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Dame Bridget Ogilvie was interviewed in 2011 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge and view science as a human endeavour. These interviews specifically tie into the Australian Curriculum sub-strand ‘Nature and development of science’.
The following summary of Dame Ogilvie’s career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers’ notes. The extract discusses her research into parasites and their immune response. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Bridget Margaret Ogilvie was born in Glen Innes, New South Wales in 1938. She finished her secondary education at New England Girls’ School in 1955. Ogilvie then enrolled in a science degree at the University of Queensland (1956), but quickly realised a greater passion for rural science. She transferred to the University of New England where she completed a BRurSc (Hons I) degree, graduating with the University medal (1960). Ogilvie was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship which enabled her to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge, England (1960–64). Her thesis research investigated immunity to intestinal nematodes.
In 1963 Ogilvie was invited to join the department of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London. She was appointed first as a Wellcome Animal Health Trust fellow (1963–66), and then as a member of scientific staff (1966–81). During this time Ogilvie visited the CSIRO Division of Animal Health (1971–72) and later went on a part-time secondment as coordinator of the Tropical Medicine Program for the Wellcome Trust (1979–80). Ogilvie found the latter experience so rewarding that she joined the Wellcome Trust full time in 1981. She spent almost the next 20 years with the Wellcome Trust, as deputy secretary and assistant director (1981–84), deputy director of science (1984–89), director of science programs (1989–91) and director (1991–98). In the same period, Ogilvie was a trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry (1992–2003) and was on the UK Council for Science and Industry (1993–2000). Since leaving the Wellcome Trust Ogilvie has served on numerous advisory boards and committees including the AstraZeneca Science Teaching Trust (1998–2006), Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (1998–2002), Association of British Science Writers (2000–03) and Association of Medical Research Charities (2002–07).
Dame Bridget has received many honours and awards for her contributions to science and medical research, including 24 honorary doctorates. Other honours include the inaugural Distinguished Alumni award from the University of New England (1993), the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran prize (1994), Dame Commander of the British Empire (1996), the Wooldridge Memorial medal from the British Veterinary Society (1998), the Australian Society for Medical Research medal (2000), High Steward of the University of Cambridge (2001–2010), the Kilby award (2003), the Duncan Davies Memorial medal (2004), the Ralph Doherty QIMR prize (2006) and Companion of the Order of Australia (2007). Dame Bridget Ogilvie was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 2003 and to the fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 2008.
Parasitic PhD
What about the work itself? What about the lab?
I had a lot of fun doing that. I was given a problem which I didn’t think was doable for a single person. So I quickly changed my plans and discussed it with Soulsby. He essentially left me alone to get on with it. It was one of those old-fashioned PhDs, quite common then, where more or less you were allowed to choose a problem and told ‘please give me your thesis in three years time and I’ll see if it’s okay’.
Britain wasn’t very good at PhDs way back.
No, it wasn’t.
They were a German invention, which they were quite leery [suspicious] about.
Absolutely. I was already a very independent person, and this kind of independence suited me. There were three or four of us in the lab and we all got on well and supported each other. I think that often happens. It is a peer group support system.
What was your parasite of choice and what were you trying to follow up?
It was a little nematode parasite of the gut of rats and mice called Nippostrongylus brasiliensis. It was a very good thing to work with because it was easy to maintain in the lab. This was not long after the veterinary group up in Glasgow had invented a vaccine for cattle lungworm, so the whole world of parasitology was very interested in seeing if you could reproduce that in all sorts of other nematodes. I set about looking at the antigenicity of each life cycle stage of that parasite. We were also trying to culture it in vitro. It was fun. I had a very nice time, I enjoyed myself and I eventually got my PhD.
Subversive parasite infection
Your field is parasitology, but some of it is a bit abstract, for example, immunology. Were you able to talk about that stuff as well?
What I was trying to do, really, was to find out why these parasites didn’t induce an immune response that got rid of them. In the early sixties, we knew so little about the immune response. We knew that antibodies existed, but we knew nothing about their diversity and how they developed to be so specific. We didn’t know what the lymphocyte did until about that time. Jim Gowans showed what the lymphocyte did — it was key to the whole immune response. We didn’t know about T and B cells and the role of the thymus. The whole thing about soluble factors and cell receptors was long into the future.
Isn’t it amazing. As we speak, it is now the 50th anniversary of the time when Jacques Miller and others announced the function of the thymus gland which people thought was just in the neck for packing or something.
I know. What we did was to be closely involved with the immunology and see what happened in a major infection. What these parasites do is to stimulate an amazingly complex, massive immune response. I suppose there were two key things my contemporaries and I did as research scientists. One was to show that as well as all the usual immunoglobulin G antibody responses and increases in leucocytes associated with infections in general, helminths induce an enormous immunoglobulin E response and a huge proliferation of a special type of mast cell. The immunoglobulin E antibodies are associated with allergy and the special type of mast cells are found in the gut wall and in the mucous-producing goblet cells found amongst the cells that line the inner surface of the gut. All these responses are under T lymphocyte control. Because of this great variety of immune responses, the task of analysing why infected animals may fail to expel their parasite was daunting. I left doing research in the early stages of this analysis.
What is the answer to that: the immune response and how it downplayed it?
What the parasites do is that they subvert the immune response. They induce regulatory T lymphocytes and special regulatory macrophages. These subvert not only the immune responses to the parasites themselves but sometimes to other things. For example, it has been suggested for many years that if you are parasitised with helminths, you won’t get so allergic. There is now real evidence that that is the case. The parasite subverts the immune response not just to itself but to other things. These are very cunning infections because they rarely kill people or animals — unless you have too big an infection. And previous generations of humans, up until very recently, were parasitised like this. Humans free of parasites, as we are, are historical accidents. So it is not surprising that parasites have the capacity to subvert.
There is a parallel with the hookworm story, which we have been dealing with quite often in recent times on radio programs. People have actually taken hookworms, infected themselves and, having done that, find their own diseases are reduced. In fact, sometimes their diseases just disappear. Isn’t it amazing?
But that shows you how insidious they are and how dangerous they are in people in marginal economies. If you’re infected, you don’t feel well, you find it more difficult to work and you find it more difficult to do anything. They are incredibly subtle dangers to the human race, but they don’t often kill.
An edited transcript of the full interview can be found at http://www.science.org.au/scientists/interviews/bo.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. These activities align with the Australian Curriculum strands ‘Science Understanding’, ‘Science as a Human Endeavour’ and ‘Science Inquiry Skills’, as well as the New South Wales Stage 6 Biology outcome 9.4.5 and the Stage 6 Agriculture syllabus. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
Related publication: The Science of Immunisation: Questions and Answers
parasite
parasitology
host
immune response
immunology
life cycle
worm
lymphocyte
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