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Professor Robert Street was interviewed in 2005 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.
The following summary of Street's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers’ notes. The extract covers some applications of magnetism to biological situations. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Robert Street was born in 1920, in Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK. His home life and early schooling encouraged a love of science and he decided at 12 years of age that he would become a physics professor. He studied at King's College, London, (relocated to Bristol during the war) and earned a BSc Special in 1942. From 1941 to 1945 he worked for the Ministry of Supply, investigating the 'absolute measurement of power', specifically the power output of signal generators used to calibrate radar receivers. This work was extended into a PhD. In 1966 he was awarded a DSc from the University of London.
From 1945 to 1954 Street was a lecturer at the University of Nottingham. It was here that he began investigating the effects of magnetic fields on the mechanical properties of magnetic materials. In 1954 he became a senior lecturer in physics at Sheffield University. His research interests included low-temperature studies of magnetism.
Street moved to Australia in 1960 to become the foundation professor of physics at Monash University. At the university he was involved with university teaching and research, science education and communication, and science policy and funding.
In 1974 Street became director of the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the Australian National University. In addition to his director duties, he was on the UK-Australia committee which set up the Anglo-Australian telescope at Siding Spring, New South Wales.
From 1978 to 1986 Street was the vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia (UWA). After retiring as vice-chancellor, Street turned back to his research into magnetic materials. His work has included investigating the properties of permanent magnetic materials (particularly those in fine particle form such as nanoparticles), diagnosing rail deterioration and looking at applications of magnetism to biological situations.
Over his career, Street has received many honours. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1985 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001. He was awarded a DSc from UWA in 1988. In his honour, UWA awards the Robert Street Prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis each year.
Street was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1973. He is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics, has served on the Atomic Energy Advisory Committee and has been president of the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
Magnetism, I suppose, entwines our very being and our world around us. You have worked on a couple of projects in biomagnetism in recent years. Can you tell us how that came about?
All these things evolve – starting off with permanent magnets, we can end up with sunscreen. The magnetics lab, since its foundation, has evolved in different ways, and one way has been towards biomagnetism, the use of magnetic techniques in medicine, in biology. We have had two significant involvements with that.
The first one arose from a beautiful idea developed by Tim St Pierre, who worked in the lab. The principle is very simple. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a very good technique for imaging the internal structures of human bodies. It works because there are protons in the water that is contained in the body, and if you apply a magnetic field you can excite a proton into resonance; it will rotate. The idea of MRI is that you can detect that resonance signal and find where it was emitted, and thus you can plot the density of protons in the human body to get a pattern of what's going on. It is a very useful diagnostic tool.
Tim St Pierre thought, 'well, protons, when they are excited into resonance, do something else: they decay. They rotate and then they gradually slow down.' He noted that when protons are near iron, the rate of decay is increased – protons near iron deposits will decay more rapidly than others. He suggested that all you need to do is to change the protocol of the system's data collection, to measure not only frequency and location but the rate at which the thing relaxes. And he called this 'relaxometry'.
Now, why is this interesting and important? Well, there is a whole range of iron overload diseases, chiefly iron overload in the liver. And when he modified slightly the data collection of an MRI machine to look on relaxometry, sure enough, he got a three-dimensional pattern of the distribution of iron in the liver.
The importance of this is that the only other way of detecting iron in the liver is through a biopsy. You drill a little hole, take a cork borer, as it were, and pull out a sample. That is not very nice. It also is very localised – you might be near a whole great heap of iron but you won't find it if you've put in the probe in the wrong way. MRI, however, can give you a three-dimensional picture.
So now a company called Inner Vision Biometrics has been set up to work in this field. It will supply the modified sequence of pulses for a standard MRI to collect that information, and now the clever bit comes: 'You get our system of pulses, you collect the data, you send it by email to us, and we will analyse it and let you have the results in 24 hours, anywhere in the world.' That seems to me a stroke of genius.
And is that actually what's happening at the moment?
It is, and the company has been very successful. What is more, iron overload in the liver is prevalent in Mediterranean countries, particularly in Egypt, where the disease is of such distribution that the government supports any treatment for it. Once you get government support, the shares in the company go up!
Biomagnetism has also been applied in a treatment for liver cancer, I think.
Yes. That too began in the lab, in response to an idea that a professor of surgery at UWA had developed while he was still in Melbourne. He took small proteins in the form of microspheres and directed them through the vascular system to various places, including the liver. So by drug control he could deposit these microspheres in people's liver cancers. He then moved on to load the microspheres with yttrium – which can be made radioactive at Lucas Heights – because radioactive materials can destroy cancer.
Now came a further idea. If you heat any cell to above 45 degrees Celsius it dies. Would it be possible to heat the cancer, perhaps using radioactive treatment and heat treatment jointly? If so, how do you get the heat?
Well, you put in microspheres which have a core of magnetic material. You see, when you have a magnetic material and you cycle it through with a magnetic field, it heats. So you have now a non-invasive way of treating liver cancer. By putting your patient in the middle of a system of coils, perhaps, to produce varying magnetic fields, you heat the microspheres that you have loaded with magnetic materials and deposited in the liver cancer cells.
The original work on the processes responsible for the heating when you are applying magnetic fields was done in the laboratory by PhD students, and then of course it was taken over and developed medically, commercially, in this way. A company operating the process floated on the stock exchange quite some time ago.
So there would be a world of applications there, most of which probably haven't even been thought up yet.
I think that's so.
Do you still have much involvement with the magnetics lab?
Oh, I go in. The real problem is that the young are getting much too clever these days!
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
cancer treatment
liver
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
magnetic field
magnetism
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