway lines and most of the South Durham pits had been closed.

John’s dad recognised two facts: one, the railways had been built on high-quality coke and two, much of the coal from the pit heaps had been thrown aside. He bought up these resources and began to make a considerable amount of money selling the fuel.

John recalls: “I turned up to school driving a Mercedes. We were the nouveau of nouveau riche.”

Aping his father, John set up his own business while at school selling some of his dad’s scrap door-to-door. But Burn senior soon put a stop to it, when he discovered his son was undercutting him.

A bright child, he went to the local grammar school, Barnard Castle, now Teesdale School, where he showed a flair for science but was often more interested in “chasing girls and driving cars”. One of the girls, Linda, was a “vision in a short skirt”.

They have two children Danielle, 32, a teacher who lives in Perth, Scotland, with her lecturer husband and three children Alfie, three, Thomas, two, and Ella, six months; and son James, 28, who works as a writer in Newcastle.

John says: “I enjoyed science as a kid, people ask me how I got so good at talking and it was because I was surrounded by people around 15 years older than me. Everyone thought I was wonderful but no one ever spoke to me so I became a performer to get attention.”

John also mentions a fascination with ICI, an early ambition to be a engineer which faltered as he didn’t take maths A-level.

“So my biology teacher said why don’t you do medicine?”.

John took up the advice and left to study medicine at Newcastle University in 1970.

His medical path was also in part inspired by a lecture at the university he had been taken to when he was 17. The lecture was on an emerging branch of science, genetics. And when his teachers asked John to explain it to them afterwards, he realised he had an aptitude for the subject.

To pursue this he took a year out of his medical degree to gain a genetics degree.

This in part heralded back to his father's entrepreneurial skills.

John says: “Although DNA had been discovered in 1953, by the late 60s it still hadn’t found its way into any applications or the medical curriculum at all and so I realised there was a kind of opening.”

John’s father had always told him to stay aware for any openings in the market and in genetics John saw one.

“I knew it was a field which was only going to get bigger,” he explains.

After working in paediatrics in Newcastle, John decided to pursue his interest in genetics further.

He knew the leading scientist on genetics at the time was Cedric Carter, who had founded the Clinical Genetics Society in 1970, so in 1980 John walked into his London office and said, 'I want to be a clinical geneticist, can I work for your clinic?'.

Impressed by his gumption, Carter agreed and John worked for him at the Medical Research Council’s Institute of Child Health as a clinical scientific officer. learning all he could about the developing field at its very cutting edge. After a few years John decided to bring his new-found expertise back to the North East and set up a clinic at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary in 1984, the region’s first consultant clinical geneticist.

At the beginning of his work John and his team focused on rare genetic disorders in children, gradually building up the clinic, its credentials and respect within the medical community.

John says: “When we first started genetics was more of an abstract idea and we really began putting it to use in diagnosing rare conditions.”

He recalls one child called Ian, who was 14 when John came to see him.

John says: “I asked if there was anything unusual about him when he had been born and his mother said, ‘Yes, he was born with a very high-pitched cry like a cat’.”

John immediately diagnosed Ian with a condition called Cri du Chat, “cry of cat,” so called because of the cry affected children give at birth and which is caused by a missing part of the fifth chromosome.

John recalls: “They were delighted he had been diagnosed. Although there was nothing we could do to help their son’s condition, we could tell them they’d done nothing wrong and the condition was caused by pure chance.” The couple recently wrote to John more than a decade after he made the diagnosis, to tell them how much he helped them.

Despite the success of his work, John became increasingly interested in curing people rather than just diagnosing people. “I found it frustrating I could tell the disease somebody had but I couldn’t help them,” he says.

In the late 1980s John and his team began investigating cancer. They discovered a certain type of early-onset bowel cancer was caused by a genetic fault which meant, John explains: “In their teens people with this genetic defect get lots of polyps in their bowels, which then developed into cancer in their 20s.

“We discovered if doctors tested the relatives of people with this cancer for the defective gene, they could to see which family members had this gene and treat them before developing cancer.”

It was this kind of disease prevention which John became very interested in during the 1990s. He expanded his trials further when he and colleagues gave adults who were likely to develop a form of cancer one of two types of pills.

The first group took a harmless placebo, the second took common aspirin.

John says: “At the end of the trail in 2008 there really didn’t seem to be any difference in the groups.

“But last year we saw those taking aspirin were developing fewer cancers.”

He puts the figure on those who took the aspirin supplements at as much as 50% less than those who did not take them. A startling contrast.

“And now we’re looking at possible uses for aspirin in preventing all types of cancer.”

John says more work needs to be done to look at these issues properly.

His genetics work has taken on a broader spectrum as well, best exhibited in Newcastle’s Centre For Life, for which he had the initial idea.

John explains: “I travelled down to Cambridge in 1994 with my daughter as she had an interview for the university.

“As part of the trip I visited the shed where James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.

“I was shocked to see that all that marked the most important discovery in science for thousands of years was a small brass plaque.”

Outraged as he was by this, it sparked off an idea in his head about a possible genetics centre in Newcastle.

“On the way back Danielle and I sketched out the idea for a Geneodome in Newcastle.”

John envisaged it as a place for research to be carried out but also for the public to come and learn about the science of genetics.

With the backing of Alastair Balls and Linda Conlon from the Tyne and Wear development corporation, and science author Matt Ridley, proposals for the centre were approved by the Millennium Commission and the Centre for Life opened.

There are now 135 research staff at the centre, 17 professors and 140 NHS staff.

John heard in the New Year honours list that he was to be made a knight for his services to science. It is something he is proud of.

“It’s going to be a special day,” he says, “and of course its an honour but I don’t think people will treat me any differently, certainly not in the North East.

“My wife is excited as well because apparently we might get upgrades on flights.”

John’s band also takes up time, but enjoyable time, and their recent gig raised £500 for the Haiti relief effort.

But the legacy John hopes to leave is to develop his work with aspirin – similar to work he did in putting folic acid, which pregnant women take to prevent spina bifida in children, into bread.

He is looking at the ways aspirin, which is cheap and readily available, can be put safely into people’s diets for mass benefit.

“My main ambition now is to progress the aspirin cancer prevention story which could have great benefits for people’s health,” he states.

“Then I can retire happy to spend more time with my grandchildren.”

When we first started genetics was more of an abstract idea and we really began putting it to use in diagnosing rare conditions