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J.K. está Potteriando pela Internet

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Revisão: Adriana Snape

“JK is Pottering about Internet,” BBC Newsround, February 2003.

JK ROWLING says the internet is a wizard way to spy on her fans.

The Harry Potter author goes into chatrooms without revealing her name to find out what they really think about her books.

She takes part and reads the anonymous confessions of her young readers.

Rowling, 37, has been at home in Edinburgh since son David was born last month.

Rowling said she diary that villain Tom Riddle uses in book two to lure Harry into the Chamber of Secrets is like an internet chatroom.

JK said: “When I wrote that, I had never been in an internet chat room. It is very similar – typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back.

“You don’t know who is answering you.”

The idea came from a childhood diary her younger sister, Dianne, confided in.

Top websites dedicated to Harry Potter include www.harrypotter.warner bros.co.uk and www.magic-hogwarts.com.

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Entrevista com Steve Kloves e J.K. Rowling

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Tradução: Frede_Potter
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Mzimba, Lizo, moderator. Interview with Steve Kloves and J.K. Rowling, February 2003.

Transcription: Eric of Mugglenet and Melissa of TLC

Lizo: Now, to bring a story like Harry Potter from the page to the screen, the starting point is your original novel, written by you of course, J.K. Rowling. And the script is based on that novel but is written by the screenwriter, of course you, Steve Kloves. Can you explain both how you worked together to produce the final script because it must be very very different writing a book as compared to writing a film.

Steve: Yeah, you know, I mean, I just… steal her best stuff, for the most part…

JKR: [Nodding] That’s basically it. And I don’t sue!

Steve: I think the thing…What’s always been great about Jo is that, from the beginning she gave me tremendous elbow room, but when you’re in the middle of a series like this it’s important that I talk to Jo along the way and ask her, beyond advice, just simple advice, and certain sequences and things, but just, ,”Am I on the right path?” and Jo’s always been good about, in that, she’s maddening in the sense that she will not tell me what’s going to happen but she will tell me if I’m going down the wrong path…

JKR: I’ve given you more than I’ve given anyone else which I probably shouldn’t probably say…on screen, or they’ll kidnap and torture him, and we need him. But yeah, I’ve told Steve probably more than I’ve told anyone else, because he needs to know. Because it’s incredibly annoying of me when he says “Well shall we cut that”, or “I wanted to do this” and I say, “Well no… because, you know, in book six, something will happen and you’ll need that in” or “that will contradict something that happens” and I can feel him on the end of the emails, you know, [does impression of frustrated Steve typing] “would you mind telling me why?” So I have told him things. But he’s very good at guessing. He’s guessed more shrewdly than anyone else, I think.

Lizo: How frustrating is it for you, working slightly in the dark with some of these issues, Steve?

Steve: Well it’s frustrating because, you like to know… when you’re writing a character, you want to know where they’re going…

JKR: I’d tell you if you were dying!

Steve: [laughing] That’s… that’s nice to know.

JKR: But you don’t need to know at the moment!

Steve: Well, you know, I am dying, hopefully it’s just gonna take a while! But I think it’s frustrating just, again, it comes down to the details and the magic of those details and I think just reading the books is just quite a wonderful experience.

Lizo: There are so many rich details in the books. Can you tell us how you decide what goes in and what stays out?

Steve: I will sometimes ask Jo. I will say, you know, this detail, you just seem to have cast just a bit more light on this in this scene than the other details. Sometimes I’m wrong, but often she’ll say “No, that is going to play.” There’s one thing in Chamber, actually, that Jo indicated will play later in the series. The hardest thing for me, honestly, is I’m writing a story to which I do not know the end. Which is, I’m not going to lie to you, has been the case sometimes in my own originals.

JKR: I was gonna say!

Steve: But I assume I will find an end. With this, it’s just I’m writing a story over a decade, and I keep waiting, you know, keep hoping that Jo will slip-up and actually tell me something.

Lizo: In this movie we’ve seen the kids develop from the first film, can you tell us about the relationship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione and how that is developing film by film?

JKR: Well I think it is developing in the films as it does in the books, which is to say that they are, they’re much stronger together than apart. They’re much more aware, in the second film, of their particular strengths. So they’re more effective, the children are able to do more complex things, for example the Polyjuice Potion. And also Chris in the second film has kind of foreshadowed what I don’t do until the fourth book, which is that you get hints of certain feelings between the three of them, that belong to a sort of slightly more mature person.

Lizo: Steve?

Steve: Yeah, I think you’re seeing in Chamber the magic’s becoming a bit second nature to them. At least simple magic is. And that basically it’s, you know, a little bit of knowledge will get you into a lot of trouble. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the second one: is that they’re getting more mature but, it’s a dangerous kind of knowledge.

Lizo: How do you feel about what the kids were like in this movie?

Steve: Well the first thing that you notice when you watch the movie is that Harry and Ron’s voices have dropped about two octaves, which is just bizarre. Suddenly they’re not these cute little moppetheads running around. You know, children will grow.

Lizo: Steve, Hermione is a character that you have said is one of your favorites. Has that made her easier to write?

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I like writing all three, but I’ve always loved writing Hermione. Because, I just, one, she’s a tremendous character for a lot of reasons for a writer, which also is she can carry exposition in a wonderful way because you just assume she read it in a book. If I need to tell the audience something…

JKR: Absolutely right, I find that all the time in the book, if you need to tell your readers something just put it in her. There are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it’s plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she’s handy.

Steve: Yeah, she’s really handy. And she’s also just, I think, just tremendously entertaining. There’s something about her fierce intellect coupled with a complete lack of understanding of how she affects people sometimes that I just find charming and irresistible to write.

Lizo: Does Dumbledore speak for you?

JKR: Oh yes, very much so. Dumbledore often speaks for me.

Lizo: How do you see Dumbledore, Steve?

Steve: I think Dumbledore’s a fascinating character because I think he obviously sort of imparts great wisdom that comes from experience, but I’ve always felt that Dumbledore bears such a tremendous Dark burden, and he knows secrets and I think in many ways he bears the weight of the future of the wizard world, which is being challenged, and the only way that he can keep that at bay, the darkness, is to be whimsical and humorous. And I think that’s just a really interesting thing, I think he’s a character of so many layers and I think when he does say, that it is our choices and not our abilities. I just coming from him it doesn’t feel like a sermon, it doesn’t feel like a message, it just feels like an absolute truth and it goes down easy. And I like that about him. But that’s what I like about the books, I’ve always said that I thought that Jo’s writing is deceptively profound, which is that you never feel there are messages in there, but there’s a lot of things being dealt with in a very sort of clever way, and they’re never pretentious, the books, and I think that’s why kids love reading them.

Lizo: You say that you don’t set out to put particular messages in each book, they grow organically. But do you think that it’s important to have the right messages there when they do emerge?

JKR: Well obviously in the wizard world passes for racism, and that’s deeply entrenched in the whole plot, there’s this issue going on about the bad side really advocating a kind of genocide, to exterminate what they see as these half-blood people. So that was obviously very conscious, but the other messages do grow organically. But I’ve never, no I’ve never set out to teach anyone anything. It’s been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding “What is today’s message?” And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to “thought for the day.”

Lizo: What was the most important difference in doing the story for Chamber of Secrets as opposed to the first film?

JKR: Well we probably had a bit more contact on the first film, but we probably needed more contact on the first film because we were establishing a relationship that has lasted two years and is going to last hopefully longer, so that was really about getting to know what we needed from each other. So it’s probably a good sign that we had less contact on Chamber because I think there’s a lot of trust there. I was very prickly when I met Steve. Because I knew that they’d chosen this American guy, even though he wrote and directed one of my favorite films, The Fabulous Baker Boys, I still thought, “Well, you know, he’s American.” Not to be… I don’t know… He was just… I was most worried about meeting Steve. He was the writer, he was going to be ripping apart my baby. And it turns out I really like him, so that worked!

Lizo: How do you communicate, how does all that work, and how often?

JKR: Uh, it… it varies to what we’re doing at the time.

Steve: Owls.

JKR: Owls, mainly, obviously, a bit of Floo Powder. [laughs]

Lizo: How does this film differ from the first?

JKR: It is, I think we would both say an easier book to transfer into a film, isn’t it? The first one is episodic, you have individual adventures, it chops and changes more. I remember when we were working on the script of Philosopher’s Stone that was something that came up continually, wasn’t it, that you have these sort of discrete adventures. And Chamber is a more linear structure so it was easier to translate to screen, I think, wasn’t it?

Steve: Yeah, though I thought it was going to be easier than…

JKR: Than it actually turned out to be.

Steve: Because you do have that sort of Tom Riddle moment where Tom explains it all. And that’s always challenging in a movie. Also what’s interesting about, I think, what makes Chamber interesting is that things are occurring that you don’t really quite understand until Tom explains them at the end. So you’ve got to work toward that moment and hope you can hold the audience during that moment. But there’s no question, it had more of a sort of, it just more of a, tight plot to sort of play out.

Lizo: What were the biggest challenges for you in this film?

Steve: The challenge always for me is keeping it from being four hours. Because I like everything that, what I honestly think is magical about what Jo does is the details. And so my first drafts are always chock-full of details. I think for the thing for me is, the things I respond to sometimes are hard to sort of put in proportion. I mean, I was really interested in the whole Mudblood thread, so that became a very interesting emotional thing for me to write in the script. I don’t know that it’s still there in the way that I saw it entirely. But those, you want to give some of those things weight, in some ways, so that becomes a challenge always, but it’s mainly compression.

Lizo: Jo, were there any bits of Chamber of Secrets that didn’t reflect the way that you originally saw it in your mind?

JKR: It’s interesting what Steve says about the Mudblood theme because I would agree that there’s always the pressure of time and space with the film, that is a stronger theme in the book and yet it is present in the film but for me I suppose when I look back in the book or I think about that book that is the time in the overall entire series where the issue of pure blood becomes very important, so yeah, maybe more weight to that.

Lizo: What stands out most in this film?

JKR: It was scary, I’ve always thought Chamber of Secrets, people underestimate how scary the book is. And in fact it’s the book I’ve got the most complaints about, bizarrely. Possibly because people got upset at Chamber of Secrets and didn’t carry on reading the rest of the books, and I think that’s certainly translated to the screen, a couple of really frightening moments.

Lizo: The visual effects are a huge part of bringing the magic to life. In this film we have Dobby, we have the pixies, we have Fawkes, we have the basilisk. What do you make of the effects in this movie?

JKR: Dobby’s wonderful. Dobby’s really really good, and the Mandrakes…superb. I really love the Mandrakes.

Lizo: Is that a big challenge for you, Steve, getting the effects, getting those scenes right?

Steve: No, no, it’s easy for me because I just write it and dream it…

JKR: He just writes it, and watches them faint! [laughing.]

Steve: …and then someone else has to actually do it! But I’m amazed to see something like the Mandrakes, which is really, it’s essentially, puppetry.

Lizo: Which parts of Chamber of Secrets were you most excited to see on screen?

JKR: I was most worried about the spiders. Because you see these old sci-fi movies where they have spiders and they’re always hysterically funny, they’re never, never scary. And it’s easy to write a scene like that in a novel, and make it scary. But when I started thinking about how we were going to actually see that, in fact it was extremely frightening. They were the most frightening large spiders I’ve ever seen in my life.

Steve: I had the same concern, I just thought, as I was writing, I was thinking “How are we going to do this?” You’ve got Aragog saying “Who goes there?” basically, you know, this giant spider, and I was saying “This is just going to be hysterical,” sorry, I’m laughing as I’m writing it! I know I’m imagining it being…

JKR: We’ve had that problem a lot.

Steve: Yeah, well one thing that you learn about movies is that the thing that you’re more worried about often is the thing that’s not a problem. And the thing that you don’t worry about is a complete disaster. So I’ve found, it’s funny because you’re talking about the scares in the movie. I know the thing that terrified my son the most in the first movie was opening the book, and the book screaming. And I think it was because it was something he could identify with. Which is, he could take a book off the shelf, and open it, and there might be a face in there screaming. He wasn’t scared by the other things at all.

JKR: But I think I wrote that, those are the sort of details that I write because, that would scare me. I read all the time and to have to just open something and have it shriek at me. And one thing that I thought that was well done in the film, Chamber of Secrets, was the diary. Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really, really frightening object. This manipulative little book, the temptation particularly for a young girl to pour out her heart to a diary, which is never something I was prone to, but my sister was. The power of something that answers you back, and at the time that I wrote that I’d never been in an Internet chat room. But I’ve since thought “Well it’s very similar.” Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don’t know who is answering you. And so that was always a very scary image to me, in the book, and I thought it worked very well in the film. You could understand when he started writing to see these things coming back to him, and the power of that, that secret friend in your pocket.

Steve: Yeah I’ve always loved that in the book. I thought that was just one of the great… that someone’s writing back to you that you do not know who they are and there is something inherently ominous in that, but the fact that they also know the secret you want to know and they’re inviting you, like a finger beckoning you into the past. I always thought that was an incredibly interesting concept.

Lizo: How different has it been working on the script for now the next movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?

Steve: Well we’ve just started, I honestly think it’s going as well as any of the others. Personally I feel it’s going to be the best movie.

JKR: Yeah, I think so too.

Steve: I think that we’re at a better place than we’ve ever been on the script.

JKR: Mm-hm.

Steve: And we’re months from starting shooting so I think it’s the best place we’ve been. I think Three could be really, really be interesting.

JKR: Yeah, I agree.

Lizo: Where does Three stand on your list of favorites?

JKR: Oh, I know it’s very corny and all to say it, but it’s like choosing between your children. It really is. But I have a very soft spot for Three because of a couple of the characters who crop up there for the first time. Lupin and Black, obviously very important characters and yeah, I’m really fond of them.

Lizo: So far you’ve had two very successful collaborations on Harry Potter, what are your hopes for the future of the Harry Potter series?

JKR: Well, I hope Steve keeps writing the scripts, because I’m used to him now, you know. Just keep being faithful to the books, I suppose. From my point of view I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?

Lizo: J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, author and the script writer, I’m sure we’re looking forward very much to the results of your future collaborations, thank you very much.

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Famosa autora corresponde-se com criança enferma

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Tradução: Pê Agá
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Grondahl, Paul. “Famous author corresponds with ailing child,” Albany Times Union, December 22, 2002

CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. — Once upon a time, a little girl who believed in magic fell in love with the Harry Potter books her mom read to her.

Her name was Catie Hoch. One day, doctors found a tumor in her kidney. She was 6. Neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer, quickly spread to her liver, lungs and spinal column.

Surgeons removed her kidney and adrenal gland, three-quarters of her liver and portions of her lungs. She endured seven rounds of high-dose chemotherapy, radiation and numerous clinical drug trials.

The sparkle drained from her blue eyes. She lost her curly blond hair. The treatments made her violently ill.

“She never complained or asked, “Why me?”‘ Catie’s mom said. “She was a ray of sunshine.”

Catie left her dad, two younger brothers and friends behind in their suburban Albany home when she and her mom moved to New York City while she received treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Catie rode the train to Penn Station dressed as Harry Potter. Sick, scared and living in a strange place, Catie took comfort in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling stories of good triumphing over evil.

She and her mom stayed at a Ronald McDonald House for 18 months, returning home for a visit every six weeks or so. They read all the Harry Potter books, one after the other.

They were nearing the end of the third book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” when doctors said Catie was losing her fight with cancer.

Catie had a wish. She wanted to have her mother read her book four, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” But Rowling was still writing it and the book wasn’t due out for many months. Catie did not have that long.

A friend of a friend sent an e-mail to Rowling’s publisher in England.

A short while later, an e-mail arrived.

“Dear Catie. I am working very hard on book four at the moment … on a bit that involves some new creatures Hagrid has brought along for the care of Magical Creatures classes. You are an extremely brave person and a true Gryffindor. With lots of love, J.K. Rowling (Jo to anybody in Gryffindor).”

Rowling sent Catie a plush stuffed owl named Pigwidgeon (a character in her book) for Valentine’s Day along with a card. Two weeks after Valentine’s Day, Rowling wrote again.

Catie dictated her replies to her mom, who typed them into their home computer and sent them to the author by e-mail. Mostly, Catie talked about the intricacies of the Harry Potter plot, her family and friends. And Rowling replied.

“I love you even more for telling me to make book four long, because I am worried about how long it’s getting. You’ve cheered me up a lot. Lots of love. Your friend right back. Jo XXX”

Catie defied doctors’ predictions and made it through her March birthday. She received a card and presents from Rowling, a plush cat and a dream decoder book.

Spring arrived, and Catie lapsed into a coma. When she awoke, she asked her mom to invite several of her girlfriends. Catie gave her American Girl dolls to her friends.

The end was near. Catie’s mom relayed this information to Rowling in an e-mail.

A phone call came to the Hochs’ Clifton Park home from Edinburgh, Scotland, on a Sunday afternoon. It was Rowling. She wanted to read parts of book four to Catie.

“We laid Catie down on the living room couch, and Jo read to her over the phone. Catie’s face just lit up,” her mom recalled.

Rowling called three or four more times to read to her, but Catie started failing so badly she couldn’t receive any more calls.

Catie died May 18, 2000. She was 9.

Three days later, Rowling wrote a message of condolence.

“Dear Gina and Larry. I have been away again. I’ve only just received your message. I have been praying that Catie would be released, that she would go where she can wait happily and painlessly for the rest of us to join her. But there are no words to express how sorry I am.

“I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie. I can only aspire to being the sort of parent both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right. With much love, Jo”

Rowling continued to write to Catie’s family in the ensuing weeks and shared in their feelings of grief and loss.

“I look back at Catie’s e-mails to me and happiness shines out of each and every one. Please don’t thank me for anything I did, because I feel truly honoured to have known your daughter, however briefly. Jo XXX”

Catie’s parents … Gina Peca, a homemaker, and Larry Hoch, a tax lawyer for General Electric Co. … established a nonprofit public charity in Catie’s memory.

The Catie Hoch Foundation raised $120,000 in two years and made gifts to Sloan-Kettering and to Ronald McDonald houses in New York, Boston and Albany to help children with neuroblastoma, the third most common form of pediatric cancer.

The foundation recently received a surprise, unsolicited donation of $100,000 from Scotland. It game from J.K. Rowling. And Catie’s mother told her story.

On the Web: http://www.catiehochfoundation.org.

Copyright (c) 2002, The Associated Press

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Rowling encontra um significado para a fama

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Tradução: Camila Weasley
Revisão: Adriana snape ** Adriana Snape

McQuillan, Rebecca. “Rowling finds a meaning in fame,” Bookshelf, December 2002
The creator of Harry Potter tells Rebecca McQuillan how celebrity and its trappings have given her the ability to campaign in memory of her mother

SHE may be an internationally renowned author with a fortune to rival Madonna’s but according to J K Rowling, it is not the financial rewards of success that have given her the most satisfaction since she shot to fame as the creator of Harry Potter. It is something far more personal. “For me, being able to campaign and fund-raise for multiple sclerosis is the most personally meaningful thing to have come out of being famous,” she says. “It would mean everything to me if I thought even one person did not have to go through what my mother did.”

In the two years since Rowling became patron of the Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland, she has foregone her well-guarded privacy to campaign and fund-raise on its behalf, driven on by the memory of her mother, Anne, who died of respiratory failure linked to MS when she was 45. Looking back now on her first two years as a campaigner, Rowling reveals that the personal thanks of MS sufferers and their families has meant a huge amount to her. “The biggest feedback I’ve got is from letters and people coming up to me in the street – people who have MS themselves or those with friends and relatives with MS – saying how happy they are to see the subject getting some media coverage,” she says.

A Hallowe’en Ball she hosted at Stirling Castle the weekend before the launch of {Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets }raised £275,000, smashing the target of £100,000. “I can’t tell you how happy that made me; I was still beaming about it at the film premiere two days later. We got enough money on that one night to double the number of MS nurses in Scotland, though we still need the commitment of health boards and the Scottish Executive.”

Talking exclusively to The {Herald }as a £500,000 MS research group, largely funded by Rowling, is launched in Aberdeen, the author says she is not just hopeful that a cure will be found – she is positive. The question is when. But she condemns the Scottish Executive’s failure to fund research into the disease or draw up national guidelines on care standards, even though Scotland has the highest per capita incidence of MS in the world.

She knows how it feels to watch a desperately loved relative suffer for lack of better care and treatment. Her mother, whom she has described as an energetic, youthful figure with a contagious laugh, a keen gardener who swam, played badminton, and walked the dog for miles, started having trouble lifting the teapot when the young Joanne was just 12. Anne put the pins’n’needles feeling she experienced down to a touch of rheumatism or a trapped nerve. But within two years it had spread up her arm and across her chest. At the age of 35, she was told she had multiple sclerosis, a neurological condition in which the body’s immune system malfunctions and starts attacking the brain and the spinal chord.

She remained “relentlessly cheerful” when anyone asked her about her health but when she was just over 40 she started using a wheelchair outside the house and, at 42, was using a walking frame inside it. Rowling last saw her just before Christmas 1990 and on New Year’s Eve, she died.

Rowling, 37, who has a nine-year-old daughter, Jessica, and is pregnant with her second child, deeply regrets that her mother did not have the help of specialist carers, such as nurses and physiotherapists, who could have helped her to overcome the isolation that increased as her mobility diminished. “Physiotherapy helped her physically when she received it, though we never seemed able to establish on-going care. People came and went; she was living in a rural area – just as so many people with MS are in Scotland,” she says.

“I saw my mother’s health decline steadily from the age of 35 until her death at 45. The care was intermittent and inadequate and she never came into sight of a specialist MS nurse. Nobody should have to suffer that lack of care or isolation in a rich, western country.”

Although no-one knows yet what causes MS, researchers believe genes may play a part. For Rowling, that worry does surface sometimes. “I was told when I was about 18 that there was a ‘familial tendency’ by a doctor I saw at university,” she says. “I understood that to mean that I’m a bit more likely to get MS than the next person, though a lot of people are the only ones in their family with MS and there seems to be no hereditary link at all. The only time I’ve ever been scared was last year when I hurt my back and my legs went numb for a while. It turned out that I was being paranoid, but it did bring back a lot of memories of my mother’s first symptoms.”

Rowling did not lack information about the condition when her mother was diagnosed because, like her mother, her reaction was to try to read as much as she could about it. She praises the MS Society Scotland (“I’ve never met so many dedicated people packed into such a small place”) which, for some Scottish MS sufferers, is the only source of information and support.

Informing the wider public about the disease is not so easy but TV can help. In the Emmy award-winning drama {The West Wing}, President Jed Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, has MS and manages to keep it quiet for years. Rowling is pleased that the disease features in the programme, not least because she and her family are “obsessed” by it. “Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that Jed Bartlett is fictional, so as to stop ourselves writing him fan mail,” she says. The more ardent among her Harry Potter fans will recognise the sentiment.

She points out that the fictional President Bartlett does not have a very severe form of MS, but, even so, agrees it is “very useful” to see a character living with the condition. It has not always been so sensitively portrayed. “I will never forget watching an episode of {Fame }with my mother when I was about 15 – she had just been diagnosed. A beautiful young dancer popped up in this particular episode and the curly-haired keyboard player character, whose name escapes me, fell in love with her. The dancer became progressively more ill and was diagnosed with MS in the space of about 20 minutes. And I remember my mother saying tearfully ‘but does she end up his girlfriend?’ Well, of course she didn’t – it was {Fame }- people weren’t allowed to be ill in {Fame}. She never appeared again. So I am all for President Bartlett fighting MS onscreen. I’ll bet there are a few people out there who found out what MS was from {The West Wing}, which can’t be bad.”

While TV may be doing its bit, she is much less impressed with the action, or lack of it, taken over the past three years by the Scottish Executive. Despite of the high incidence of MS in Scotland, where 10,400 people have the disease, many of them between 20 and 40, the Scottish Executive does not fund any research into the condition. Nor, as yet, has the executive set national clinical standards for MS care or assigned a higher priority to neurological conditions, as has been done in England and Wales.

Rowling says that the lack of progress makes her feel “perplexed and angry”.

“Perplexed because people with MS will tell you that the standard of care varies greatly depending on the area of Scotland in which you live. Angry – it’s obvious why.”

The lack of funding for research is “deeply disappointing”.

“The Westminster government does fund a small percentage of research into MS, but here in Scotland, nothing – and yet MS is more prevalent in Scotland than in any country in the world.”

There has been one major step forward in the past year. In February, the UK government forged a deal with pharmaceutical companies whereby Beta Interferon would be made available to those who could benefit from it, ending the bane of postcode prescribing. Rowling was delighted when she heard, not least because she felt that the argument against its use – its expense – was fallacious. “Compare the cost of maintaining somebody’s health and mobility – possibly so that they can continue working – with the cost of relegating them to a life-time of state-funded or family care. I’ve met people with MS whose partners have been forced to give up work to care for them full-time. I would be interested to hear how anyone thinks providing Beta Interferon is a more expensive option than having two people give up their jobs and become state-supported.”

The new group in Aberdeen is an important development for MS research in Scotland, where work on the fundamental causes of the disease is not well-represented.

The team will be headed by the internationally-renowned MS expert, Dr Chris Linnington, who has worked on MS at the Max Plank Institute for Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany, for the past 12 years.

Dr Linnington has high hopes for the research group and believes that if developments in research continue at their current rate, there could be important breakthroughs on the horizon.

“I would be surprised if we don’t see significant progress in the next 10 years. It may not be a cure, but it may mean we detect it earlier and find treatments that will delay the progress to such an extent that people may live well into old age.”

Aberdeen’s fame as a centre for medical imaging will help the researchers. Using nuclear mag-netic resonance they will be able to see what is happening inside the brains of sufferers. They will also investigate the reasons why the immune system appears to attack the optic nerve first in MS sufferers and to what extent genetic and environmental factors might contribute to causing the disease.

Rowling says she would be happy with any advance the group manages to make. For her part, she will continue campaigning. Given her commitment to awareness-raising, she might be expected to try and write a character with the disease into one of her multimillion-selling Harry Potter novels. Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. As Rowling explains: “One problem with the world of Hogwarts – or not, depending on how you look at it – is that, being wizards, they tend not to have to suffer what the rest of us do. I spent ages working out what magic could and couldn’t do with regard to illness and decided that normal human ailments – such as MS – could be cured. It’s a bit harder in the real world, but we’re going to see what we can do up in Aberdeen.

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