Chris Shaw: Pain-in-the-ass persistent

Biography

Chris Shaw, professor of neurology and neurogenetics at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, felt ambivalent about a career in medicine until he met his first patients. Privileged access to their hopes and fears, he says, makes treating them more than the sum of their symptoms—and, as a specialist in motor neurone disease (MND), he is privy to more hopes and fears than most doctors. For the past decade he has led the creation of a new research facility, the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, which opens this month and brings together 250 scientists and clinicians working on neurological and psychiatric disorders.