Jean Laby was born in 1915 in Melbourne, Victoria. She received a BSc in 1939, an MSc in 1951 and a PhD in 1959, all from the University of Melbourne. Laby was employed by the University in 1940 to work in the Department of Natural Philosophy, later named the Physics Department. Serving initially as a part-time demonstrator she was appointed to the position of lecturer in 1959. Her research was in the area of cosmic rays and wind studies. While continuing as a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, from 1961-80, Laby also held a position as senior lecturer at the RAAF Academy at Point Cook, Victoria. During this time her research included radar meteorology and balloon-borne cameras as well as cosmic radiation measurements. From 1972-80 Laby was involved in the Climatic Impact Assessment Program. In collaboration with the University of Wyoming, she measured atmospheric aerosols, ozone and water vapour in the stratosphere. Dr Laby passed away in 2008.

Interviewed by Ms Nessy Allen in 2000.

Contents

• Introduction
• 'I was always interested in science': like father, like daughter
• Gaining useful skills and contacts
• Laying the foundations of a career
• Cosmic rays and high-altitude balloons
• What goes up must be tracked until it comes down
• Criss-crossing the world in not enough days
• The balloons join the Air Force and the research goes on
• The Climatic Impact Assessment Program
• Opportunities and some recognition

Introduction

Dr Jean Laby was probably Australia's sole woman atmospheric physicist of her generation. Indeed, in an era when it was rare for a woman to be a scientist at all, she was one of the very few who took up what was considered to be the most masculine of the sciences, physics. The fact that she had to endure unequal treatment, which very few women would tolerate today, may partly be explained by her choice. Her research was highly specialised and entailed working under very difficult physical conditions, demanding qualities of sheer courage and determination. These she possessed in abundance. During her career she attracted large research grants for work in the southern hemisphere to supply wind data, to assess the effects of supersonic transport and to measure aerosol particles up to the stratosphere.

'I was always interested in science': like father, like daughter

For a girl to become a physicist in Australia before World War II was very unusual. Do you think your father influenced you in that direction? Perhaps you would tell us about your parents.

My father was born in Creswick, Victoria. At 29 he became professor of physics at Victoria College, Wellington, New Zealand, where my mother was born. They were married in London, and returned to New Zealand soon afterwards. They stayed there until my father was appointed professor of natural philosophy – now called physics – at the University of Melbourne. In 1931 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London where he developed the practical teaching and promoted research. According to Sir Mark Oliphant, it was the best university school of physics in the southern hemisphere.

Where did you live?

I was born in 1915, in Parkville (near the university), and my sister was born in South Yarra. I remember us living in South Yarra, where we used to go for walks in the nearby Botanical Gardens. Just inside the gate was a pond into which my father used to put his walking-stick and show us that it appeared bent – the effect of refraction. Later we moved to the university grounds. Living there was quite good for me as a child because the grounds were very extensive, and when I was an undergraduate it was convenient to go to lectures. Also it suited my father very well, because he could work at night.

Quite often my sister and I would go with him at night to his department. I remember one occasion when we were there preparing for the lecture he was to give next morning. The experiment was to put a tennis ball into a container of liquid air (which is very cold) and then to try to bounce it, when it would just smash. But unfortunately the ball wasn't at the right temperature, and so when he tested the bounce it didn't break – it came back, hit a flask on the desk and broke it! On other occasions he spent many hours inspecting all areas of the department and showed particular interest in the workshop, and how the work was progressing.

Were you interested in science at school?

Oh yes, I was always interested in it. I went to Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School, where I studied physics, chemistry and mathematics up to matriculation. The school had what was called the Howard system: the subjects were divided into six units and you could take all six or only one or two, according to your preference, so you could get much further ahead in some subjects than in others, which I did in science and mathematics. Although my father didn't directly influence my choice of subjects, he saw to it that I had a good teacher of physics, because when a rather elderly teacher retired he ensured that she was replaced by a more up-to-date one, Elizabeth Pownall, a recent MSc graduate of natural philosophy. Actually, when I matriculated I thought I might do either architecture or physics at university, but finally chose to do physics. That meant going to my father's lectures, but I was much too nervous to enjoy them very much.

Were there any women on the staff of the Department of Natural Philosophy?

Yes, there were two women senior demonstrators, Misses Natalie Allen and Edith Nelson. They were there for many years before being promoted to lecturer. Miss Allen gave some short courses of lectures as well as demonstrating.

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Gaining useful skills and contacts

You mentioned architecture. During your undergraduate course in Melbourne you took graphics – architectural drawing – in the School of Engineering. Why was that?

My father thought it was a better subject to do than mixed mathematics, which was rather the same as physics. You had to draw all sorts of things, either freehand or with a steel pen that needed great care and attention. I wasn't any good at free-hand drawing. I had a much too shaky hand. I was the only girl in the class, and at first they never called my name on the roll – because, they said, it was so obvious I was there. Having so many male students around made it very difficult to get to the piece of railway line or whatever you were supposed to be measuring and drawing, but one day another student, Rupert Leslie, brought out a piece of line so that I could draw it. He became a friend for life! I gave up doing the subject anyway, shortly after.

I went also to the Working Men's College (now the RMIT) and learnt to blow glass. It was useful to be able to do that because a lot of apparatus was made of glass at that time. That was a night class, and when the boilermakers appeared for the next class we had to make a hasty retreat with our hot glass.

I think that through your father you met Lord Rutherford.

Yes, when we went to England with my father in 1936. I met Lord Rutherford first at a lecture he gave at the Royal Institution and then later at a Royal Society soiree.

Also, in Cambridge, where he lived, there was a very big meeting of academics assembled for the congress of the Universities of the British Empire which my father attended, and we had breakfast with him then.

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Laying the foundations of a career

You graduated in 1940 with a major in physics. Did your father help you to choose a career?

No. He thought I should do that on my own, and left me to my own devices. I answered a newspaper advertisement for a job at the Weather Bureau. I went there for an interview and they showed me around, but they were a bit concerned: beds were provided for the observers to sleep on between taking observations at night, and they didn't quite know how I would fit into that situation. I gather they didn't expect a woman to apply for the job, but eventually I did get it.

I didn't take up the position, though, because by this time the war had started and most of the young physics graduates were employed by the Optical Munitions Panel to produce optical instruments for the forces. Consequently there was a shortage of demonstrators in the Department of Natural Philosophy and I was chosen to become a part-time demonstrator.

You also had something to do with the Optical Munitions Panel, didn't you?

Yes. There was no glass available in Australia of good enough quality for optical instruments, so the Optical Munitions Panel decided to investigate the manufacture of suitable glass in Australia. Professor Hartung, the professor of chemistry, devised a method to do this, and from it optical lenses and 'flats', very flat pieces of glass, were made. The lenses were then made into various instruments in the Natural Philosophy Department, and I had to keep separate costs for each of these things they did so an account could be sent.

In 1946 I asked the interim head of the department, Dr Hercus, if I could do some research. At his suggestion I worked on the measurement of the conductivity of water. For some years conductivity measurements had been made of gases, but there were extra problems with liquids. For this work I obtained an MSc.

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Cosmic rays and high-altitude balloons

What did you do next?

At that time Dr V D Hopper offered me the opportunity to work on the cosmic ray project which he was doing with a group of others. I knew him quite well, as he used to come and help my father with the revision of his book, tables of physical and chemical constants, and I used to help with that too. Even when we went on holidays my father sometimes didn't stop work, and Vic and I used to help him then with the revision also.

How did you detect the cosmic rays?

We used nuclear emulsions, which were thick layers of photographic emulsion on a thin glass plate. They were exposed to cosmic radiation by sending them up into the atmosphere, using balloons because aeroplanes did not get quite high enough.

There were two different types of balloons: expandable neoprene, which was an artificial rubber, and non-expandable plastic ones, which were not commercially available. You could make those yourself but they needed an enormous room and were very difficult to deal with (you had to test that there were no leaks at the joins and so on) so we didn't use them. We used neoprene on the whole.

How big were these balloons?

The neoprene ones were about 3 to 6 metres in diameter, but they got up to 10-plus metres in the atmosphere when they expanded. The plastic ones were a different order of magnitude altogether, with diameters of hundreds of metres, and had to be launched by quite different methods. It took a team of people with trucks, cranes and goodness knows what to get everything into position, and the use of an aerodrome runway for launch.

How did you modify your balloons so that they would stay up for long periods?

The balloons were filled with hydrogen to make them ascend and as they went up into the more rarefied atmosphere they expanded and ultimately got to a stage where they burst – and that was the end of the flight. Our group, working together, devised a valve at the neck to keep them from bursting. The valves consisted of a metal tube with a ping-pong ball in the top to form a seal, the bell was attached to the top of the balloon by a length of string just less than the bursting diameter. A soft spring held the ping-pong ball down until the string unwound from the outside of the tube; when it reached the set height, the string lifted the valve and let out some of the hydrogen; and the balloon then just went on at that constant level.

Because the balloons would remain at a level height and float like that for hours, they gave our plates a very long exposure to the cosmic rays. The plates had to be recovered and then they were developed. They produced black grains where the rays had been through the emulsion and you could determine their properties from these, examining them under a microscope. We could also compare the results at different altitudes, varying the height at which we wanted the level flights by adjusting the length of the string. The longer the string, the higher the balloon would go, so long as it remained under the bursting diameter.

I understand that by 1952 your balloons reached above 24 kilometres and stayed there for about three hours, and by 1953 you got them up to 38 kilometres.

Yes. It was quite an achievement, I guess. In fact, the manufacturers of the balloons in America didn't believe the heights we got. (I once saw how they used to predict the diameter at which the balloons would burst: it was done just by blowing them up gradually in an enormous room, to bursting point, measuring this size.)

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What goes up must be tracked until it comes down

Where did you launch the cosmic ray flights from?

Somewhere in Victoria, around Melbourne. For any of the balloon flights that were going to be in the air for a long time, the wind patterns would determine where you needed to launch them and where they were expected to end up. We needed somewhere good for recovery on landing – not in a forest or the sea. So on the day before a flight, we let a balloon off on its own, without any load, and then calculated what the winds were up to the required height, and forecast its trajectory.

After the pre-flight to forecast the wind, we had to prepare the balloon. That necessitated putting the valve in with the string and attaching it to the top of the balloon, before boiling the neoprene balloons (which performed better when they were boiled) and putting them in a plastic bag to take to the launch site the next day. Then we obtained from the weather bureau their forecasts as to where the skies would be clear of clouds so we could use our theodolites. Later on, the weather bureau were very cooperative and allowed us to use their radar at Laverton, which made it a much simpler operation, a different story altogether: there was only one place around Melbourne – the Laverton station – to operate for the tracking. That meant for tracking you were some distance from where the balloon was launched, and to find the balloon on the radar was sometimes difficult, particularly not knowing the exact time of release.

What did you have to carry with you to the launching site?

To launch the balloon with the cosmic ray equipment we had to go quite a distance to the selected spot. We had to take the two theodolites, the hydrogen cylinders, balloons, timers, maps of course, and radio communication, to wherever it was – and all this had to be packed up and put on a truck. A team of three or four would go out. The theodolites were set up a few miles apart, in sight of each other. They were aligned by using flashing mirrors between the two and were then ready to observe the flight when the balloon was launched. You kept it in sight, taking minute readings, until the load was dropped off. The load was unhooked from the balloon by the unwinding of an alarm clock, so that had to be set at the right time beforehand.

Later the government set up the HIBAL launching station, near Mildura, to launch the much bigger plastic type balloons for scientists from overseas, as well as Australia. We used to provide the wind information, using flights with our balloons with the valves because they went up much higher than the ordinary meteorological balloons and the plastic type balloons would be going much higher. I would do a flight the day before as a wind forecast. Some of these flights were very long and I assisted the bureau observers by using the radar for some of the many hours needed in order to track the balloon throughout its flight, sometimes from pre-sunrise and sometimes right through the night as well.

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Criss-crossing the world in not enough days

Didn't you go to South Africa to continue your work on the cosmic rays?

Yes. Vic Hopper had obtained some large research grants from the Nuffield Foundation – one in 1956 of about £3000, and another one of £5000, with which we could go to South Africa and South America for further work.

We set off in 1959 by ship, taking a van with us. We took two or three weeks to get to Cape Town, where we had a few flights, and then we went northwards in the van and also a car which the Nuffield Foundation had given us in Cape Town. I drove that. We stopped at Potchefstroom, where some South African scientists were interested in flying balloons, and showed them how to launch a balloon and so forth before we continued to Pretoria. But unfortunately that one was never recovered, because in calculating its descent time they thought it would land directly underneath where it started to come down, instead of allowing for the descent pattern of winds.

After some flights in Pretoria, we went further north to Beira, in Mozambique, for Dr Hopper's wife and sons to catch a ship home. (They had accompanied us so far on this trip.) We then returned to Cape Town.

Unfortunately, the ship we were booked on to go on to South America had been wrecked in a typhoon, so we began to run late on our program. The next ship took another few weeks to get to Rio de Janeiro and then although the people in South America were trying to be helpful, nothing ever got done. There was great trouble in getting the van off the ship: they kept it strung up on a hoist on the ship for hours and we knew if you were not standing on the wharf to take possession, it, or its contents, would have been quickly disposed of. We spent a few days on that 'activity' – by which time my leave had run out and I had to return home. So I got back on the same ship and returned to Cape Town. In Cape Town the Customs people had charged us duty on any of our balloons that we had flown and lost. They thought they were toys, which were highly dutiable! Having paid the duty on the balloons we didn't take home, I tried to explain they were not toys and to get a refund, without success.

Your group concentrated on intensive field work during International Geophysical Year (1957–58) as well, didn't you?

Yes. We increased the number of balloon flights to determine the winds to maximum heights and we also studied all our cosmic ray flights, also we provided valved balloons for the weather bureau to conduct flights at several stations to achieve greater heights. The results of those flights were analysed and published.

And the balloons went higher and higher?

Well, yes. I think our highest went to 154,000 feet (about 47 kilometres).

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The balloons join the Air Force and the research goes on

By 1961 Professor Martin was responsible for setting up the Royal Australian Air Force Academy at Point Cook, about 30 kilometres from Melbourne. What was your connection with the academy?

Dr Hopper was appointed professor of physics and dean of university studies at the academy and he asked me to join the staff as a senior lecturer, which I did. We then had an office there as well as one at the university.

We still continued research on the measurement of cosmic radiation, as well as a few minor projects with radar meteorology and balloon-borne cameras. We got a photograph of Port Phillip Bay from a balloon directly above it – and setting the camera to make the exposure just when the balloon was over the bay took a bit of calculating!

Were there any other women academic members of staff in your department?

No. But just before I retired, there was one other woman, Elizabeth Sonnenberg in the mathematics department.

What would you say about the physical conditions in which you worked at the University of Melbourne and also at the Point Cook Academy?

The rooms we were given at the University of Melbourne were terrible: dirty, and smelly. But at Point Cook it was a different story. The rooms were very good, you got a doormat (if you were of a certain status), and I had a wardrobe with a holder for my swords.

Travelling between the two places took about 30 to 45 minutes. Telephone communication between the two places was difficult because the Air Force used to start at 8am and had lunch at 11am, whereas the University of Melbourne started at 9am, with lunch at 1pm. There was not a great deal of time in which to communicate with colleagues between the two places, and besides, you couldn't dial directly: you had to get the Air Force telephone exchange to put you through to the university.

I believe that not long after the academy was set up, there were rumours that it would close down.

Yes. It was quite awkward, because a lot of the staff felt that they would be better to get another position and also it was very difficult for new students to come for research without knowing whether the academy would close before they finished their PhD. I stayed, and fortunately the academy wasn't closed down until a few years after I retired. The Australian Defence Force Academy was set up in Canberra for the Army and Navy as well as the Air Force.

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The Climatic Impact Assessment Program

In 1972 you became involved in the Climatic Impact Assessment Program of the United States Department of Transportation, funded by the United States Office of Naval Research.

That's right. It was a global study of aerosols in the atmosphere, and the department of physics in the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, asked me to take part in providing the data for the southern hemisphere area. They had devised a dust-sonde to measure the aerosols, which were of particles two sizes: greater than 0.3 and greater than 0.5 micron. They were to supply this instrument and I would fly it in Australia. For quite a while John Gras, a post-graduate student, cooperated with these flights until he went to the CSIRO. I continued the flights with the help of a technician, although we continued to cooperate with the resulting data.

I think you sampled the atmosphere to the lower stratosphere, about 30 kilometres up.

Yes, we went as high as we could get. These flights were carried out with plastic balloons for greater height (with the heavier leads). We measured the two sizes of aerosols, water vapour, ozone, and the atmospheric pressure and wind patterns. Then we analysed the records – some were on paper charts and others on recorded tape, and these had to be hand read and measurements made from them to get the figures to feed into a programmable electronic calculator – for the final results tabulated by hand.

The aim was to assess the transport of particles that could have been put out by the supersonic transports, to see what effect this would have on the atmosphere. We wanted to establish whether there was a transfer of air between the two hemispheres over the equator. Some nuclear testing was being carried out at this time above ground, and information was needed on how far and in what direction radioactive material could travel.

Weren't there military implications to this kind of work?

Well, there was no constriction on us at all. We freely published anything we found.

What did this program involve in Australia?

The dust-sondes and subsidiary equipment had to be transported to Mildura and Longreach, Queensland, for their flights. Getting the equipment to Mildura wasn't so hard. Originally we used to pack it all into a hired van and put it – van and all – on the train, which got there reasonably quickly overnight. Longreach was somewhat harder. Because of the airline timetable I had to spend overnight in Brisbane, and sometimes the airlines wouldn't let me leave the equipment in the airport. So I had to trolley it to a locker for storage, collect it from there at dawn next day, and get it onto the aircraft for a 6am flight to Longreach.

Afterwards, of course, it all had to be repacked and brought back. The dust-sondes were sent back to America to be calibrated, for return to Australia for another flight.

The balloons, a larger plastic type, were launched by the team at HIBAL at Mildura and Longreach and we had to set up receiving equipment and recalling for receiving of signals transmitted from the balloon. This took quite a lot of work too. The balloons were tracked by the weather bureau radar and HIBAL recovered the equipment.

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Opportunities and some recognition

Didn't you go to Laramie for some work with the University of Wyoming group?

Yes, for two study leaves and several shorter visits. I worked on the dust-sonde instruments and eventually learned how to calibrate them so that I didn't have to send them back to Laramie all the time. And among other programs I did a test of a device being used – to measure water vapour, which showed it was not reliable.

After that I maintained and calibrated dust-sondes in Melbourne. Laramie is 5000 feet high, with very clean air, but in Melbourne University I was working right next to the tramline and in a not very clean building, so it was rather difficult, as it was necessary to see the sonde was not contaminated with dust before calibration.

Your work must have created great interest, because in 1975 you were awarded a $US25,000 contract by the United States Office of Naval Research, in collaboration with the Division of Cloud Physics of CSIRO.

Yes. I went to ONR in Washington for discussions, and was awarded the contract. The CSIRO group had developed a different method of measuring from the Wyoming dust-sonde, and our work gave both unique data on the stratospheric aerosols and a valuable cross-check of the validity of the two techniques – the one using in situ light scatter and the other, electron microscope analysis of collected particles. For the first time these two methods were demonstrated to be in agreement.

Analysis of the southern hemisphere aerosol data provided interesting and unique information on atmospheric circulation, particularly of inter-hemisphere transport. When there was a volcanic eruption, this provided material that could be checked with the dust-sondes and so we could make deductions about the stratospheric transport methods. That was then applied to the exhaust gases of supersonic aircraft, and an estimate could be made of their residence time and their trajectory.

How long did you go on with this work?

Till 1980, when I retired from the academy. But in 1981 I made one last visit to Laramie to discuss all the results of this work. And in 1998 the Laramie group came to Mildura to make some flights to check whether layers of higher concentration of aerosols could still be found in the lower part of the atmosphere. (These had been detected in September and October of several different years.) At their invitation I went to Mildura and participated in a minor way in the flights, which took place at about midnight when aircraft activity had ceased.

Did you ever feel discriminated against because you were a woman – apart from the fact that your name was not even called out at lectures in architectural drawing?

No, not really. But sometimes the Air Force cadets, when they came into the lectures in the morning, would say, 'Good morning, sir.' And at other times, when I went to physics society meetings, they would say, 'Lady and gentlemen…'

Although you were never promoted beyond senior lecturer – nor given any reasons why not – you have a record of publications in world-class journals, working with first-rate physicists and attracting huge sums of money for research. Your contributions to this field have been enormous and your world-class work has been acknowledged by many, including Dr John Gras, Principal Research Scientist in the Division of Atmospheric Research at CSIRO, who is an expert in your field. Thank you very much indeed, Jean, for participating in this interview.

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Garth William Paltridge was born in Brisbane in 1940. He completed a BSc with honours at the University of Queensland (1961) before moving south to Melbourne. Paltridge was awarded an MSc and PhD (1965) from the University of Melbourne. In 1966, Paltridge took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in the USA. He changed continents again in 1967 and became a senior science officer at the Radio and Space Research Station in the UK.

Paltridge returned to Australia in 1968 to the CSIRO Division of Meteorological Physics (eventually re-named as the Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research). He began as a research scientist and was promoted over the following eleven years to reach the level of chief research scientist. In 1990 Paltridge became professor and director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies at the University of Tasmania (1990-2002). He was then instrumental in setting up one of the first Cooperative Research Centres, the CRC for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (1991). He was director of the Antarctic CRC until his retirement in 2002. He then became an emeritus professor and honorary research fellow at the University of Tasmania and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University Research School of Biology.

Interviewed by Professor Graham Farquhar in 2010.

Contents

• Raised in the lab
• A very good time at university
• Electric PhD
• Flying through thunderstorms
• Hungry UK scientists
• Homeward bound for more fun experiments
• Earth's temperature controlled by clouds
• C.R.A.P.P.Y.
• Principle of Maximum Entropy Production
• Involvement with Industry
• "Sabbaticals"
• Cooperative Research Centre
• Respectable scepticism: The Climate Caper
• Two kinds of research: problem solving vs following your nose
• Life outside Radiation Physics
• IPCC
• Work of the team

Hello. I am Graham Farquhar. I am Vice President and Secretary Biological at the Australian Academy of Science. It is my honour and privilege to be interviewing Professor Garth Paltridge, who is here in Canberra today. He is famous for his work in atmospheric physics and radiation physics, his contributions to agriculture, and his development of the theory of maximum entropy production. I am delighted that he is here. Welcome, Garth.

Raised in the lab

Garth, where were you born?

I was born in Brisbane. I was brought up for the first seven or eight years in Gatton Agricultural College, which was a good place to be brought up in. It is about 50 miles west of Brisbane. My father was an agronomist with CSIRO, would you believe! At that time he was running a fairly small CSIRO research lab on the grounds of the Agricultural College I can remember lots of glasshouses, and pots with plants in them being given different fertiliser treatments. At night-time my father would be there pounding away at a calculating machine. It quite put me off biology. On the other hand, he had a hobby, which was audio amplifiers and the hi-fi of the day. So I can also remember huge electronic amplifiers, loud speakers, huge baffle boards and very loud classical music, which was rather louder than I could put up with. In any event, it did give me something of a feel for classical music.

How long did you stay at Gatton?

Until I was about seven or eight. I am not absolutely sure. After that, my parents moved to Brisbane where my father was a sort of chief of the 'Cunningham Laboratories'. I am not absolutely certain about the name, but they were the predecessors of the CSIRO Division of Tropical Pastures. I can remember that in those days various pooh-bahs from CSIRO in Canberra and Melbourne would come up and occasionally have dinner at our house. I sat on the sidelines and heard a bit about CSIRO. I can remember I used to think it was a terrific organisation. I am not so sure that it is quite so terrific these days, but it was good then.

What about your schooling? Where did you go to school?

I went to various state schools until the year before what was called the 'scholarship year' in Queensland. My father got a job in Ceylon at the Coconut Research Establishment. So I was sent off to boarding school at Brisbane Boys' College and enjoyed myself very much. Particularly as, after a few years, having realised that I was not terribly keen on the politically correct sports of cricket and football, I joined a mob of kids who took to gymnastics. We became quite good at it and became quite respectable in the eyes of the school, so life improved greatly after that. In the present context, the most important thing about the school was the maths teacher, who was a fellow called Pete Laughton. He was a superb teacher and seemed to know the right balance between learning by rote and the understanding of something. It was his teaching that carried me through at least the first couple of years of university mathematics and enabled me to survive (just!) the mathematics of third year.

What is your feeling about rote learning?

Suffice it to say that I don't go along with the current philosophy, which seems to be that you have to understand something before you can learn it. I think, in most things in life, it is exactly the opposite. Particularly multiplication tables and things like that. If you don't 'learn to rote learn', you are missing a lot in life. That is my philosophy and I'm sticking to it!

What did your mother do and did she have any influence on getting you into science?

My mother was one of a family of 12 brothers and sisters and she did not have a formal 'career'. She was the oldest of the 12 kids, so she had to spend a lot of time looking after the family as she grew up. But she was very good at supporting my father in his efforts in science, and put up with an awful lot. He, like many forgetful scientists, could rush away and forget to pick her up for instance, when she was supposed to be taken somewhere to do something. She took all this in her stride.

What did she do in Ceylon – in Sri Lanka as it now called?

I don't know. I'm sorry about that; I really don't know. I presume that she looked after my father and was a hostess for the very many parties that seemed to go on in Ceylon in those days. I went to visit them twice during the three or four years that they were away in Ceylon, and they lived rather well. This was in the days of the old Colombo Plan. My father at that stage was doing research on what sort of pastures it might be possible to grow under coconut trees.

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A very good time at university

What happened subsequently at university?

I went to university; it must have been from 1957 to 1961. I majored in physics. I very nearly failed the first-year. I was living in St John's College, at the University of Queensland, and it was a great change from the constraints of a boarding school to the lack of constraints in a university college. I had a very good time. I can remember, in the middle of the physics exam at the end of the first year, suddenly realising that I could probably fail this subject, because I hadn't done any work in it. Sometimes I still wake up with dreams about it, sweating about it. If I had failed, it would have been the end of my university career. But I just made it by the skin of my teeth.

I enjoyed university life, but I can't really remember any of the lecturers or even the subjects much. I can remember that one of my pieces of luck was that my father had introduced me at an early age to a thing called the Radio Amateurs Handbook. That was a superb book for teaching you the practicalities of electronics. In those days, if you didn't know any electronics, you didn't get very far in physics. Just the reading of that book when I had been a young teenager made a tremendous difference as to what I could get away with in the university. Incidentally, that little incident where I nearly failed first year was also fortunate because it gave me such a fright that I worked like stink for the rest of the two years. Indeed, I got a high distinction in physics in second year. So things worked out all right in the end.

The other story I remember from my university days had to do with the very first chemistry practical class that I ever had. We were told by the tutors that we were marked not on what we produced in the experiment but how we wrote up what we did, and you had to be terribly honest about writing up what happened. The very first experiment was to produce aspirin, salicylic acid. Mine turned out to be pink, and I gather that aspirin is white, and so they failed me on that day. I learnt then and there that, in order to get on in this world of the university chemistry school and, indeed, the physics school, you made sure that you got the right results in the physics and chemistry practical classes. I did, mostly by rigging the results. That sounds dreadful but, if you rig results, you really have to learn and know more about the subject than if you did the experiments straight. Because you have got to be able to tell a good story and you have to learn to look at an experiment from all sorts of different directions. That is in case the demonstrators caught you out. It was all very good training as to how one ought to be sceptical about real life experiments when one gets out of the classroom and does experiments for real. It was not very honest, but it was good training.

What did you do for your honours year?

The honours year in those days in Queensland was very tough. We had a vast amount of lectures and we also had to do a major practical experiment. I have forgotten what my experiment was. But, after that honours year, leaving Queensland University and going to Melbourne University, I found that its honours year was not very tough at all. I felt sort of cheated.

Electric PhD

In any event, after Queensland University and the honours year there, I went to Adelaide for a job interview with DSTO – that is, with the Defence Science people. On the way, I visited Professor Hopper, who was a Professor of Physics in Melbourne University, and we talked about the possibility of me doing an MSc and a PhD. He had just been reading some journal article on atmospheric electricity and he said to me, 'This looks like a very interesting subject; why don't you have a go at that?' So I started an MSc and a PhD there. I think that that original recommendation of his was the last piece of open advice he ever gave me, although he probably was fairly subtle about his guidance from there on in. Again, I was lucky, I was left alone and could do just about what I liked, as long as it had something to do with atmospheric electricity. While Professor Hopper was a Professor of Physics at the University, specifically he was with the RAAF Academy. So all us research students enjoyed ourselves, flying instruments on balloons and aircraft. We raced around western Victoria searching for balloons that had been tracked on radar, or searching for the packages of the balloons. We really had a good life.

At the time I was also a resident tutor at International House, which was a college of the University of Melbourne. At night I ate at the high table and ate very well. At lunchtime I was usually at Point Cook, the RAAF training base, and I used to eat in the officers' mess, and ate even better there. The net result of all that was that my PhD scholarship, which was pretty miserable in terms of money, was sheer profit. Again, I was very lucky and had that money to spend on good things other than food.

Where did you meet your wife, Kay?

I can't actually remember where I met her but, during the time I was doing the PhD, she used to come out with me on trips looking for balloon packages that had fallen all over the country. She used to help me with punching out Fortran computer cards for the radio valve computer that was at the Melbourne Physics Department at the time. Also I managed to kid her sister into typing my PhD thesis. All of that was very useful!

Do you have any advice for prospective PhD students? Should they take on single or multiple projects?

That's a good question. When I was doing my PhD, there were a few other research students I knew who put all their PhD eggs in the one basket. That is to say, they had one experiment or one instrument that they would spend three years building. They would put it, say, on a rocket at Woomera. If the rocket went up and exploded prematurely, that would be the end of their experiment and, virtually, the end of their PhD. I was slightly luckier in that I had three or four experimental projects running at the one time with instruments to fly on aircraft and balloons. So, if any of those went west, it didn't really matter in the broad scheme of things as far as getting a PhD was concerned. As it happened, I was lucky. I don't think anything was completely disastrous and all those different bits of science came up with the equivalent of a research paper. So it all turned out quite well.

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Flying through thunderstorms

What did you do after your PhD? Did you take a break?

No. I should point out that in those days you didn't have to worry about hanging around until your PhD had been marked. You just got it bound, sent it off into the system and then off you went. At any rate, two days after I had submitted my PhD, Kay and I got married. We got on a boat from Sydney and went off to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in the United States. That was a nice way to start a marriage, with three or four weeks on a boat.

What was the boat?

The boat was the Arcadia, one of the old P&O passenger liners. I suppose that leads into the fact that New Mexico Tech was in the middle of the semi-desert at a little half-Mexican town called Socorro. It was marvellous. My supervisor at the time was a fellow who had been with the Manhattan Project. He was there when they let off the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site, which was only about 30 miles from Socorro. He had stayed on and was concerned primarily with tracking radon and radon daughter products and how they got distributed in the atmosphere. That was the sort of work that I was doing with him. We spent our time flying around in the research aircraft of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research. Mainly on the top of thunder storms and occasionally, when we made a mistake, in the middle of the thunder storms. Like most of these outdoor activities, they were good fun.

New Mexico Tech at the time was famous for its research in thunderstorms and thunderstorm electricity. There were people like Charlie Moore, Marx Brook and, in particular, a fellow called Stirling Colgate, who was one of the Colgate family. Stirling Colgate was the President of the university. In those days, he might have been President of the university, but this didn't stop him from doing all sorts of research and experimentation, and it was all grandiose stuff. These sorts of guys lived, slept, ate and breathed research. They argued about it all the time and it was just marvellous working with them. The American attitude to research is so much more professional and so much more fun than you strike in most other places.

What was it like flying through these thunderstorms, when you made a mistake and went through them?

The plane goes up and down a lot! I was often sick on those trips, which would completely wipe me out. But one of the guys I mentioned before, Charlie Moore, was absolutely incredible in his ability to be in an aircraft that was going up and down in a thunderstorm and be physically sick one second, then write on a chart recorder the next and then be sick and then write on a chart recorder again. Unbelievable.

Hungry UK scientists

What happened next in your career? What was your next position?

During that year I had been in touch with a fellow called Pasquill, who was quite a famous scientist at the UK Met Office. He suggested that I should come and work with him at the Met Office on another postdoctoral appointment. He arranged for me to be interviewed by a committee of UK bureaucrats who were in the USA at the time, interviewing mainly young English scientists in the hope of attracting them back to England. He arranged for me to be interviewed by that committee, and I explained to them that I had been talking to Pasquill and that we were trying to organise that I should go and work with him. Then, a few weeks after the interview, offers came in from the various research establishments in England that were funding the committee. The funny thing was that the offer in terms of salary for going to work with Pasquill was about 60 percent of the salaries that were being offered by all the other places that wanted research people. I had specifically said that I wasn't really interested in the other places, because I wanted to go to the Met Office. That made me suspect at the time, and I had it confirmed later on, that the English were quite prepared to try to get their scientists cheap.

I finished up actually taking a job in England at the Radio and Space Research Station, which was offering a reasonable salary. I can remember that, within a few weeks of arrival, they sent me down to London to what they called an 'indoctrination course', which was run by various bureaucrats in the Science Research Council of the UK. Not once but twice during those lectures, the lecturers said straight out that it was a good thing to keep scientists hungry because that way they did their best work. They completely forgot that another person and myself in the audience were scientists. I stayed one year, and that was it. I was supposed to be there for three, but I managed to get a job back in CSIRO in Australia.

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Homeward bound for more fun experiments

How did that come about?

I think I had been in correspondence with Dr Priestley, who was chief of the CSIRO Division of Meteorological Physics. He arranged for one of his offsiders to come and interview me in England; I think that's how it went.

How did you travel the second time?

You may remember that Kay and I took the Arcadia to the US. That was on Z-deck because I was paying for it. Coming back from England to Australia, our trip was paid for by CSIRO and they brought their people back first-class on boats such as the Arcadia. We really had a terrific six weeks. It is the best holiday that we ever had. This was in the days before CSIRO and the universities began to fly their new recruits to Australia.

At CSIRO, what division were you in and what did you do?

I went to the Division of Meteorological Physics. Dr Priestley, when I walked into his office, said, 'Perhaps you could work in both atmospheric radiation' – which means looking at things like solar and infrared radiation in the atmosphere – 'and also in agricultural physics,' which was a bit of a specialty of the Division at the time. So that's what I did, although over the years the atmospheric radiation studies became more of a 'purpose' in themselves. I was looking at the radiation 'environment', particularly of clouds and the effect of clouds on how much sunlight gets through to the ground, and what the effect of clouds is on how much infra-red radiation is emitted back to space. It involved a lot of fun experiments with the old CSIRO DC3 research aircraft. We spent lots of happy weeks and months in exotic resort towns up and down the east coast of Australia. 'We' being me and a fellow called Martin Platt, who was in the same group. He and I shared an office for umpteen years. Every morning we would go out in the DC3 and look for clouds over the ocean and make measurements. I keep saying that we enjoyed ourselves, and that was the object of the game.

I suppose that the radiation work was useful enough, but it was bread and butter sort of research. It was not the sort of research that would lead to setting the world on fire with some great grandiose new theory. Nevertheless, it was good fun and it was useful. It was also very good training in a discipline which is the basis of climate research. It became more and more of an interest to me as the years went past, and perhaps we can talk about that later.

Earth's temperature controlled by clouds

I want to ask you about clouds; you are very famous for your work on clouds. What are they made of, how are they formed and why are they important?

The thing that warms the Earth is the sun shining on it. The amount of sunshine that actually gets to the surface of the Earth and does the heating is determined almost entirely by how much cloud there is between the surface of the Earth and the Sun. Clouds are a very dominant control on how hot the world will be.

If you are in the game of trying to forecast what will happen to the world's climate – will it get warmer or colder – you have to know how to forecast what will happen to the amount and distribution of cloud around the world. In the climate research game at the time, there was no way of calculating the response of cloud or cloud amount to any change in the surface temperature. The reason things are so difficult is that climate models represent the atmosphere only at a series of points on a grid spread over an imaginary atmosphere that is built into the computer program. These grid points are the actual points where the calculations of what will happen in the future are done. So the model knows nothing about the atmosphere between the points. It has to assume that anything between the points will behave more or less the same as is happening at the points.

Clouds in the atmosphere are very much determined by what happens between the points – that is, on the 'small scale'. Bear in mind that the individual virtual points in a computer model of climate may be anything up to 100 kilometres apart. Cloud formation is determined by processes that are much less than 100 kilometres across, they could be 100 metres across. So, if you have a model that can't represent things at that sort of scale, it is not going to be very good at calculating how cloud will change. In essence, the fundamental problem as to why we cannot really guarantee that climate models are working properly is that they cannot reliably represent clouds and cloud behaviour. This was particularly true in the early stages of climate research and things haven't improved all that much over the years.

There is a similar problem with the diffusion of heat into the ocean through small eddies. Do you see any future possibility of using the Maximum Entropy Production principle that you developed for finding ways of dealing with these issues?

It was this sort of worry that was behind the whole idea of looking for such a principle in the first place, as a means of getting around having to describe the actual detail of all the eddies and small processes that are going on in the atmosphere and ocean. Hopefully, if maximum entropy production is a true representation of what's going on, you would hope that the principle could be applied to climate models so as to be able to make some reasonable guess as to what is going on at a sub-grid scale. That is to say, between the points where the calculations are done. So far, that hasn't happened. Largely because the principle applies to the world as a whole and it is very difficult to add a broad-scale principle like Maximum Entropy Production to a huge numerical climate model, which does all its calculations on the small scale. Just the numerical practicalities of how to do it are very difficult.

You said a while ago that clouds determine the energy reaching the Earth's surface, suggesting they determine the Earth's temperature as well. Are you suggesting that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play no role in the Earth's temperature?

No, no, I am not suggesting that. All I am saying is that, if you put lots of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere there will be an impact on surface temperature. But in order to calculate whether the impact is big or little, you have to be able to calculate the response of cloud amount, cloud type and cloud position to the change of temperature induced by the change in carbon dioxide. Excuse me, let me be specific – if you have a world in which nothing else changes except the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you double its amount, given a couple of hundred years for things to settle down, the temperature of the surface of the Earth will probably go up by about one degree. But there is the caveat that 'nothing else happens', and other things certainly will happen. For instance, the cloud cover can change in response to the change in temperature. This may amplify or reduce the initial one degree rise in temperature that we're talking about. At this stage, we simply don't know the answer to the question as to whether the rise due to increasing carbon dioxide will be less than one degree or more than one degree, because there are these things like clouds, which we can't handle yet.

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C.R.A.P.P.Y.

If we get back to the agricultural physics side of things, that involved a lot of experimentation. I can remember that we ran a three­-year experiment in Rutherglen. This was at the Wine Research Station in Rutherglen in northern Victoria, but they also grew wheat there. We instrumented this field of wheat with all sorts of meteorological machines of one sort or another. I suspect that there were more instruments in the field than wheat plants. Nevertheless, we produced a fair number of results out of the experiment. But, as the years went by, that sort of experimental work in 'agricultural meteorology' became more and more 'theoretical'.

One interesting outcome was that there were two guys in the University of Melbourne, a fellow called John Denholm in the Physics Department and another fellow called David Connor, who was a Professor of Agriculture. David Connor, John Denham and I formed a group called the Consortium for Research in Agricultural Physics and Plant Yield, which, if you are quick, you will realise means 'CRAPPY' for short. We used to meet every couple of weeks in the Clyde Hotel, just outside the university, and we would discuss research of one sort or another. We published several research papers on the evolution of plant growth and other topics of the sort. We actually published one or two papers in the Journal of Theoretical Biology under the name of CRAPPY, at an address called the Clyde Hotel in Lygon Street, Parkville, near the University of Melbourne. You could do that sort of thing in those days and get away with it.

The paper of which we were most proud was one which established the optimum strategy for maximising the amount of grain growth. If you were a plant trying to grow grain, you should do nothing for the first part of your growth period except grow leaves and then, immediately, you should switch over from growing leaves to growing grain. You would not adopt a strategy of growing leaves and grain at the same time. It all sounds a bit silly but, in fact, it is quite a significant realisation. That is what plants ought to do, if they want to have big productivity.

I read that paper, and it's well known among agronomists and crop physiologists.

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Principle of Maximum Entropy Production

During this time you worked with Platt on a textbook on radiation physics, which became a standard. How did you find time to do that?

That is a good question. I can remember that it took about six months of solid work. There was no difficulty in getting that time from the Division. They accepted that producing a textbook was the sort of thing that research scientists should do at least once in their life. CSIRO treated us very well in those days.

Did that lead you in your thinking about how to predict global cloud cover?

I suppose you are right. At about that time, it must have been in the late 70's or early 80's, one of the central problems of predicting weather and climate was that the models, as I mentioned, were still pretty primitive and had no way of predicting how much cloud there was, or would be, in the sky at any one time. In those days, the models simply had to assume that, no matter what happened, the amount and the distribution of cloud around the world was fixed.

I started thinking about what are called 'extremum principles', which are the last gasp of a scientist when he can't think of anything else to do in order to solve a problem. He starts wondering whether such-and-such a phenomenon will obey some sort of principle of maximising or minimising something. It doesn't sound very scientific, but I simply set up a rough model of the broad distribution of climate around the world. I then went on a random search for any variable representative of that overall model which might have a maximum or a minimum at a distribution of cloud and of surface temperature that looked roughly right.

After a few months I did manage to come up with a variable that looked as if it was at a maximum when the clouds and the surface temperature of the world had a distribution that looked like reality. Then, having got such a variable, I had to figure out what it meant physically. I talked to a thermodynamicist called Kevin Spillane. He thought a bit and said, 'What you're dealing with is the entropy production of the atmosphere-ocean system.' I said, 'What on earth is entropy production?' and he then proceeded to tell me what entropy was all about. It turned out that what I had been maximising was a thing called the 'rate of entropy production'. The idea that a complex system might maximise entropy production became a principle called (not surprisingly!) the 'Principle of Maximum Entropy Production'.

Over the years a fairly long stream of people have investigated the principle and, with a remarkable lack of success, have tried to establish why such a principle should exist. They have tried to apply it to all sorts of other phenomena concerning essentially turbulent media or turbulent processes. It is only in the last few years that it looks as though an explanation of this principle is being worked out theoretically by, among others, Roderick Dewar, who is in your department.

With this principle, which has made your name quite famous, where would you say some problems need to be addressed in the near future?

I think a couple of things are needed to make it fully 'respectable'. The first is for somebody to come up with a problem which can only be solved by the application of the concept of maximum entropy production. Otherwise, there is not much point to it, is there! I suppose the second thing is for somebody to invent a machine which behaves according to the Maximum Entropy Production principle but is simple enough to visualise and to be understood. At the moment people are attempting to apply the principle to turbulent systems. Turbulence is one of those great and complex unsolved problems of physics.

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Involvement with Industry

Somewhere along the line, CSIRO became involved with industry. How did that affect your work?

That was an interesting time in CSIRO. All of a sudden, CSIRO got it into its head that it had to be more relevant to industry, which I suppose is a worthy enough goal. I can't remember when it was exactly, it must have been in the mid 70's. As a consequence, our Division was looking at what might be done in that way. The net result was that we turned my Radiation Group towards the development of instrumentation for getting data from, and analysing the data of, the new polar-orbiting satellites. These were monitoring things to do with weather and Earth's surface characteristics. We spent quite a lot of effort and money on developing a radio dish that would receive the satellites as they passed overhead. As well, we spent lots of effort on instrumentation that could handle the data and produce a product that would be useful.

We involved a local, relatively small electronics firm, with the idea that that firm would get out into the world and market the stuff that we had produced. It was going all right, in principle, until we suddenly woke up to the fact that some of the very big international companies were also in the same game and there was just no way in the world that we could compete. We could have competed, but it would have required vast quantities of money. I suppose that the lesson I learnt – and we learnt – was that, if you really want to go into the sport of international commerce and the making of commercial products, you have to spend a lot of money and a lot of effort. It is no good trying to carry on as one had in the past in CSIRO, for instance, where a lot of the research was based around individuals rather than large teams with given objectives that one had to stick to.

For what it is worth, I think that CSIRO didn't at that time really wake up to the fact. I presume they have now, although I am not absolutely certain. But there is still a tendency, in CSIRO and in the universities in Australia in general, to be very good at defining research programs, where you have lots of different people doing different things within a broad umbrella of a general discipline. What Australian research in general is absolutely hopeless at doing is defining a problem and setting out to solve it, as opposed to doing research under the umbrella of a general program. I have got a bit off the subject here but, for what it's worth, that is my opinion of one of the main problems of Australian research in the past.

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“Sabbaticals”

What about sabbaticals? Did CSIRO have sabbaticals in those days?

They weren't called 'sabbaticals'. In my case, I managed to get overseas and have various years away in different circumstances. And I have to say that I had great difficulty in persuading CSIRO to let me go to the various places. Not because it wanted to keep me or anything ridiculous like that, but simply because it didn't approve generally of the sort of thing that I wanted to do for a year or more. They weren't necessarily strictly research jobs or research sabbaticals.

For instance one of them was a year in Geneva at the World Meteorological Organization. I spent the year with the team that was stitching together the bureaucracy of the World Climate Research Programme.

Another was a year in Boulder, Colorado, working with a group that was trying to put together the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project. I think I mentioned earlier that clouds are a big problem, and one of the things that nobody knew at that time was how much of the world was covered by cloud at any one time. The guesses ranged from 40 percent to 80 percent and nobody knew any better, so a big international satellite program was organised to look at the problem. It was during that year, apropos of nothing, that I was working with some people in NOAA and managed to produce the first published paper on global temperature change over the years. This was from vast amounts of ocean surface data that had been gathered from ships floating around the world.

It must have been in the late 80's that I managed to have a year in Washington DC with a funny crowd called the National Climate Program Office. It was a small group in the US government that was supposed to 'coordinate' – there is a good bureaucratic term – the climate research activities of all the various government departments around the country.

I even managed at one time, it must have been in the early 80's, to have a year with the Australian Institute of Petroleum doing absolutely nothing by way of science. Among other things, I was involved with the oil industry organising itself to be able to look after oil spills from ships and so on. CSIRO really did not like me taking a year off to work with the oil industry. Apparently, the name 'big oil' frightened CSIRO even in those days. But, I had a year with them and it was a great experience, I must say. I like to think that it did what CSIRO said that they wanted to see, namely, that their research staff should get a feel for the problems of industry.

At any rate, despite all the troubles, I managed to get away quite often and get a break from pure research, which is something that, to me, is a good idea. You can't do research 100 percent of the time throughout your life. You need a bit of a break every so often.

You hired people while you were at CSIRO: Graeme Stephens, Denis O'Brien and Martin Platt. Did you treat them the way that you would like to be treated?

You would have to ask them about the treatment I gave them. But I can remember distinctly hiring Denis O'Brien, who turned out to be one of the geniuses of this world – and also Graeme Stephens, who now is a big shot running a climate research institute at JPL in the United States. There were a number of people over the years that I was lucky enough to get hold of. They contributed an enormous amount to the development of the Radiation Group in particular and to the reputation that it got.

Did you give them free rein, or did you give them problems to solve?

I gave them free rein. You do not give geniuses problems to solve, as far as I can see, particularly people like Denis O'Brien.

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Cooperative Research Centre

In 1990, you left CSIRO and went to the University of Tasmania. What did you do there?

The University of Tasmania had just established the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies, which was to be a postgraduate research training ground for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. This was in 1989 or 1990. I applied for the job as its director and got it. Within a year of that, things expanded enormously because we managed to nail down and 'get' one of the first round of the new Cooperative Research Centres that were established by your friend Ralph Slatyer. I combined the two, the original Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and the new CRC, so that you couldn't tell the difference between them. It became a very successful CRC in that it made a fairly large difference to the reputation of Hobart as a centre for things to do with Oceanography and Antarctic research.

For the first six or seven years of the CRC, it was tremendous fun because it took that time for the bureaucrats in charge of the overall CRC program to get their act together. While they were doing that, we, as a new CRC, did exactly as we liked. And I could deliberately run it in the fashion of the earlier CSIRO divisions. That is to say, let people do what they wanted to do. It was a successful CRC and it still exists today as a CRC-type entity. In the second six­year contract, it wasn't quite so enjoyable because the system of the CRCs had evolved and had become very administration minded. There seemed to be reviews every year and one was always producing documents as to what one had done last week. All in all, I was quite glad to retire in the end, because things were no longer the same as they had been. 'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be,' as they say.

However, the success of that CRC was largely due to the fact that the Chiefs of the partner organisations – the University of Tasmania, the CSIRO Division of Oceanography, the Weather Bureau and the Antarctic Division – were very keen to ensure that the CRC should stand on its own and be successful. All of them were marvellous at helping the CRC along the way. Things have changed as the years have gone by. I don't know, but I suspect that a lot of CRCs in general have become little more than grant-giving bodies that give the money from the CRC back to the partner organisations to do X, Y and Z in the way of research. But, for what it is worth, certainly for that first period of the Antarctic CRC, the partner organisations were just marvellous.

Who were the Chiefs of the partner organisations at that time?

CSIRO was Dr Angus McEwan, who is a Fellow of the Academy; the Bureau of Meteorology was Dr John Zillman, who is a Fellow of both Academies; and Rex Moncur, who was the Director of the Antarctic Division. Alec Lazenby was the Vice Chancellor of the University at the time.

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Respectable scepticism: The Climate Caper

Garth, what are you doing now? I know that you're still publishing.

Apart from returning to have a good time, I am still 'pretending' to do some research with various people. One is in Canberra and one is in Washington DC. It is mainly research on various climate issues and, at the moment, on how water vapour in the atmosphere is responding to any change of global temperature due to global warming. But, to be more general, what I am enjoying being involved with most is an attempt to ensure that scepticism is at least respectable in the context of what has become the politically correct beliefs concerning climate change and global warming.

I am one of those people who believe that the problem of global warming has most likely been completely oversold. There is no question that there is such a thing as global warming, but whether or not it is a problem and whether or not it will be disastrous is a completely open question. I like to get involved with things which at least maintain the belief that it is okay to be sceptical about such politically correct subjects. It is a dangerous occupation. You can lose friends this way, I can tell you. But, it keeps me off the streets. Last year I produced a book called The Climate Caper, which was intended as a reasonably sceptical view of the overselling of climate change.

Garth, with your credentials in radiation physics, the physics that underlies the whole global climate change/greenhouse effect discussion, why is it that sceptical people seem to be older? And are tending to be at odds with younger scientists in this area?

That is a tremendous question and I don't know the answer to it. I would say that probably one of the most worrying things about the whole climate change debate – if we'll be gentlemanly enough to call it a debate – is that normally it is the younger people who are liable to be sceptical about accepted wisdom, and that is the way it should be. But, with regard to climate change, which is now the accepted wisdom, it is the younger people who are pushing the idea and it is the older people who are sceptical, particularly the retired older scientists. The unretired older scientists who are sceptical about climate change cannot afford, in the present climate of public opinion, to be seen as obviously sceptical about the story. It can be dangerous to one's career to get that sort of reputation. I suppose that one of the reasons the younger generation are not sceptical about global warming is that they are also the people who worry about the future of the world. They feel that there is a problem that they ought to be worried about, and you can't blame them.

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Two kinds of research: problem solving vs following your nose

Garth, you said that at CSIRO you liked to follow your own nose and, paradoxically, you also said that, if CSIRO were to solve problems, it would need a lot of money and people to work on the problems that they were given. How do you reconcile those two views?

The short answer is that I can't reconcile them. Except to say that, if you are an organisation – let's say some mythical organisation called CSIRO – that wants to get involved in 'immediately useful research', first of all it has to be prepared to put money into solving problems as opposed to generating programs. As said earlier, Australians are not very good at defining the problems. And when I say 'put money into it', they have to put big money into it. You can't run such a program or such a type of research, if you are going to allow scientists simply to follow their nose. So I suppose that this mythical organisation of CSIRO is going to have divide itself very obviously into Divisions which are either one or the other: you are either a Division which is out there to make money or to make money for the country, or you are a Division which is 'interested', for want of a better word, in basic research. They have to make that division of roles quite clear to whomever they are going to employ. I don't think you can mix the two.

Would you like to have spent some time in a division making money for the country?

Yes, I think so. Provided that it wasn't my whole career, yes. This is another thing which I think Australian scientific organisations, CSIRO and the universities in particular, might seriously think about. To have the facility for those scientists who want to spend some time as an industrial researcher, as opposed to a basic researcher, to go and work for three, four or five years in an industry which is doing some research for itself. And then be able to come back, or 'sneak back' if you like, into the basic research that they used to do. Things may have changed since my time, but certainly that was not really possible at the time that I was working for CSIRO. You could get short times away or you could just leave and go into industry, without any guarantee that you could come back. Scientists in general are pretty timorous people and they don't like burning their boats and going off into industry without knowing that perhaps there is an avenue to come back to basic research if they don't like the applied stuff.

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Life outside Radiation Physics

What about the other side, Garth? You have always been involved with creative writing along with your research. Would you have liked to have had more time or time off to do other creative things?

No, that is not a thought that has ever occurred to me in my life. But there may be lots of people who would like to have time off to do something 'cultural'. When I retired seven or eight years ago, I did actually go mad and decide to learn to play the piano. So I have spent, with remarkably little success, the last seven or eight years trying to learn to play the piano, and it is enjoyable.

Garth, your father was an agronomist and you too have dallied in biological problems. I always thought it was a shame that we couldn't have attracted you into biology. What would need to have happened to have attracted you into biology?

Despite my great difficulties with mathematics – certainly complex mathematics which I try to avoid if I can – the bottom line is that I am a great believer in the fact that to be a really successful biologist, you have to know and be able to use a fair bit of mathematics. One of the great differences that I have noticed between biological sciences in Australia and biological sciences in the US is that most US biologists of any note are also mathematicians. In Australia, very few biological scientists – present company excepted – know anything at all about mathematics. Therefore, in many ways, they are terribly restricted in the sort of original research that they can dabble in. And there is the danger that biological science done by such people can boil down to nothing more than cataloguing or stamp collecting, unless they are terribly good.

You have two children; do they have any connection with science?

My son, who is married and has three children now, is in the music game and, among other things, records the music of groups who want their music recorded for sale. My daughter lives in Melbourne with her husband and she works for Leighton Holdings in some reasonably minor position, I gather. They seem to have turned out quite well, I have to admit, quite reasonable individuals.

That's a credit to your wife, Kay, Garth.

Indeed.

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IPCC

You were involved in setting up the World Climate Research Programme, the WCRP, and later you were involved when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was being set up. What did people at the time expect that the IPCC would do or produce?

That is actually a difficult question to answer because obviously, as far as the IPCC was concerned, the different countries had entirely different views of what it should achieve. I suppose that it was best summed up for me by a comment made by an American friend of mine, who had just been to one of these interminable international conferences on climate change. He reported the outcome of that meeting as basically the underdeveloped countries saying to the audience that the world had been taking money and resources out of the third world countries for the last 500 years. It was therefore time to redress the balance so 'give us all your money.' That was on the one side. On the other side there were a fair number of countries who simply regarded it as a mechanism for getting more money for climate research. What it actually turned out to be seems to be an amalgam of those two extremes and with just about every shade in between. It's all a bit strange.

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Work of the team

Your work with Martin Platt, Graeme Stephens, Denis O'Brien and others at CSIRO … what was the Division was called then?

Initially, when I joined it, it was called the Division of Meteorological Physics, but that was a bit of a mouthful. So over the years, I don't know exactly when, it was changed to the Division of Atmospheric Physics. Then it became the Division of Atmospheric Research and finally the Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research. I'm sure there was lots of heart-searching about each of the changes, but they happened.

What areas of research in atmospheric physics would you regard as being the most important work of your team?

As far as the team is concerned, Martin Platt evolved a technique for using laser radars based on the ground to detect cirrus cloud and also, in fact, to describe the clouds in some detail. Cirrus cloud is very high cloud, made of ice crystals and generally at a height that research aircraft find difficult to get to. At that time not much was known about them, and they are very important in the scheme of things. Martin's development of the laser radar technique was one of the highlights for the group.

The general radiation work from aircraft that he, I and a few others were involved in concerned issues, which sound a bit esoteric, but which we really need to know something about. For instance, how much of the solar radiation gets absorbed by a cloud? A cloud is a white sort of object and it reflects solar radiation back to space and so removes it from heating the surface. But one of the important processes is that water vapour and water drops can absorb solar radiation. That is to say, the cloud or the air around the cloud will heat up because it is absorbing energy. At the time there was virtually no experimental data on just how much solar radiation clouds absorbed. So a lot of our work was concerned with flying above clouds and under clouds, measuring the difference in solar radiation and trying to calculate how much energy they absorbed. Indeed, at that time there was no real information on how much solar radiation was absorbed by the water vapour in general in the atmosphere. We did a lot of work on that particular problem so as to be able to calculate, if there is such and such an amount of water vapour in a particular depth of atmosphere, how much solar energy would be absorbed in that layer?

When those layers absorb energy, does that heat the surface of the Earth at all?

Yes, in a roundabout way. If you are talking about the surface of the Earth, yes. It removes immediate solar radiation from heating the surface of the Earth because it is absorbed in the atmosphere. But there are processes by which that energy or that heat, if you like, is transmitted or brought to the surface and contributes to the heating of the surface.

What did Graeme Stephens and Dennis O'Brien do?

Denis O'Brien is an applied mathematician, who was brought up on a chicken farm, would you believe, and was therefore also a very practical guy. Among other things, because he was so bright and helpful, he was the fellow to whom everybody else in the Division would come if they had some insoluble problem to do with physics. They would come to him and he would say, 'Leave it with me overnight,' and the next morning he would come back with the solution. So he became very popular. He got involved in what was actually the first effort in Australia to develop a new satellite instrument. The idea was to monitor from a satellite how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere. He is now actually in the US, still in the same game because the Americans are now building such an instrument. The Japanese have also built one. The first American instrument was built only two years ago, was put on a rocket and fell into the ocean. So that was the end of that, and they have had to start again. But, in a way, his impact on satellite remote sensing in general has been quite significant.

Graeme Stephens developed some marvellous new 'practical-theoretical' approaches, which everybody could use for calculating – in models – things like the heating of clouds, and the heating of water vapour.

Garth, it has been an honour and a privilege to interview somebody who has made the contributions that you have. I have admired your work. As I said before, the first work that I knew being in agriculture and then, more recently, I got to know your work on radiation physics and climate change. It has been a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you very much for accepting the invitation to be interviewed.

Thank you for having me and putting up with me. Thank you.

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Professor Anton Hales was educated at the University of Cape Town where he earned a BSc in 1929, an MSc in 1930 and a PhD in 1936. He also studied at the University of Cambridge in Britain, earning a BA in 1934 and an MA in 1952. Professor Hales was Director of the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research at the University of Witwatersrand from 1954 to 1962. Originally trained as a mathematician, he applied quantitative methods to many geological problems. He served as the first Head of the Geoscience Division at the Southwest Centre for Advanced Studies (later the University of Texas at Dallas) from 1962 to 1973. Professor Hales moved to the Australian National University in 1973 as foundation Director of the Research School of Earth Sciences and held this position until 1978.

Interviewed by Professor Kurt Lambeck in 2002.

Contents

• Introduction
• Lured to Australia
• Recollections of some great Earth scientists
• Fruitful links: reflection seismology, palaeomagnetism and continental drift
• Going for the ion probe
• Seismology achievements and prospects
• Answering questions and doing things: drive, enjoyment and inspiration
• Speaking from experience

Introduction

Professor Anton Hales is a scientist whose career has spanned three continents and covered nearly nine decades. He was born in South Africa in 1911, and his early career, with the exception of a few years in Britain and his war service in east and north Africa, was in South Africa. Then, in 1962, he moved to the United States, and in 1973 he moved to Australia.

He would call himself a geophysicist, someone who uses physics and mathematics to understand the structure and workings of the Earth. But his contributions cover a broader spectrum of the Earth sciences. His legacy is that he has created vital research institutions on three continents, institutions that advanced Earth sciences in each of the three countries in which he worked. The last of these was the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University, where he was the foundation Director.

Professor Hales was elected a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science in 1976 in recognition of his contributions to science in general and to Australian Earth science in particular.

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Lured to Australia

Anton, I am interested that when you were already 62 and had only recently overseen the establishment of the geophysics program at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, in Dallas, Texas, you came to the Australian National University and made a fresh start as Director at RSES, the Research School of Earth Sciences. What possessed you to take up such a challenge when others might have been planning their retirement?

The short answer is Ted Ringwood, whom I had known for quite a number of years, but the explanation involves John Jaeger as well. In late 1972, Jaeger wrote to me that Ted Ringwood was in the United States at that time and could visit Dallas to talk to me about the directorship at ANU, because Jaeger had noted that I had not expressed any interest in it despite the letters which the Vice-Chancellor had sent to me – to which I had replied, but not expressing any personal interest in a directorship. He wondered whether Ted could come and talk to me in Dallas. I said, 'Oh yes, of course, provided he gives a seminar.' And so, after the seminar, my wife Denise, Ted and I went off to dinner.

Now, Ted Ringwood was very good at picking up points that he could use to his advantage, not directly on the job that he was trying to sell you but on the sideways support that might cause you to consider the proposition more carefully. He asked Denise about the children and where she took them for holidays, and her explanation – that one place was a beach near Galveston and the other was a national park near the US–Mexico border – seemed to be just what Ted had wanted. In fact, I suspect he had planned it that way, because he then started to tell Denise that it was only 90 kilometres to the sea from Canberra and the same distance to the Snowy Mountains, where there was snow every winter.

It sounds a very familiar technique. He tried it on me, actually!

In the end, we arranged that I would come out for the first week of '73. That had to be it, because in the period before the Christmas holidays the university was busy with end-of-the-year examinations and could not organise a time when all the people who were involved in the discussions would be free.

I landed in Canberra and spent time with Ted and also with Jaeger – all in all, I talked to a lot of people. And the visiting committee, at a pleasant meeting, agreed that they would recommend my appointment, I said that I would accept the appointment if I were offered it, and that was that.

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Recollections of some great Earth scientists

Professors John Jaeger and Ted Ringwood would be two of the giants of Earth sciences in Australia. Can you share with us any personal recollections of them?

Well, Ted was a man who liked doing things himself. He didn't organise teams to do the things he wanted done; his two technicians, Alan Major and Hibberson, did all the things he wanted. The only thing that I did for Ted in my time was to arrange that he should become the Director for a spell after I finished. Ted liked having his own way but I thought he had better get used to the idea that he was going to have a turn. And in the end he did, but with, I think, considerable reluctance.

And what about Jaeger?

I met John Jaeger when I was Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cape Town University. He came to South Africa on a world tour in which his first stop was at the BPI, the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research, to talk to Eric Simpson (the Professor of Geology there) for the day and to me at dinner in the evening. That was how I met Jaeger. We talked about the BPI's program, and I think Jaeger's program was influenced to some extent by what he saw in Johannesburg, particularly geochronology.

Jaeger was good at organising things, and he was easy to get on with. Rather than doing things himself in geophysics – about which he did, looking back from these years, relatively little – he was good at seeing what should be done and getting people to do it. He built up a damn good geophysics group for its time and its reputation is one reason why, later on, it was easy for the geophysics world in general to accept that there was a Research School of Earth Sciences there: the competence in the geophysics field was well established in Jaeger's day.

Much earlier, in the 1930s, having begun your university studies at Cape Town University you went to Cambridge, where you got to know two great geophysicists, Sir Harold Jeffreys and Keith Bullen. What can you tell us about them?

I knew Bullen well, even before I had much contact with Harold Jeffreys – a shy man, although his wife-to-be, the future Lady Jeffreys, could talk easily to people. But Harold's lectures were interesting because he could break off and give his own personal view, rather than a lecture note, on a particular topic. These views were most illuminating but I had to write them down that same afternoon, to remember the sequence of events. I was for a good deal of the time the only student in a course with Harold – he didn't have many students, probably a dozen all told in the whole of his long career – and I got on well with him. He was very kind.

Cambridge in those years would have been very different from the Cambridge that we know today. What did you think about the university community?

I thought it was a stupid community. Having to put on a gown to run around the streets at night struck me as being a bit of silly nonsense!

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Fruitful links: reflection seismology, palaeomagnetism and continental drift

In the early '50s you became Director of the Bernard Price Institute, in Johannesburg, South Africa. You worked there initially in geomagnetism rather than in seismology. Why was that?

The main reason I changed over to palaeomagnetism was that the Deputy Director of the BPI, Philip Gane, was doing the seismology and I didn't want to take it over from him. And so I picked up Ken Graham from Eric Simpson's department, where he had just done an honours, as a PhD candidate. But within six months or a year Philip Gane took a post in industry and I got the seismology dropped in my lap again.

That was a most exciting time, because Gane and Selwyn Sachs had started on a project for generating a signal in the ground mechanically, and then using it as the source for reflection seismology. The first thing was about 2 feet high and it would go 100 feet, but Sachs worked it up so that it went up 2000 or 3000 feet. Then we built a bigger one that went to 10,000 feet or thereabouts, and a still bigger one of a slightly different design which went for 10 or more kilometres.

We did take out a patent on this, but we were unable to get oil industry support to continue.

To go back to the palaeomagnetism: if I remember correctly, you produced some of the very first numbers that established the magnetic pole path from South Africa. That was the time when the idea of continental drift was beginning to gain support, despite some opposition from your former mentor Jeffreys, and I think your work led to your conversion from a 'fixist' to a 'drifter' – reluctantly convinced that continental drift was a reality.

Well, it came about because of Ted Irving. While he was out at sea, nearly to Australia to take up an ANU appointment, he found he had failed his PhD. So Jaeger wrote to me, asking me to support the case for leaving Irving with a research fellowship when he hadn't got his PhD. By that time we had already obtained a copy of this thesis and I had read it, so I quite cheerfully wrote a letter to say that in my view the thesis was worthy of a PhD. And the university did agree, somewhat to my surprise, to let Irving – without a PhD – have a research fellowship in Jaeger's department. I am doubtful whether such a thing would be possible today, but Jaeger had a very smooth tongue and he was good at getting his own way. Anyway, the University of Cambridge did Irving proud, because they awarded him a DSc on his book on palaeomagnetism, which was published in 1964. He went on to become a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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Going for the ion probe

Eventually you came from Dallas to Australia, but after your interview for the ANU appointment you had a discussion in Sydney that set the scene for one of the great success stories of the Research School of Earth Sciences.

Yes. I went back to Dallas, but Glen Riley – who was part of the CSIRO team – and Ken McCracken phoned to ask me whether I could come to Sydney an hour or two early, to discuss something that Glen was particularly anxious about. That turned out to be the ion probe.

I had talked about it with James Carter, in Dallas, some two or three years earlier when I was asking him whether we needed to replace the geochemical probe we had. He said no, but that we should give consideration to the ion probe, which he thought was one of the instruments of the future. I asked the price, he said $400,000, and I had to say, 'Well, that's not possible at this time.' The Southwest Center had become by then the University of Texas at Dallas, and so getting equipment of that order would be some way down the road.

When I talked to Glen Riley, he gave me a half-hour lecture which made two main points: it had to be high-precision and it had to be high-sensitivity. Without that, it could not fulfil the role that he thought that the ion probe ought to have. I thought then that this might be a joint project, but that idea didn't seem to get a great deal of support from people in the research school – some thought the ion probe should not even be started, because it would cost too much money and take too much time.

However, in the end the faculty board agreed that we should go for the ion probe. Bill Compston was involved, and Glen had emphasised that Steve Clement, who had been a student of Bowie's and had done the ion optics of one of their instruments, should be involved.

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Seismology achievements and prospects

That returns us to your arrival at the ANU, and the seismology program which you set about building up. How did the program get on?

Well, because of a partly political problem we never published some of the early work. You see, the BMR, the Bureau of Mineral Resources as it was then, had a similar idea of building up seismology to do regional surveys and so one had to be a little cautious about that.

I have mentioned some of the people who were involved in the research school. Another was Muirhead, and also we had John Cleary, who had done a PhD on surface waves. It may not have been a particularly important seismological approach, but it was done neatly and well. Cleary had spent about three years in Dallas, and at least one of his kids was born there.

As Director of RSES you set up a lot of the portable networks, you collected a lot of data, and you established a lot of new information on the upper mantle structure beneath the Australian continent. How would you view that today?

Looking back, I would say that we probably should have done more and done it better. Really, worldwide, there isn't enough known about the crust of the Earth in most areas. The United States may be the best, perhaps, but the BMR has done a fair amount here. On an area for area comparison, it might well turn out that they have done more than has been done in the States – or have done it more systematically.

Where do you think seismology is heading now?

That is a difficult question. I think that systematic surveying will be carried out which may add detailed, more uniformly spread information, and that it will be possible to do experiments which look in more detail into particular sections than has so far been done. But my view at the moment is that it is the surface wave data that will give the broadest overall view, because it doesn't sample only where you put the instruments. It can be used to derive information for paths in inaccessible places.

For instance, you see, it is very difficult to get body wave data in the range of 100° arc distance because of the instrument distribution and the data sources. To get the overall picture you are dependent largely on surface wave data. Certainly ocean bottom instrumentation is essential, but you do want surface wave data in more places than they have it at present.

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Answering questions and doing things: drive, enjoyment and inspiration

Interviews of this kind tend to focus on the science, and the great and glorious battles fought and won, rather than saying much about the person. What is it that has driven you three times to create outstanding research institutions, something that few others achieve even once?

Oh, just the idea that if there is a question to be answered, it is worthwhile to try and answer it. If I see something which I can do, I like to do it.

Do you think anything special about your early childhood may have shaped you towards perseverance to carry on your long career?

I suspect it came from my mother, more than anyone else. She worked for about 18 years for a biscuit company in Dundee, and when she went to South Africa to be married they gave her an engraved silver dish. She had, I think, a brain that would have been mathematical if mathematics had been fashionable then. That is probably where I got it from, because from the age of 15 she ran the administrative things of that company in Dundee. I don't think anyone could work for a company for so long as the chief administrator, keeping records of everything, without having some brains.

Anton, you and Jaeger were both mathematicians who finished up as professors of geophysics. You were a mathematician in Cape Town, and you went to Cambridge for further study at a time when most activity in the physical sciences was in quantum mechanics, in nuclear physics. So why did you become a geophysicist? Was it because the queue at Cambridge was less for geophysics than for quantum mechanics?

No, there was a more substantial reason: Sir Basil Schonland. Schonland was the senior lecturer in physics at Cape Town, teaching the second-year physics when I did my BSc degree. He met me after my MSc examination results were out, and knowing that I had one of the two scholarships offered to the bachelors degree candidates to go overseas, he asked me what I was going to do in Cambridge for Schedule B. (That is the part that you choose to study from a whole list of subjects.) When I said I was thinking of doing quantum dynamics and then returning to South Africa, he said, 'Well then, that's a wrong choice, because the work in that field is done and is talked about in Europe for six months or more before the printed version arrives in South Africa. You've got to do something where you have your own observations, like in geophysics.' He himself was working on the electric field in the atmosphere, and on lightning.

Have you regretted the decision to turn to geophysics instead of quantum mechanics?

I haven't regretted it. Several times I have wondered how I would have gone in that highly competitive field, and it is possible that Schonland was quite right and it would have been disastrous.

At Cape Town University, I must say, Schonland in physics and the people in mathematics helped me and left lasting impressions on me. They were all a good lot.

And on the path that you have been down since then, you have not been alone. Who are some of the people who have helped you most?

Well, John Cleary in one kind of seismology – I know he did some nice things when he was in Dallas – and Muirhead in another kind. Certainly he has done some nice things here.

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Speaking from experience

The framework within which research is carried out has changed very much over the decades, but you have remained a very close observer of what is going on. Supposing, for argument's sake, that a politician or a bureaucrat would listen, what advice would you offer on how science should be carried out in Australia?

I don't know whether I would regard this as advice, but I believe a good way of making sure that you get the right kind of people into the system is to get youngsters involved, early on, in thinking about problems to which the answer is not obvious. How you do so is not very clear, though.

Anton, there is so much for us to discuss, but this is perhaps a good point at which to call a halt for now. Thank you very much.

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James Moody graduated from the Queensland University of Technology with degrees in electrical engineering and information technology, winning the University Medal in both. In 1999 he began his PhD research at the Australian National University. His research involved strategic management theory and the management of complex projects within the space industry. As part of this research, Moody was the systems manager with the Cooperative Research Centre for Satellite Systems, involved with the building and launching of FedSat, Australia's first satellite for 30 years. He also manages several companies that integrate his interests in space and the environment.

Interviewed by David Salt in 2002.

Contents

• What does an engineer do?
• FedSat: gathering space data for Earth's problems
• Turning information into intelligence for a sustainable environment
• International responsibilities
• Intertwining interests
• A network of mentors to keep the passions aflame
• Who should go into engineering, and how?
• Long-term sustainability: 'Let the engineers go and do it!'
• Exciting prospects: creative problem-solving to benefit the community

What does an engineer do?

James, at the age of 26 you are involved with the United Nations on a range of projects, you run several companies and you have won a fistful of awards – including Young Professional Engineer of the Year, Young Queenslander of the Year, and Young Australian of the Year in Science and Technology. How do you describe yourself?

My friends would probably call me a bit of a nerd, but I suppose I would describe myself as socially conscious. I really like technology and I love finding out about things and creating things, whether they be businesses or engineering projects, but always for the benefit of the society and of the environment.

What led you into engineering?

When I was young I watched Star Wars many, many times, and I got a passion for space and wanted to become involved in the space industry. And since I liked maths and physics, I found the best avenue for me was to become an engineer – that way I could create things. I could build a satellite, so to speak.

My father was an engineer, from a family of engineers. My great-great-uncle (I'm named after him) built the Sydney Harbour Bridge and my great-great-grandfather built half the railways in Queensland. So, luckily, with that sort of heritage I could actually understand what an engineer does and I knew that was what I wanted to do.

So what does an engineer do?

I believe an engineer solves problems, mainly technical problems. There's a lot of problems in the world, but one of the things that engineering education at university does is to teach you the best way to identify a problem and work out how to solve it, using the best possible tools. And I love doing that. It's a really creative profession, and one that could be used even more than it is to help the community.

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FedSat: gathering space data for Earth's problems

You are currently finishing off your PhD on Australia's new satellite, FedSat. Why is FedSat so important?

FedSat, the Federation Satellite, is Australia's first satellite in 30 years. (Australia was the fourth country in the world to launch a satellite from our own turf, 32 years ago. So we were in there with the space industry from the very beginning, although we haven't been doing much since then.) I was lucky enough to be one of the small team of people who were building the satellite itself. My job was the systems manager, responsible for all the different pieces being put together.

Although this is a $40 million satellite, it's actually quite small – about 50 cm by 50 cm. We like to say it's the size of a bar fridge. If it were a computer, it would be more a PC than a mainframe. Yet it is incredibly complex, with communications systems, power systems, attitude control (pointing systems) to be interfaced and plugged in. And if something doesn't fit into something else, my job is to find a way around that. We have to fix it.

What will FedSat do?

This is a research satellite, so we are trying to get Australian technologies and put them in space to test them. For example, we have got a high-bandwidth communications payload looking at getting direct high-speed Internet to the bush. We have got a magnetometer and a GPS receiver to measure our ionospherics, looking at space weather. And we have got a 'reconfigurable' computer – that is, it can change its hardware in space, halfway through a mission.

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Turning information into intelligence for a sustainable environment

You also manage several companies. What is the focus of the work that you are currently involved with?

I have got one media company, but most of my companies are involved in my two passions, space and the environment. One is a space engineering company, for example, and another is a sustainable development and environmental consulting firm. My latest endeavour (which is taking up a lot of my time) combines my passions in one company, Mitchell Resource Intelligence. We are taking space data – images of the Earth from space – and applying it to the environment. We can now look from space at crops, at vegetation, at climate, at water use. We can increase a farm's water efficiency by 25 per cent, for example, by means of this data. And from the air we can measure soil quality. Using the data we can start to make better choices about how agriculture can work in Australia and also about how we can benefit the environment.

As one example, in Cootamundra, New South Wales, part of the Olympic Highway kept falling apart every year. Everybody was blaming each other: vibrations from the nearby train line were blamed, or it was thought that somebody was washing water across the road and so destroying it. But our company could see through the road to measure the salt in the ground and we found there was actually a salinity pathway right underneath, where nobody had been able to detect it before.

How do you see through a road?

You use radioactive small particles called gamma rays. It turns out that salt in the ground, thanks to cosmic radiation, is a little bit radioactive itself. And that's how we measure it. Using our information, then, meant the road could be covered with a piece of plastic, in effect, and rebuilt. They have never had the problem again.

Australia is going through a major drought. Can your imaging work help us cope better with drought?

Our work with Mitchell Resource Intelligence is all about gaining more information about the country. For example, with thermal satellites or synthetic aperture radar we can find out where there are water irrigation channel leakages – through which we lose a lot of water – so those problems can be addressed immediately. We can find out where people are over‑irrigating, so we can start addressing these problems to increase the water efficiency of farms. There are many other things we can start doing, such as understanding the soils. We can measure soils directly now, so we can listen to what the land is telling us and start putting crops in the right places, based on the soil type and acidity. That is the whole idea: not only are we going to make more money for the agricultural areas because we will have better crops, but we are also going to help the environment and make Australia more sustainable.

Is there a difference between spatial 'information' and spatial 'intelligence'?

According to a well‑known saying, 'Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom.' Information by itself is actually quite useless. There is so much information out there that we believe strongly in getting it from different sources, aggregating it so that it applies directly to the outcomes. It's only when you start gathering information and applying it so that it drives directly to the application, turning that information into intelligence, that you can use it.

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International responsibilities

How did your involvement with the United Nations begin?

Well, at university I really believed in getting involved. I had a lot of networks, a lot of friends, and I started going to some of the youth forums in the broader community. From that I got invited to a few international youth conferences such as the State of the World Forum for Emerging Leaders, in Mexico, and through the people I met there I was invited to become a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Youth Advisory Council, as the Australian delegate. And from that I became involved in the space side of things, and then science and technology.

Now I've just been asked to be one of 10 members of the Digital Divide Task Force for the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. Our job is basically to identify ways to connect people in developing countries to communications – phone lines, for use for health or medicine or education – and try to stop the divide between rich and poor, by which developed countries have lots of communications but developing countries don't have any.

Your United Nations work has you travelling all over the world. How do you cope with always being on the move?

It's pretty crazy. For three years I was never in a country for longer than three weeks at a time. I've learnt to live out of a suitcase, in some respects. I carry my satchel around; it's got my computer and my mobile phone, and that's pretty much all I need in terms of office. So I cope by being mobile and getting used to it.

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Intertwining interests

Science fiction was one of your early motivators toward science. What did you read, and are science fiction books and movies still among your interests?

Oh, I was reading a lot of stuff: science fiction fantasy, and also Krimis – a German word – science thrillers and all that sort of thing. I really enjoyed that. One thing I like is that you generally find that today's science fiction is tomorrow's hope, which is the future's reality. There's very little that we cannot do if we put our mind to it. (That's what I love about engineering, too.) Whether we should do it or not is an entirely different question, but the thing about science fiction is that it really is dreaming about the future.

There's heaps of very visionary stuff out there. The Fifth Element is a fantastic movie. A lot of science fiction is a more dire view of the world, but I'd rather take a look at the world as more, say, environmentally friendly and so I prefer movies like that. Among the books that have influenced me most would be Neuromancer, by William Gibson, one of the first guys to start talking about the Internet. Now, that's amazing. We still haven't reached his vision in terms of where the Internet might be going.

What other interests do you have outside your incredibly busy career?

Just the normal stuff. I've got lots of friends; I like to hang out with them. My favourite sport is snowboarding, although I do like getting on a mountain bike now and again and riding up to the mountains – and that's why Canberra, where I'm living at the moment, is great.

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A network of mentors to keep the passions aflame

I am interested to know what has been the key to your success. Do you have any role models, or mentors?

I am often asked that. It is an interesting question. I've got quite a few mentors, but really I find that I take what I think is the best part (and this is all my opinion!) out of a lot of people around me. Everybody has something to offer – in that respect, everybody is a role model, everybody is a mentor. It's just a matter of identifying what it is about them that is so interesting. In an old saying, 'There's no uninteresting people. There's only uninterested people.' I like to live by that rule.

At university, I believe, you were an 'engineering activist'.

Well, at university my one philosophy was 'get involved'. I think I was president of six clubs there, and by the end I was running the snowboarding club. (In fact, we created the first Queensland snowboarding club – a bit like the Jamaican Bobsled, as I hear.) It was a matter of getting involved, getting other people to become involved, especially from the engineering profession. I wanted to see engineers get out, be part of the community, give talks at schools or do engineering works for community projects. So that's why I was an engineering activist.

Would you recommend this as a good pathway for other students?

I am not saying anybody should copy me, or do what I have done in my life. The pathway I would recommend for anybody is basically to identify what it is that you are really, really passionate about – what it is that can get you up every day when you have had a late night beforehand or when you just don't want to work or you don't want to go to school. What is it that will keep you going? For me, from when I was quite young, it was my passion for space, which then turned into a passion for the environment.

I believe the key to my success is that I knew what I was passionate about, what I wanted to follow. I think that for a lot of young people it is really hard to find out what you want to do with your life. But I've been able to know what it is, so from that point of view I was extremely lucky. I suppose I came to know it by asking myself the question 'Why?' a lot. 'What do I want to do?' 'I want to create things.' 'Why?' 'Because I want to leave something behind.' 'Well, how can I do that?' 'Become an engineer.' There is a lot of questioning to go through.

So first came finding out what I was passionate about and following that. Second was having a vision for it: 'This is where I want to get to, and now I'll go and do it.' And then third was basically having a lot of friends, a lot of networks around me of people who would be willing to come with me on that journey.

How do you find passion?

Everybody can find passion; it's just that they need to find what they are passionate about. So how can they do that? I believe it's by asking questions, by getting out and talking to as many people as you possibly can. My cousin, in his final year of school, had about $3000 to spend on a car stereo and wanted to find out exactly what car stereo to buy. He talked to everybody, he looked through every magazine, he spent heaps of time – and finally he found the car stereo that he wanted and he bought it. It was great.

Yet people who are trying to work out what they want to do at university, which is a million-dollar decision in terms of what you are going to earn for your life, don't spend that sort of time. They don't start talking to people who are doing the course, they don't look in magazines or on the Web, for example. The first thing is to actually go out and get as much information as you possibly can – let it come at you from all sides – and suddenly you'll hit on something that just feels so right that you know it's the thing you want to do.

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Who should go into engineering, and how?

What subjects should students be considering for a career in engineering?

The prerequisite subjects for engineering are mathematics, sciences and stuff like that, and people should talk to other people who have gone into the engineering degrees, or counsellors or whoever it is, to find that out. The interesting thing is that whether or not you like each subject should weigh very much in the decision. Remember, you've got to be passionate about what you're doing, to follow that path. If you don't like maths, for example, then you may not like engineering. It is important to find that out. But if you really want to be an engineer, that's probably going to give you enough passion to pursue mathematics. Do the things you are passionate about.

Engineering is often seen as a 'white male dominated' profession. As a successful white male engineer, what do you think about that?

Well, it's very true, although I put engineering things into two classes – skills such as in electrical engineering, to understand electronics; mechanical engineering, to understand mechanics; and civil engineering, to understand structures – and applications such as space engineering or biomedical engineering, say. I have noticed that you get a lot of males doing the skills-based, older type of engineering, but you get a really good representation in the applications: you get a lot of females doing things like space engineering. Maybe that's because girls are smarter!

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Long-term sustainability: 'Let the engineers go and do it!'

As an engineer, what do you think is the key to a sustainable future for Australia?

Sustainability is making sure that we don't leave the world in any worse shape than when we got it. Getting to that goal, then, depends on putting more money on design – and if you do that, you will probably find that the whole thing will cost you less anyway. The new type of light bulb, for example, might cost more up front, but in the long term you are going to save money because you use less energy.

A lot of sustainability is exactly like that. It's saying, 'We want to waste less, because waste is something we are producing that we cannot sell' – an interesting concept. From an engineering point of view, if we start designing the right things the right way with the goal of sustainability in mind, we are going to get better products, they are going to last longer and we are going to have less waste.

The key is to decide as a country that sustainability is directly linked with our future, to embrace it, and then to use that to stimulate innovation – to let the engineers go and do it!

Why haven't we been doing that?

Well, in some cases we have. New York is a great example. Because the water quality in New York was going down, they were going to build a $6 billion water recycling plant. Luckily, though, somebody did some sums and found out that if they just bought $2 billion worth of forest which was being chopped down at the time, and revegetated it, they would improve the water quality. So it was actually cheaper to buy a forest than to build a plant.

I think one of the reasons why we are not really focused on it at the moment is short-termism – looking to the next business quarter or the next election cycle. Sustainability can save us a lot of money but it is usually in the long term.

Unfortunately, we are going to get some short-termism, no matter what. Many people would take a dollar now over $20 in a year's time, so to speak. It is largely a failure in recognising priorities. If I sell you a washing machine, your goal is for that washing machine to last as long as possible. My goal, as the person selling it to you, is for the washing machine to break so I can sell you another one. And so there is a focus on things not lasting as long as they might.

We have to start looking to the organisations that want to be long term, like banks. Eventually one day you might be able to have a bank pay for a solar hot‑water heater on your roof, in exchange for the money you are going to be saving, so you don't have to worry about the short-term loss of cash. And one day you might pay just for hot water, so to speak, without caring where it comes from, and once again it would be in the best interests of the person supplying that to you to look at the longer term and to make it more sustainable.

Can engineers play a major role in helping us reconfigure the world?

Absolutely. I think that in Australia every engineer is responsible, on average, for $4 million worth of production a year. That is a lot of goods and services being produced, so the impact that an engineer can have by focusing on sustainability is going to be enormous.

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Exciting prospects: creative problem-solving to benefit the community

An important focus in your socially conscious engineering is to use the possibilities of space. Aren't there dangers in space?

Yes, space is a very dangerous game. In a launch we have basically a giant bomb trying to be shot into the sky. Then once the FedSat, our satellite, is up there it will be in an outside temperature which moves between minus 50° and plus 50° every 103 minutes. Space is full of radiation, so things fall apart. It really is a dangerous environment. We have seen a whole lot of disasters – the Mars climate crasher, rockets falling apart, even the Japanese rocket that we're launching the satellite on (we've had a couple of failures before this one).

Have you been present at the launch of any major rockets?

Yes, I have seen the Space Shuttle take off. That is absolutely the most amazing experience: you see some smoke and suddenly you start hearing this huge sound and you get a giant 'popping' in your ears, and your whole body starts shaking. And then you can watch the Space Shuttle until it becomes just a tiny speck in the sky.

Where do you think this work might take you in, say, 10 years' time?

The thing I love most about what I am doing right now in using satellite data for environmental benefits is that it allows me to fulfil my need to be creating things as an engineer, solving problems, and doing it for the benefit of the community. So I can see myself in 10 years' time still doing that sort of thing – perhaps in something totally different, but still, hopefully, solving problems to help the community.

I believe that as we go through our lives it is important not to be isolated. A lot of people focus on money or on other things that are very much to do with themselves. For me, the more you help the community, the more the community helps you back. It is basically a reciprocal arrangement. And so the most rewarding thing will be when I have, hopefully, 'saved the planet' in 20 years' time. Then I can sit back and say, 'Wow, I feel really fulfilled.'

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Professor Chris Christiansen was born in 1913 in Melbourne. From the University of Melbourne he received a BSc in 1934, an MSc in 1935 and a DSc in 1953. In 1980 he was awarded a DScEng from the University of Sydney. After graduating with his MSc he was a physicist at the Commonwealth X-ray and Radium Laboratory in Sydney for two years. In 1937 he became a research engineer at Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd (AWA). In 1948 he moved to the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics where he worked until 1960. He began his work in radioastronomy by investigating the quiet sun. To study solar radiation, he developed a new type of aerial array known as a grating interferometer. In 1953, by adding a second array of aerials at right angles to the original array, he was able to scan the sun in two dimensions. He developed the innovative cross-type radio telescope, known as the Chris Cross, which was completed at CSIRO's Fleurs field station near Sydney in 1957. Christiansen became Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sydney in 1960, a position he held until 1978. In 1963 the CSIRO handed over the Fleurs field station and its radio telescopes to his department. He retired in 1979 and moved to Canberra where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Mt Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University until 1983.

Contents

• Introduction
• Starting life as a goldfields mixture
• School, improved with hobbies and inventions
• University: science studies and a special girl
• AWA: the radio research interest
• Aerials at war
• An ecumenical antenna
• CSIRO: joining radio to astronomy
• Studying the sun by Earth rotational synthesis
• The first radio evidence of our spiral galaxy
• Avoiding starvation in France
• The Chris Cross
• The way to go: one dish or more?
• A detour to Holland
• Earning an oilcan in Sydney
• Taking over the CSIRO field station
• The Chinese connection
• A much longer wavelength in China
• Recognition in China
• Ripples from a fortuitous life

Introduction

Professor Christiansen, or Chris as he is more widely known, was born in Melbourne on 9 August 1913. The hallmarks of his long and distinguished career in science and engineering, spanning almost five decades, were his inventiveness and his commitment to, and success with, large-scale projects, mostly in radioastronomy. These projects were the outcome of his innovative skill as physicist and engineer. Paralleling this was his equal commitment to forging strong international links and friendships, leading to his election as Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union for the years 1964 to 1970, as President of the International Union of Radioastronomy from 1978 to 1981, and subsequently as Honorary Life President in 1984 and as Foreign Secretary of the Academy from 1981 to 1985.

Starting life as a goldfields mixture

To start at the very beginning, Chris, what brought your family to Australia?

I was a real goldfields mixture. My grandfather, Jens Christiansen, came from Denmark as a teenager, jumping ship in Melbourne and walking up to the goldfields. My father was one of about eight children. He went to the Three Mile one-teacher school and later to Beechworth College, in the north-east Victorian goldfields. He earned his keep and secondary education there by tutoring, which was a substitute in those days for the schools giving people scholarships. Later he went down to Melbourne with most of his brothers and sisters. They rented a house and all did different things. For example, one did metal work as an apprentice in a factory and one went to the Academy of Music; she became a professional singer. My father had a job at the National Library, and while working there he did his university course. Later he did theology and became a clergyman.

When and where were you born?

I was born in 1913, in Elsternwick, where my father was the minister of the local Congregational Church. When I was five or six, my father was shifted to a church in Perth, so we went across on the newly formed east-west railway, with our luggage following us by boat. Until my mother arrived with my sister and my brother, I batched with my father for several weeks. The manse wasn't furnished and our furniture was coming by boat so I ate with my father while sitting on a wooden box and with a jam tin on the table and so on: marvellous after normal home life.

My father died of peritonitis when he was 37 – he had appendicitis which was wrongly diagnosed – leaving my mother with four kids, I being the eldest, at seven, and my baby brother being three weeks old. The Congregational Church had no pension scheme in those days so my mother, who fortunately was a good musician, returned to Melbourne and brought us up there by teaching music at a local private school and also to pupils at our home. Strangely enough, having spent all her time looking after her brats and teaching music, she seemed to have nothing to do in the evening but to play the piano, and being the last to go to sleep (because I was the eldest) I always went to sleep listening to Beethoven, Brahms and so on.

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School, improved with hobbies and inventions

Where did you start school?

At the local State primary school in Perth. I was shifted twice during the short time I was there, I don't know why. Each time I was moved I was terrified at going into a new class.

What about the schools in Melbourne?

I went to the local State primary school, until the headmaster of a local grammar school who had known my father offered to have us three boys taught at his school at no charge. I don't know whether my mother would have accepted this, except that while I was at the primary school my aunt had spotted me hopping on the back of a tram during the lunch hour and hanging on from one stop to another. Apparently she relayed this information to my mother, who said, 'We must get him away from that school.' The result was that I went to Caulfield Grammar.

Was it in the later school years that you began your inventions – perhaps as a result of getting into trouble?

Oh yes, I did a few inventions at school and one was very popular with my cobbers. As a punishment – an ancient sort of thing the English used to go for – we would have to write out 100 lines, so I devised a way to do five lines at a time, cutting down our work to 20 per cent of what it was meant to be.

I became very keen on hobbies at school: that was much more interesting than my work, I found. I had an old Box Brownie and I became secretary of the camera club, and also of the radio club. I built several models of a crystal receiver, which was quite interesting work. The crystal receiver consisted only of a capacitor, an inductance, a galena crystal rectifier, a pair of headphones and a cat's whisker to make the connection. To buy a crystal rectifier cost me threepence, which would now be equivalent to a dollar and was an awful amount, but I had learnt about galena in my first-year chemistry at school and I thought, 'It's only lead sulphide. I've got some sulphur' – it had been used for something else – 'and there are some bits of lead around. If I cooked this up I might make some lead sulphide and it might do as a rectifier.' And to my surprise and joy it did, so I didn't have to buy any more rectifiers. In fact, I had enough to give to all my friends. In addition, I attempted to get some amplification (on analogy with the triode valve) by using a second contact on the crystal, with a different voltage. This was an unsuccessful attempt to invent the transistor.

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University: science studies and a special girl

Was it the hobbies that gave you an interest in physics and took you to a science degree at the University of Melbourne?

Yes. Actually, when I was applying for a scholarship at the university I had no idea what I should do. My favourite subjects were mainly physics, English and drawing. I thought, 'Well, physics and drawing go together in architecture, and I like building things, so I should apply for architecture.' Then at the last minute before I posted it, for some unknown reason I just crossed out 'Architecture' and wrote 'Science'. That's how I went to Melbourne University to do a course in science.

It was about now that you met Elspeth, wasn't it?

That's right. About a year before I left the university, in the Labor Club we used to have occasional weekend camps, with speakers. The club contained a pretty bright bunch, several of whom were in the honours English course. They said to me, 'There's a very bright girl, she always gets the Medal and she's very nice. We ought to try and get her to come along to one of our camps,' and apparently they persuaded her to come. We used to hire one of those old open trucks with a canvas over the top, and as she couldn't climb up I gave her a hoist into the truck. I must say I got quite a kick out of it. Anyway, we became very friendly. She got her MA at the same time as I got my MSc. Then I shot off to Sydney. She had thought of going to Oxford to do some further work, but she decided to stay and teach senior English at the Melbourne Girls High School. Her father was headmaster of the boys high school, and she came from a long line of headmasters. She stayed on for about a year.

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AWA: the radio research interest

Why did you go to Sydney, and how old were you then?

I was about 21 or 22. After graduation in Melbourne I spent two years at the Commonwealth X-ray and Radium Laboratory, but then Geoffrey Builder asked me to join AWA [Australian Wireless (Australasia) Ltd] in Sydney. He and John Green, the other head there, had previously been working for the Radio Research Board. There were some very interesting people at AWA, a very good lot to work with – John Downes, Fred Lehany, Alan Richardson and others.

How were the research activities of AWA divided up?

They were in groups. Healey and Reid, for example, were in a research lab connected with the factory itself. The biggest group, however, was the laboratory of Builder and Green.

What was it focused on, mainly?

At that time AWA had bought up all the patents of Marconi, Bell Telephone and so on in America and all manufacturers here had to pay AWA for the use of their patents. Everything produced in Australia had to have a sticker on it to say all the dues had been paid, and they all went through AWA, so that the real purpose of the research labs at AWA was to produce patents. Later on, when I was more senior, as a sideline I had the job of vetting patents that came in, from Germany and England and America, which AWA wanted to put on the list.

Was your first job there connected with patents?

No, the first job I was given was to produce a direct-reading field intensity meter. Then, because AWA was angling for the job of building the long-wave naval transmitter at Harman, near Canberra, I was sent to investigate the ground conductivity there – that is, to find out how rapidly long waves would be attenuated. The Navy didn't want to find that there was nothing of its signal left by the time it reached the sea. I did that first job with John Downes, who later became a CSIRO division chief.

I got married very shortly after that job, when Else was the senior English and Latin mistress at Ravenswood College, in Sydney. As my pay at AWA was pretty low, she was then earning more money than I was.

Aerials at war

By now World War II must have been beginning, was it?

Yes, as the 'Phoney War', when it looked as though the whole thing was going to be a completely phoney effort. At that stage AWA was saying, 'Business as usual.' But shortly afterwards the government began to realise that it was going to be a bit serious. The only communications between England and Australia were by a cable, which could very easily be cut, and the AWA Beam wireless in Victoria. That was a short-wave wireless link which used a single wavelength and was rather out of date, having been built by the Marconi Company in about 1926.

AWA then was half owned by the Commonwealth government, and doubtless had been told that the Beam wireless would have to be improved rapidly. I was sent down there to investigate the problems, to send up reports to the factory at AWA so that new receivers could be made, and particularly to see what I could do about the directional aerials. Although they were fine antennas, they could only be used at one wavelength, whereas because the ionosphere changed during the day, different wavelengths should be used at different times of the day.

A directional antenna which Bell Telephone had invented had the big advantage that it could be used over a very wide range of frequencies, but it directed energy in many directions as well. So it was quite bad for wartime use, because the enemy would be getting some of the signals.

People were worried about Japan by this time. To eliminate the nasty effects of signals going out in all directions, I decided to use a group of rhombics. This produced a very good design which, during the period when short-wave was used everywhere for long-distance communication, was the best antenna in use anywhere. It was used in quite a few countries, and brought me in five bob for my invention!

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An ecumenical antenna

Later you took part in an ecumenical venture for AWA. Tell us about that.

In a peculiar arrangement, AWA owned several of the broadcasting stations in Sydney but leased them to other organisations: for example, 2CH to the Council of Churches and 2SM – named for Santa Maria, I presume – to the Catholic Church. The difficulty was that AWA's stations were transmitting from very different locations, and various church congregations would complain bitterly that the rival signals were coming in much stronger than their own. Recalling an old question in mediaeval religion as to how many angels could sit on the point of a pin, I decided to try sitting both of these 'on the point of a pin' – putting both transmissions on the one aerial and using filters to separate them. This worked like a charm – the broadcasts for the Protestants and the Catholics came out from the same point and at the same strength all over Sydney.

Later on I used that when AWA was applying for the entire job of doing the New Zealand broadcasting system, putting in two transmitters at about a dozen stations . I said, 'At each station we'll put the two on one aerial'. Since AWA could produce one antenna more cheaply than a rival could build two, it got the job. (I think those aerials of mine are still all over New Zealand.) AWA in those days could compete with RCA and Marconi and Telefunken in other countries who were wanting to improve their radio broadcasting, so being the AWA expert in antennae I was always dragged in to design the directional aerials.

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CSIRO: joining radio to astronomy

How did you come to move to CSIRO?

CSIRO were starting to investigate mysterious radio signals from space, so I wrote and said I was very interested, telling them what I had been doing. I was offered a job in their radio research labs.

Who was there, Chris, at that time?

Bowen was the Chief, doing cloud physics and other things, and Pawsey was second in command, doing the radioastronomy.

Give us a thumbnail sketch of Pawsey, a very famous figure in Australian science.

He was a wonderful fellow – absolutely pure in heart, I think you could say. I remember a very advanced lecture being given at the university on a radio topic, going over practically everyone's head. When it came to questions, old Joe said, in his innocent fashion, 'I can't quite reconcile this with the conservation of energy.' This floored the lecturer completely, but Joe was absolutely right: the thing was phoney. But he would do this in such a nice way.

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Studying the sun by Earth rotational synthesis

What was your first job in CSIRO?

Joe Pawsey's group was at that stage studying the sun, although I think he stayed on it too long. That was one of the few things I could criticise him for. Thanks largely to Joe, it had been discovered by this time that most radio waves from the sun came as radiation from a pretty uniform hot body. Secondly, there was a thing called the slowly varying component, which changed slowly from day to day. It was known that when there were a lot of sunspots, it was highest, and when there weren't, it was lowest.

Still not identified to any location but just generally coming from the sun?

Yes, but known to be associated with sunspots. Thirdly, an occasional blow-up of the sun would always be associated with a big sunspot and with sudden enormous increases in energy that would vary like mad. Of those three main factors I was told to investigate this slowly varying component. The first thing I did was to record the radiation during an eclipse of the sun. I tried using three stations, but well separated – one in Tasmania, one in Sydney and so on – so that the eclipse shadow of any part of the sun would occur at different times at each station and we should be able to locate the emitting regions. That worked out very well and it also gave me an idea of the size of these regions, roughly three minutes of arc.

Was that very much larger than the dimension of a sunspot?

Yes. Then I thought, 'We can't wait for these damned eclipses. We ought to be able to look at the sun every day,' and I started to wonder how we could get such a high resolving power from a radio aerial that we could get down to three minutes of arc. You would need an enormous aerial if you made it in one piece but I thought, 'Well, if you have a series of aerials, not together but spaced out, you get a number of very narrow responses from that. If I can so space those that there is only one response on the sun at a time, we should get a series of scans across the sun as long as we like, provided we point the aerials in the right direction.' I worked out that we could collect the energy we would need with a lot of six-foot diameter dishes as aerials.

And they had to be steerable. Were they steered automatically?

No, we took it in turns to change them and the running kept us thin and healthy!

Where was the array, Chris?

I discovered that we could get the use of the side of the Potts Hill Reservoir, which contained the drinking water of Sydney. Only one of our people ever fell in.

You've got a picture there showing a close-up of one of the dishes. I think you have told me that they were made from 6 x 3 aluminium sheets welded together and then spun. Who are the three people in this picture?

I'm the one demonstrating part of the telescope to Professor van der Pol, the famous Dutch engineer and scientist. And there, with his black hat on, is Sir Edward Appleton, looking as though he were going to a morning party. This was at the 1952 General Assembly of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).

That just gave, in effect, a knife-like beam across the sun, and so I built another one on another side of the Potts Hill Reservoir – this time we used mechanical help to turn the aerials. With this one we did something that hadn't been done before. By looking at the sun during about a 12-hour period, we were scanning it in every direction during the day as it went round the sky. By doing a bit of mathematical jugglery called Fourier synthesis we could get a real picture of the sun, with its hot spots and so on. This method of using the Earth's rotation to produce a picture is called an Earth rotational synthesis and now all the really big aerials in the world use it. But that was the first time.

Approximately how many individual sources on the sun were you looking at?

Usually not more than 10 or so. They were always associated with either the sunspots or where sunspots had been, the previous time the sun turned round.

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The first radio evidence of our spiral galaxy

About this time came some very interesting news from Harvard.

Yes, that's right. About the time of the URSI meeting, while we were still building the second linear array, we got news from Professor Purcell in America that one of his students, after working for a couple of years, had found a particular radio spectral line from space which would enable us to look, not at the hot or active parts of space, but at the hydrogen in the cold regions of space. This important discovery had been predicted by van de Hulst in Holland, but the Americans made it first. Purcell asked us to try to confirm the discovery, and he asked the Dutch to get a move on and have a go at it.

Was there any particular direction to look, Chris?

All we knew was that this had been seen with a fixed aerial when the Milky Way went through. With Jim Hindman as my assistant I got stuck into this very rapidly, using all sorts of old junk that we could collect. We did have to make up one special bit of instrumentation. Within six weeks we confirmed that the radiation was coming from the Milky Way, but we went further and mapped it all over the Milky Way, showing that in fact it had exactly the same shape as the Milky Way. Moreover, because we were doing it in a special way, we were able to show there were spiral arms in our galaxy – the first radio evidence that we were living in a spiral galaxy. Later, other people in CSIRO and also the Dutch started mapping these things in detail, and after a lot of time they produced between them very reliable maps of the source of radiation.

Our research was done crudely but it was good fun and the results were exciting. When Purcell's research student Ewen came over and saw the gear I had, with cables lying all over the floor and ancient oscillators, he said, 'My God, I can understand why you could do it in six weeks and it took me two years!'

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Avoiding starvation in France

You then went back to further work on the sun. But round about that time you went off to France, didn't you? Was there a particular motivation for that?

The French were very interested indeed in our work, and at the URSI General Assembly in Sydney one of them suggested that I go and work in France with them. I hadn't been overseas and I thought this would be great, so the family packed up and we went over to France. Unfortunately, I discovered there that the group I was with was not the best French group, so I didn't do as well over there as I thought I would. But I made up for it by learning a lot about France and optical astronomy.

Where were you based mainly?

I worked at the Meudon Observatory, near Paris, inside the stables of Louis XIV. I spent a lot of time there, learning about the optics of the sun. There were a couple of dear old souls who had been taking H-alpha pictures of the sun – for 50 years, I think, because inside the stables there were long planks of wood bent down with the weight of all their glass plates on them. I used to sit down and have my sandwich with that delightful old couple at lunchtime.

We were living in a beautiful 17th century house that had been divided up by le Baron for use by foreigners – the rents were so high that no decent Frenchman could afford it. In fact, it took the whole of my CSIRO salary to pay the rent, but he said, 'M'sieu, I am not a wealthy man and I cannot afford to pay income tax, so you will send me every month a little note thanking me for the use of the house and saying, "This is a small donation towards the expenses."' We nearly starved, as I wasn't getting anything from the French, but CSIRO made special arrangements so that I could get a bit of a hand-out from the Australian Embassy to pay for our food for each coming month. Oh, it was fun, though. We didn't starve.

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The Chris Cross

So after that you came back to Sydney. What then?

Both we and American astronomers were very keen on getting daily maps of the sun, but the Earth rotational synthesis method was useless for that purpose, being slow and getting only one picture a day. So I thought that if I combined my arrays in the form of a cross, as Bernard Mills had in his Mills Cross, this would enable us to produce a very narrow pencil beam to scan the sun, in television fashion, every few minutes.

Tell us about the early Mills Cross.

Oh, that was the first telescope at Potts Hill. It was invented by Bernard Mills and consisted of two lines of dipoles, one east-west and the other north-south, which gave a narrow angular response, very economically. I built a larger Mills cross with two lines of multiple paraboloids, rather than dipoles. This gave an angular response narrower than any existing radio telescope.

What was the principle behind doing a scan – your rastering, as it were?

We let the sun go through and then I would shift the response by an elaborate method of shifting the beam, running 30-odd little devices that went over the transmission lines to change the phase. We were producing daily pictures of the sun for a long time, and sending them overseas too.

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The way to go: one dish or more?

At this stage I think there were discussions within the CSIRO Radiophysics Labs.

Oh yes, quite bitter discussions, actually, because there were two lines of thought. For a long time Bowen had been keen on getting a great big parabolic aerial to follow Jodrell Bank, Manchester, and he was very strongly supported by Bolton. This would be very expensive and there were great discussions about whether it was worthwhile. Those of us who had done the work to produce economical telescopes with very high resolving power thought this was a lot of nonsense. Rather nastily I referred to what would be the future Parkes Telescope as the 'Last of the Windjammers', which I think those who were supporting it considered a bit of treachery.

What was the alternative that you favoured?

I wanted another multiple dish telescope, such as the one that was later built for the Australia Telescope. Bernard Mills and Joe Pawsey did too. Joe was so fed up that he accepted a job as more or less the number one person in radioastronomy in the United States. Unfortunately it was then found he had a malignant tumour in the brain, so he couldn't go. Although Bernard Mills was trained in engineering, not in physics, he got a Chair of Physics in Sydney and built a big aerial of the sort he wanted, a big Mills Cross, near Canberra. Several other people were thinking of leaving, and after a real bust-up with Bowen I said, 'I'm off.' I think he was only too pleased that I was going. Fortunately, I was able to take up a job offer as Professor of Electrical Engineering in Sydney.

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A detour to Holland

Prior to joining Sydney University you had an invitation from Holland, didn't you?

Yes. This was a complication. I went to the university and said that I had promised to go to Holland for a year. They treated me very generously, giving me special leave to go to Holland provided I went to the university first, for six months. So that suited everyone.

What was your mission in Holland?

I had been asked by Professor Oort in Holland to build a 400 MHz cross-type radio telescope. My family and I set off by ship again to Europe and during that time I worked out two good designs, as I thought, one consisting of a pair of crossed cylindrical paraboloids and the other, a lot of ordinary paraboloids.

Again two crossed linear arrays?

Yes, both crossed. When we got to Holland I produced this almost straight away and it was received very enthusiastically. I was given the task of organising the group that was going to build it. They had a very good scientist there but he said that he was used to working in small things and refused to have anything to do with these big shows. With the help of a very good Dutch civil and mechanical engineer we organised a gang of scientists, but what happened happened very slowly. We were all prepared to make a start, but Jan Oort had second thoughts. He decided that we'd do better at a much higher frequency than 400 MHz and told me to work out a design for 10 cm rather than 75. That would be 3000 MHz. So I got to work again on that.

Meanwhile, people were doing the electronics required for the lab, but suddenly, when it was pretty well going, the Belgians decided they were no longer interested. The telescope had to be very close to the border, and I had found what I thought was an ideal situation with the southern border going into Belgium: it was a suitable place to do it, and it ended right at a monastery that produced about the best beer in Belgium – a wonderful, wonderful situation! But the telescope was never built. When I left Holland, I left behind my offsider, Högbom, who got his PhD degree working with Martin Ryle at Cambridge. They decided to build a smaller compromise between what we had worked out and the Cambridge antenna.

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Earning an oilcan in Sydney

So back to Sydney and the beginning of about 18 years as Professor of Electrical Engineering. Madson was a very influential figure in Australian science. Did you succeed him?

I was worried. I'm not an engineer but trained in physics. I hadn't really wanted to change my profession. For some time previously this department had not had any consistent line of research – although the first professor, Madson, had been interested in radio work his interest in it had waned very much. The university knew I wanted to turn the department back to research (eg, radioastronomy) and very generously they gave me all the support in this that they could.

I came to the Chair under a bit of a cloud, I suppose, in that I was not a qualified engineer (although I had worked as one), I was a physicist and even worse I might be an astronomer. This didn't go down too well with some students. Later on, though, I got a couple of honorary doctorates in engineering, one from Melbourne and one from Sydney, the students presented me with a beautiful engraved oilcan, congratulating me on my 'first degree in engineering'!

Taking over the CSIRO field station

How did you set about increasing the level of research in your department?

First thing, I was looking for something cheap. I could see there were no radio telescopes useful at millimetre wavelengths in the country, so I worked out quite an interesting design for one, including a hole in the ground, spherical, with a correcting mirror which had actually been designed by Head in CSIRO. It looked quite a good scheme and I applied for money for it, but it was knocked back by someone who said that there was no interest in astronomy in millimetre wavelengths. That turned out to be ridiculous, because there were molecular lines which are terribly important. But then Paul Wild rang me up and said, 'Taffy [Bowen] is going to bulldoze all your aerials. Why don't you ask CSIRO to give them to the university?' That was an excellent thing of Paul to do, and CSIRO was very generous. We took over the whole field station.

Did you modify it?

Oh yes, by turning it into a really sophisticated instrument, putting in several large antennas, well spaced from the existing arrays. We got the resolving power down to about a third of a minute of arc and produced some beautiful pictures of various sources in the sky, with more detail than before of any source in the southern hemisphere, but I don't think anything startling in astronomy came out of it.

A very good training ground for electrical engineers, though.

Yes, and it turned out that our engineers – for example, Bob Frater was really my offsider on this – played a major part in the building of the Australia Telescope.

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The Chinese connection

You were gradually increasing your international connections, including training students who would return to their own countries. Was it the 1963 International Astronomical Union assembly which led to your intense interaction with China?

My interest started in about 1920 through an aunt who was matron of a missionary hospital in China. I later read a book called Red Star over China, by Edgar Snow, and became still more interested in China. When I had to go to the IAU meeting in Japan I thought, 'Why don't I try to get into China?' So I wrote to the Chinese Academy, saying that I was representing our Academy, more or less, at the meeting and asking if they could help me to get a visa to China. Nothing happened for quite a while, and then suddenly they said they would be glad for me to go as their guest, and give lectures and so on. They'd read everything I had ever written, I think. After that the connection just increased, because while I was there I met the President of their Academy and I suggested that he ask our Academy to send a delegation to China. A delegation did go, probably in 1964, and in return a Chinese one came to Australia.

When I made my first visit, they told me they were having soon the first big scientific conference in China for very many years, maybe even the first general one, and they asked me, 'How about getting a delegation from Australia to this one?' So I collected a few people who wanted to go, and we went the next year to the Peking Symposium, which was for all branches of science. That enabled me to visit their '10 cm' telescope at Purple Mountains Observatory, near Nanking. They were quite interested in radioastronomy there.

I asked one of their astronomers, who spoke excellent English – an extremely bright and interesting person – to come to work with us in Australia for six months. He and another, much younger, fellow came and lived with us for a while and then in a college at the university. As he left us he said, 'You've got a sabbatical year coming up, Chris. Why don't you spend it in China?' I thought, 'That's an idea,' so we went to China.

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A much longer wavelength in China

Where did you go in China in 1966, on your sabbatical?

I went to Peking, but way out from the city, where they were building a version of my first radio telescope at a much longer wavelength. They had made a small model of it and had started on a larger one.

And so you had to set to and actually create it, did you?

Yes, but they were getting pretty clued up by this time, anyway. Also, I had to give a lecture every morning – an hour and a half, but it went for three hours because it had to be translated. The students were a bright bunch but I was a bit worried about the way they started talking about my 'teaching', as though this was coming from heaven or something. So I said, 'Look, I'm waiting for someone to say this is a lot of rubbish.' That rather shocked them, I think, but after that they did have a go at me if they thought what I said was wrong.

You found yourself right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, didn't you?

Oh yes. No sooner had we got there when they said, 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has just commenced. We're against bad authority.' As soon as my colleagues back at the university heard this, they said, 'Chris up to his old tricks!' Anyway, the young people were really in revolt, egged on very strongly by Mao. They were all shouting out, 'To rebel is right,' and large demonstrations were taking place.

It was a terribly interesting time to be there but it was a bit difficult for me to do my work. The construction was being held up because the young people were spending all their time at meetings. I got fed up one day because I wanted to get the transmission line in, which meant putting in a lot of posts, and nothing was being done at all. So I said, 'Look, we can't do anything until they're done. For God's sake, get me a pick and a shovel and a crowbar.' The ground was frozen stiff – it was minus 20 degrees – but I started digging post-holes. After I had done a few, I had to give up to go back to where we were living. When I arrived at work next morning, the whole lot was done. The boys had worked all night, at minus 30 degrees. They were good lads!

Tell us about your son going to live in a commune.

Steve went with us for all our time in China, just after he had started at the ANU doing Oriental Studies. He was a bit of a linguist, having had primary school in France and secondary school in Holland, and within six months he became fluent in Chinese. This was wonderful because a lot of things were not released to foreigners in the Cultural Revolution – the Chinese always play their cards pretty close to their chest anyway – but Steve could give us all the lowdown on what was happening. He was working at the Language Institute, and he and his fellows all went out to work on different communes. He enjoyed it so much, he didn't want to come back to Australia. The local peasants reckoned he was a beaut worker.

Did you get the telescope array erected?

Yes. It wasn't in a real working order when I left, but they have since been producing some very beautiful maps with it. In real Chinese fashion, they've got their maize growing right around the edge of the array. They're not going to waste anything.

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Recognition in China

When was it that you had the pleasure of meeting Chou En-lai?

It was while I was working over there. He was terribly busy – in fact, that was for him a sad and historic day. He'd had the first visit from an American, Nixon, and had just been down seeing Nixon off; and also that very day (although I didn't know it when I met him) he'd got the report from his doctor that he had terminal cancer. I was introduced to him just as, 'This is Christiansen from Australia,' and he said, 'How's that telescope going?' So he was really on the ball. He always used to go to meetings of the Academy, apparently. If he had not died, I don't think the Tiananmen trouble would have happened, because he was always right on the spot where any trouble was brewing, and was a real diplomat. He knew absolutely how to hose anything down.

Your work in China, both in the scientific and in the cultural sphere, was acknowledged, wasn't it, by the Chairman of the Chinese Academy.

That's right, yes. He gave a nice speech in which Bohr and a lot of other famous scientists were mentioned – it was wonderful being put in the company of such people.

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Ripples from a fortuitous life

You retired from Sydney in 1978 and you were Foreign Secretary of the Academy for four years from 1981. To make the job a bit easier, I think, you moved up to Canberra in your retirement.

Yes, and the ANU very generously gave me part use of a room at Mt Stromlo. That enabled me to do the two things I had in mind. I wanted to produce a second edition of my book with Högbom, Radio Telescopes. The first edition had been written in China in 1966, throughout the Cultural Revolution. It had done very well, being translated into Russian and Chinese, and the Cambridge University Press wanted a second edition and also a paperback. And also I was working in the International Union and for our Academy.

You were elected as Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union from 1964 to 1970, and as President of the International Union of Radioastronomy from 1978 to 1981 – very fitting tributes to your work and the fame you had achieved in radioastronomy. Just briefly, what reminiscences of life would you give us?

Well, it does look a bit as though I'd had a nicely planned existence, that I'd been interested in astronomy and then went into radio, and then that just fitted perfectly into radioastronomy. But everything happened purely by accident in my life. I didn't plan any damn thing.

Having had roughly a third of my working life in the research lab of an industrial factory, a third of it in CSIRO, a research organisation, and a third as a university professor, I would have to say that my most interesting time undoubtedly was in CSIRO. Most of the worthwhile things I did were there, although being at the University of Melbourne as a postgraduate and working in AWA were very interesting too. One's ideas probably diminish in number as one gets older, because I had dozens of them in that early period. Then the University of Sydney treated me very generously, allowing me time without any demur to do work for the international unions and the Academy, and also encouraging me to build up an engineering department into a sort of research organisation.

Do you think that the ripples from your work went out more from your university years, simply because you were training students?

I think so. That is the good thing about the university work. One takes quite a bit of pride in what one's offsiders have done, and even now, getting on for 20 years in retirement, I get a lot of kick out of seeing what my former students are doing and their contributions to science and engineering. You get a long-lasting pleasure out of that, which compensates for the slight irritations you get at university from never being able to do anything without being interrupted.

On that note we'll finish, Chris. Thank you very much for giving us your time for an entirely fascinating interview.

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Alan Buchanan Wardrop was born in Hobart in 1921. Wardrop was educated at the University of Tasmania, where he obtained a BSc in 1942 and an MSc in 1944 for his work in botany and chemistry. He then spent 1944 and 1945 training RAAF air crews. In 1945 he joined the CSIR (later to become CSIRO) Division of Forest Products and in 1946 was awarded an overseas research scholarship which led to a PhD in botany from the University of Leeds in the UK in 1949. He then returned to CSIRO, where he rose to the level of senior principal research scientist and officer-in-charge of the Section of Wood and Fibre Structure. He was awarded a DSc by the University of Melbourne in 1958.  

Wardrop left the CSIRO in 1964 to return to the University of Tasmania as professor of botany. In 1966 he became the foundation professor of botany at La Trobe University, where he remained until his retirement in 1986, upon which he became emeritus professor in the Botany Department. He played an active role in the academic administration of the university. Professor Wardrop passed away in 2003.

Interviewed by Dr Max Blythe in 1998.

Contents

• A well-grounded childhood
• Helpful influences at school
• Building a foundation in biochemistry
• Scientific war efforts
• Going into the Services
• Starting to look at cell wall structure in wood
• How wood is constituted
• Conflicting views of cellulose arrangement
• Solving the controversy
• Highlights and footnotes of the Leeds sojourn
• Persuading annual growth rings to cast light on wood properties
• Coming into contact with the problem of reaction wood
• Fig tree revelations
• Coleoptile contributions to plant growth theory
• Under-the-counter research
• Itchy feet in an enduring family landscape
• Multifaceted academic leadership
• Fruitful applications of freeze-etching techniques
• Cell extenstion: multinet or helicoid
• The continuing attraction of unsolved problems

A well-grounded childhood

Alan, you were born in Hobart, in July 1921. Were there other children in the family?

I had just one elder brother, John.

Your surname is somewhat unusual.

I believe it is quite a common name in Scotland, particularly on the west coast. That is where my father, James Wardrop, was born. He was about three when he migrated to Tasmania with my grandparents in the late 1880s.

Did your parents support you in gaining an education and going into science?

Well, my father was a legal officer working for the Tasmanian government. There wasn't any science in the family, but he was always very supportive of me in anything I wanted to do in relationship to such things. My mother was never opposed to my ambitions but was more protective, – I don't think she wanted me to have to work too hard in life.

Hobart in the 1920s, when you were growing up, must have been relatively quiet.

Yes. It probably had only about 50,000 people. Its geographical setting is very nice, with Mount Wellington just behind, and the beauty of it was that you could walk to the summit and back in one day, through all sorts of vegetation and so on. That was a favourite recreation for me, whether I went alone or with friends.

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Helpful influences at school

What do you remember about beginning your education?

I went to a state primary school – the details are a bit of a blur now – and then to the state high school in Hobart. It was not very large but it had really good teachers and I enjoyed being there.

Did the science teaching in the high school figure well?

Yes, it was very good. In particular, Gordon Brett, who was in charge of teaching physics, made the first chromosome counts of eucalypts and published that in the Royal Society of Tasmania – quite remarkable. I imagine he must have been influenced by the new techniques of seeing chromosomes about that time, but it was unusual for a schoolteacher to have the time to do such a thing. I was impressed by his approach to scientific research: 'If you are going to get into a question, get yourself well prepared, read all you can, and if possible try and see if something doesn't agree with what you think.'

There was a very good chemistry man as well, Victor Crohn. As a matter of fact, the place being so small, you tended to get really good teachers because often they would, particularly in languages, teach part-time at the university and at school.

Would you say you stood out in anything at school – in sports or reading, or academically?

Ahh, in sports I met all requirements! I don't think you could rate it higher than that. I did read a lot, certainly, but I can only say I always did quite well in academic things.

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Building a foundation in biochemistry

I suppose that by the time you got towards your higher school certificate, it was obvious that you would look for a university place. Were your parents supportive of that?

Yes, particularly my father. We were not well off, though, and I think one reason my brother hadn't gone to university might have been a financial constraint. But I was able to get a university scholarship – worth about £50 – which was a great help.

I believe that the University of Tasmania was quite small.

Yes. There were only 15 or 16 students doing honours in the whole of biology.

What did you intend to do at university? I don't suppose you meant to focus on botany right from the start.

For some reason I had a feeling that I would like to do biochemistry, so I aimed at majoring in botany and chemistry. I had done chemistry at school, but biology wasn't taught to males at that time and biochemistry wasn't taught at all in Tasmanian schools.

Did you continue with any physics?

Oh yes. We had a very rigidly structured degree. In first year we did four subjects: physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology. By third year I ended up with botany and chemistry. We had lectures all the way through, complemented by lab work.

So you had a good conventional scientific background. Were there any particular lecturers who fired your mind?

There were a number of them. One quite good physics man, Lester McCauley, had an interest in biophysics, studying in particular (as a physicist) the electric fields around growing roots. He had done his PhD in England – as a student of Rutherford, I think. He stood out for us, however, chiefly for his eccentricity in his personal dress, his manner of talking to you and that sort of thing.

In botany, Professor Gordon was very good. I think he was a student of Bowers, from Edinburgh; he spoke with a strong Scottish accent. And we had just one Chair of chemistry: Edwin Kurth was a chemical engineer, and was engaged in a lot of wartime programs.

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Scientific war efforts

You didn't go straight on to do a PhD, did you?

No. Until about 1946 or '47 there were no PhDs given in Australia and normally you had to go to England or somewhere else overseas for that, but an MSc was the nearest I could do during the war.

Was your MSc course entirely a taught one?

No. We had lectures in physical, organic and inorganic chemistry, but instead of going into the Army to do something towards the war effort we had a project to do, which extended about 18 months. The one that I had was hydrolysing the cellulose of wood to produce monomer sugars which could then be fermented to alcohol, allegedly as a fuel substitute. It didn't seem to me that we were ever going to make enough alcohol to affect the war effort, but it did involve an interesting study of the kinetics of cellulose hydrolysis.

I've been trying to work out which division of science your MSc was actually in.

Well, you would have to say it verged on chemical engineering. We would cook up wood and measure how much had been hydrolysed and then what the sugar yield was, and that sort of thing. Of course, wood hydrolysis had been a common procedure in World War I, when huge kilns were built in Europe to make alcohol. I suppose people had forgotten it all until World War II started.

What other projects were the postgraduate students put onto?

In the Physics Department a lot of work on optical munitions – making lenses and that sort of thing – was going on, but I don't know the details of it.

And as I mentioned, the professor of chemistry was involved in a project. There was a great fuel shortage, so they used to make portable producer-gas units which were carried behind motorcars on little trolleys. Producer gas is mainly carbon monoxide and nitrogen, and you had to blow air over a bed of charcoal, so kilns were built to make very high-carbon content charcoal. One of the 'Kurth kilns' which the professor designed might still be in the hills here in Melbourne.

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Going into the Services

I gather that it was straight after your MSc that you went into the RAAF. Your brother had gone into the Services too, hadn't he?

Yes. He was in the Army for pretty well the whole of the war. He was up in the Pacific Islands.

While you were at university, did the students feel you were missing the war?

I think that was prevalent. As science students we were put into reserved occupations. I don't think I was terribly conscious of that for a long time, but when it came to actually doing work allegedly supporting the war effort, it all seemed pretty useless. I don't want to pose as a great patriot or anything, but going into the Services was the thing to do.

I suppose that by then, late 1943 or so, things were starting to change a bit more favourably. Anyway, I did get in to the Air Force and I started training as a navigator. Our initial training was at Balnarring, on Western Port Bay in Victoria, after which we went to Mount Gambier, in South Australia, for the actual air navigation. And then from there we would do exercises.

Having been relatively isolated in Tasmania for most of your previous life, did you find this period a bit of a revelation?

Well, I found it very interesting. I think it did me a lot of good, in the sense that you got a different perspective on other people and that sort of thing. But after the atomic attack on Japan, it was obvious that the war was coming to an end and we began agitating to get out of the Air Force.

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Starting to look at cell wall structure in wood

Did you get another job fairly quickly?

Yes. I don't recall the exact circumstance. I think I just saw an advertisement for the CSIR, as it was then – the Council for Science and Industrial Research. Later it became the CSIRO.

The Division of Forest Products had about six sections, one of which was on wood structure, with Eric Dadswell – a very eminent wood anatomist – in charge. The particular importance of the section's work was in identifying wood by the arrangement of the cells in it, and also in interpreting the gross properties of wood: its shrinkage, and its strength. But they could see that if you were going to extend this work into wood properties and also into the very important fledgling pulp and paper industry, you needed to know something more than the gross anatomy of the wood. I wanted to look particularly at the very fine structure of the cell walls.

I have always thought of the matrices of specially developed cells which make up wood as massive structures of cell walls, rather like thickened honeycombs of tissue. So these huge trees make me think of great structures of cells that were thickened and then died out, leaving their skeletal structure.

That's right, yes.

The division that you joined was very large, I believe. Wood was quite a priority.

Yes, it was. For example, complementing the wood structure section there was one on wood chemistry, a separate one on physics, and a number of very applied sections on wood preservation, timber mechanics and so on. There would be 20 to 30 people in each section, so it was quite a big laboratory.

They were all in the same building in South Melbourne, so you got good interaction. You could get any information you wanted, particularly with chemistry but also physics. And of course as a lab it had wonderful backup, workshops, if you wanted anything made. (The casino is now on that site, but the division is thriving and well at Clayton.)

That must have been a fascinating time to join the division. There was an interest in the new timbers that had been found during the war in the Pacific area, wasn't there?

Yes. There were many new species coming in all the time, because there was usually a forestry unit with the armies and they would send specimens. But after the war, fortunately for me, there was this suggestion of looking at the structure of the cell walls, which relate to the shrinkage and swelling of the wood as a whole. I didn't particularly want to get into the wood identification kind of thing, so I started to look at what the fine structure was, and the composition, just reading about it.

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How wood is constituted

Then you came across a widely-debated controversy. What was that about?

It was about what the organisation of the cell wall was. I think I should say here what the main wood components are.

In a conifer wood, the main component of the cell walls – about 60 per cent – is cellulose. In a hardwood such as eucalyptus, it is a bit less than 50 per cent. Besides the cellulose, there are non-cellulosic polysaccharides, carbohydrates, making up about 20 per cent. And the remainder is a non-carbohydrate component called lignin, which is basically a polyphenyl.

It is important, when you start looking at the structure of the cell wall, to recognise the molecular nature of cellulose. It is made up of individual molecules, consisting of residues of the sugar glucose, strung together in a very long straight chains of perhaps 10,000. A cellulose molecule would be long enough – but not wide enough – to be seen in an optical microscope. These very long straight molecules of cellulose are aggregated laterally, the lateral aggregates being called microfibrils, and they are partially crystalline. They have perfect arrangement in three dimensions, which means that you can detect them using the techniques for studying crystals, such as polarised light or X-ray diffraction, and so we developed these techniques there at that time.

In explaining the differentiation – the development – I might use the terms 'tracheid', meaning the conducting cells in a conifer, or 'fibres', as the strengthening cells in a hardwood, and occasionally I might interchange the terms.

In the development of the individual tracheid, it is the same as dividing cells just between the bark and the wood in a stem, the cambial layer.

Constantly cutting new cells to the interior?

That's right. In that differentiation from the cambium to the tracheid, there are dimensional changes – the cells expand laterally and longitudinally – during which the cell wall is very thin and is called a primary cell wall. When the dimensional changes have ceased, there are laid down on the inner surface of the primary wall a succession of layers of cellulose and non-cellulosic polysaccharides – the S1, S2 and S3 layers of the secondary wall. When the cell begins to approach maturity, there is the additional deposition of lignin, which begins at the primary wall on the outer side.

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Conflicting views of cellulose arrangement

So where did the controversy come in?

Well, there were two views as to the way the cellulose, in particular, was arranged in the cell wall.

One would think that the existence of these layers would be readily recognised. They can be readily distinguished if you examine them in polarised light, in that because of the crystalline structure of the microfibrils the optical properties of these three layers are different – they appear with different grain structures. One of the main workers in this field at the time was I W Bailey, at Harvard University, and he proposed a model very much like the one I have been talking about.

A contrary conclusion was formed in Leeds, however, by R D Preston. He was a physicist working in the Botany Department because the professor of the time wanted someone trained in physical sciences to be approaching botanical problems. (Preston was working with a very distinguished man, W T Astbury, who did a lot of work on proteins, particularly structural proteins.) Preston built a beautiful little X-ray spectrometer, with which you could get a diffraction diagram of just a single tracheid. And the evidence he obtained from the X-ray diffraction diagram was of only one helix in the whole cell wall.

So while Bailey in America was saying that there were three helical developments, three sheathing collars, Preston was not seeing that?

Oh, he admitted there were three layers, because he too could see them in the polarised light. But because he could only detect one helix from the X-ray data, he postulated that although the mean orientation of the microfibrils was the same in all three layers, the dispersion or the diffraction of orientation in each layer was different. So he proposed that in layer S1, for example, the mean orientation was the same as in S2 but, if you like, the microfibrils wobbled about that orientation. And the same for the S3. On this argument he could explain the optical heterogeneity of the cross-section and the fact that he could only obtain one layer. (I should tell you that I got to know both Preston and Bailey very well in later years.)

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Solving the controversy

Obviously you became interested enough to want to become associated with that problem. Is that why you applied to go to Leeds?

That's right. The CSIRO were offering postwar fellowship scholarships for people who wanted to go away, and I wanted to solve this problem of the different models that had been advanced. Everybody agreed there were three layers, of different optical properties, but was there only one helix or were there three?

Did Preston set you onto this problem for your PhD?

Yes. It was close to his heart. And the solution was really very simple. Imagine a cross-section of the cell, showing the three layers, S1, S2, S3. Now imagine we can cut, with a good microtome, a cross-section. As we alter the plane of section, the optical properties of these three layers will change. The story behind that is too complicated to go into here, but what we did was to section them, starting with a transverse section, and measure the optical properties of the three layers. Then we cut a section steeper, and again steeper, until we got to a longitudinal one.

Now imagine that you plot these optical properties. If there were three layers, in the Bailey model there would come a time, in cutting these sections, when the plane of the section would be in the plane of the microfibril and you would get a maximum of an optical quantity you are measuring. It is called the biorefringent. On this model you would get three curves, one for each layer. But on the Preston model you should have only one. Well, there were three.

It must have been difficult to go and tell that to your PhD supervisor, when he had staked so much of his reputation on there being only one.

It must be said enormously in Preston's favour that he was as hell-bent on getting a solution to this as anyone. At morning tea every day it would be, 'How's it going? How are the measurements?' It was a very congenial sort of thing. And the proof appealed to him because it involved measurement of a physical quantity, with quite complicated interpretation of the optical properties, this biorefringent, at the different planes of section. Although he pulled out every stop in arguing his case – he had a particularly good ability to interpret the optical properties – he acknowledged that we had a clear result. So that was good.

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Highlights and footnotes of the Leeds sojourn

Tell me a bit about your voyage to Leeds.

It was a broadening experience. We went on a ship called the Almeida, which had been torpedoed during the war and then mended by filling up the whole bottom with concrete. So the bowels of the ship were all concrete. From Melbourne to Liverpool took us 7½ weeks – not the best of sea travel, but quite enjoyable. And a number of people who were quite well known in Australia were aboard at the same time, such as George Humphrey, who was Chief of Fisheries at the CSIRO, and Edgar Mercer, who was in the Wool Division.

When you got to Leeds, did that Botany Department strike you as impressive?

Well, the department was in a row of old terrace houses on the Leeds campus; they hadn't started postwar building or anything of that kind. As a matter of fact, it nearly brought me to a sticky end. One of Preston's X-ray diffraction units involved a reciprocating anode, which meant that the target moved backwards and forwards with it, and of course this caused vibration in the operation of the instrument. One day, when I was in the lab – in a house which I think had been plastered for centuries! – trying to line this instrument up, all of a sudden there was a terrible crash and the whole assembly of fluorescent lights came down on top of me and the instrument. It turned out that the lights had only been screwed into the plaster and not into the rafters, and with the vibration of the building they just came loose and fell. So you might say there were some highlights of my time there.

When I arrived, the very well-known Professor Priestley (who had introduced Preston to the department) had just retired. The new professor who came in, Irene Manton, is well known in phycology. She was very keen on electron microscopy as well.

With such distinguished botanists as Priestley, Preston and later Pearsall, that was a remarkable department.

Yes. And they migrated all over the place.

Preston can't have been all that much older than you.

Oh, there is quite a difference. He will be 90 this year and I am 77. But he is young enough to be a very good, lively person to discuss things with.

Would you say he has been undervalued in history?

I think he has, especially in his impact on the timber industry and that sort of thing. He is a very eminent scientist, and was elected quite early to the Royal Society of London. And well, he is a Yorkshireman and I think he had a devilish streak in him – if people tried to be a bit pompous, he'd deal with them by addressing them in dialect. But he was a very nice chap. Even though at times we had quite extended arguments, the way it always ended, late in the afternoon, was, 'Well, let's go up to the pub and have a beer.' There was never any acrimony. Also, he had interesting students around that he was supervising at the time, in different ways. He seemed very popular.

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Persuading annual growth rings to cast light on wood properties

Can you give me an example of Preston's contribution to timber science?

Yes. A cross-section of a stem, we'll say in a conifer, shows growth rings formed annually. It had been observed by German botanists in the 19th century, by measuring the length of the tracheid in successive growth rings, that the length of the cells progressively increased.

Preston made a very important observation about the orientation of the microfibrils in the S2 layer. As the cells increased in length, the angle of the microfibrils decreased. The microfibril orientation in the early cells, say in the first year, would be rather flat, and then in successive years it would get steeper and steeper. Now, to take just one helix at a time, if the orientation is flat, water which is present in the cell walls can't penetrate the crystalline cellulose of the microfibril. So that determines whether the longitudinal shrinkage is great or not. If the helix were flat, you would get a high component of longitudinal shrinkage; if the helix were steep, there would be mainly lateral and very little longitudinal shrinkage. This gave a perfect way to study the effect of microfibril orientation and wall structure on properties, by dissecting wood from successive growth rings.

So Preston was showing the wonderful versatility of change.

Yes, but he was not recognised. He was the first, I think, to establish this relationship. And it is a beautiful experimental model. When I got back, we hammered this very hard, measuring whatever properties we could – shrinkage, inverse swelling, and also mechanical properties like breaking load of the wood. We were able to show a relationship between the orientation of the microfibrils and the breaking load of individual tracheids.

I suppose this work would ultimately enable you to show microscopically the actual properties of a wood – to say quite a lot about its breaking strength – even if you had not seen it before.

Yes, once we knew what the wall organisation was. Remember, this was no one-man band: in that division we were very fortunate in having the chemists and physicists around so that we could always go and get advice on these problems. If you wanted to measure shrinkage, there was somebody there to tell you how to do it in the best possible way.

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Coming into contact with the problem of reaction wood

You spent two years in Leeds, resolving that cell structure debate for your PhD. When you came back to CSIRO did you receive some recognition of the magnitude of what you had done?

Yes, but it didn't make clear the relevance of solving what model was right to the properties. We got on with the microfibril structure work, installing all the instruments to do it and buying our first little electron microscope. It used to sit on a bench, with the high-tension works under the bench. This was in the 1950s, so the lenses were permanent magnets – in the modern ones, they are all electron magnets – and its best resolution was about 10 nanometres. But we had it, and we had the X-ray diffraction unit, good optical and polarising microscopes, and so on.

Alan, would you like to explain to me the interest in reaction wood which you were developing at that time?

There were two things we got interested in about then. One arose from the dimensional changes occurring with the differentiation of the tracheid: the question was what changes in wall organisation, microfibril orientation, occurred during those dimensional changes. And also, through the studies looking at the properties in successive annual rings, we came into contact with the problem of reaction wood – an old problem which the foresters of Europe were looking at in the 19th century.

Consider the axis of a tree and one of its branches. In a conifer, if you cut a cross-section of the branch and look at the annual growth rings, you will find they are eccentric towards the lower side, and the wood there is very abnormal, quite different from the structure I was telling you about. Specifically, the rings are wider; and the tracheids are shorter, the orientation of the microfibrils in the S1 and S2 layers in the tracheids is very much flatter, and the S3 layer is absent. This is popularly known as compression wood, simply because with the weight of the tree that side would be under compression. The interesting thing arises if you suppose that the growing tip of a stem – the leading shoot – is cut off. Normally, the branch will then take over, curving up to become the leading shoot. But this is a massive structure, tremendously strong. In a simple plant like a flower stalk, any movement of the stalk is brought about by a differential growth on the two sides. That can't happen here – this is very thick and very strong, so it has to be bent. The development of reaction wood, or compression wood in this case, involves an actual bending of that massive structure.

Is there a tension in that compression wood, then, that will provide an uplift force?

It pushes the branch up, to put it crudely. But if a thick branch is to bend when the leading shoot is chopped off, a great compressive force must be developed. You can establish that the compression wood is the site of the force, because if you kill the cambium (which generates new tissue) on the side away from it, nothing happens – the compressive force causing the bending is associated with the compression wood. Just how the level of lignification and the different cell wall organisation operate, I don't know. We drew attention to the problem, or added to the evidence, but we never solved it.

We did a lot on that, and also quite a lot of field experimentation, killing the cambium on one part of the stem and not the other. And in the so-called tension wood in the angiosperms, in the hardwoods – a eucalypt, say – you have a similar eccentricity, but the opposite of what you have in the conifer. The structure is again different, abnormal. You can show experimentally that there are enormous growth stresses in the stem.

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Fig tree revelations

Wasn't some work related to tension wood done in the United States on fig trees?

Yes, by Martin Zimmerman and Barry Tomlinson at the Harvard Forest. (Zimmerman was from Switzerland and Tomlinson from Leeds, as a matter of fact.) Their interest in tropical vegetation led them to become very interested in the growth of the fig tree. These trees grow in the normal arborescent form, and from the branches they drop down aerial roots – very thin to start with, but when they hit the ground they go into tension and can be twanged! They are in tension and undergoing contraction.

As part of their field observations, Tomlinson and Zimmerman buried a drum with seed and soil, and marked the level where the drum was buried to. When the roots came down and went into tension, starting to thicken, they were strong enough to pull the drum quite a long way out of the ground.

When the anatomy of these aerial roots is examined, their reaction wood is found to be identical with the tension wood of the fig tree. Although we don't know all the details of the mechanism, this was a good demonstration that the formation of tension wood involved a contractile force. It's a marvellous set-up, really. You have got the stem pulling up and the root pulling down, making a tremendously stable structure. And to complete the story: after this contraction has ceased, then the roots form normal wood and act as a prop. So it is a wonderfully stable structure that develops. That was important to us in establishing the contractile nature of reaction wood.

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Coleoptile contributions to plant growth theory

What part did coleoptiles play in your studies of wood?

They came into the study of the differentiation of, say, the tracheids in a conifer, when cell division takes place in the cambium and the primary wall is formed. This is very thin, and is present during the time of growth or dimensional changes of the differentiating cell, before the secondary wall.

A favourite experimental object for studying the changes in the microfibril arrangement in the primary wall during dimensional change was oat coleoptiles. Imagine a germinating wheat seed of any kind. The first leaf as it grows up is enclosed by a slender sheath made up entirely of a single layer thin-walled parenchyma cells, with no differentiation. This outer sheath is the coleoptile, and the reason it is such a beautiful object for physiological study is that when it is first formed, up to about one centimetre long, it elongates entirely by cell division but after that time – and it can extend through about five centimetres long before the leaf breaks through – the elongation is brought about purely by the extension of the cells already formed. So when it is, say, two or three centimetres long, you can cut a bit out and pull the leaf out of the middle, and then you have got a little cylinder of cells. If you put those in a dish, they will extend, according to what you feed them, or the temperature. The coleoptile was ideal, since this is only a primary wall present, to study the arrangement of the microfibrils.

By this time we had an electron microscope so we could see the microfibril orientation, and we had all the ancillary equipment. So we started to grow the coleoptiles to different lengths, using chemical treatment to separate the individual cells one from another, and then looking at what their structure is. (You can look at this in a polarising light microscope too.)

I think you were about to collapse a hypothesis that had been made.

Well, people were going pretty mad with electron microscopy at this time and you could get all sorts of interpretations. This was prior to the development of good ultramicrotomes to allow you to section things, so you often had to break up the cell walls by very violent methods – by ultrasound or by putting them in a Mixmaster or something of that kind.

There had always been an argument about whether, when the extension period of growth in plants occurred, the growth of differentiating cells was generally uniform or tip. The view that the cells grew at their tips was based mainly on electron microscopy, and it had been advanced by two very eminent people – Frey-Wyssling and Kurt Muhlethaler, who were based at the ETH, in Zurich.

We were able to show, however, in a very simple set of observations, that if you isolate these cells you find that they are interconnected, one with the other, by little pores in the wall by which the cytoplasm communicates with the cell next to it. First of all we observed that these pit-fields, which are easily recognised in the optical microscope, did not increase in number during elongation or in distribution as you would expect if there was tip growth. So, since they did not increase in number, as far as we could see, was there a new cell wall forming? Was it different at the tip than at the middle? No, it wasn't. And then, to clinch it, we fed the coleoptile segments with radioactive glucose, C-14 glucose, and observed that the distribution of the newly formed cellulose was the same all over the cell.

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Under-the-counter research

Is it true that you were actually growing your coleoptiles under benches?

Yes. There was a sort of red-tape situation in which the Department of Forestry in Canberra was in charge of growing trees and the CSIRO Division of Forest Products just looked at the wood. So we had to keep a very low profile on growing anything. These coleoptiles posed no problem, you could grow them in a dish under the bench. But we had to relate this to wood.

Fortunately, at about that time the CSIRO Executive of the day wanted to assess how their labs were going, so James Bonner – from the California Institute of Technology – visited Plant Industry in Canberra and us in Melbourne. I told him about the compression wood story and that we needed glasshouses to be able to grow the plants under different conditions, and also about the coleoptile stuff. He quite liked all this, and after he had left the lab, the chief of the division came round to me and said, 'Well, I've talked to Bonner, and you can have your glasshouse for your coleoptiles.' Of course, we had them already, but it meant we could grow little trees, and we put a glasshouse on the roof of the lab then. That gave us a nice experimental set-up.

So in the very early '60s you could get tissue absolutely as you wanted it, and get right to the bench with it.

Yes, that's right. By the way, things have changed now and there is no problem about growing timber for research. We now have a Division of Forestry and Forest Products, all integrated in every way.

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Itchy feet in an enduring family landscape

By about 1964 you weren't so happy at CSIRO. Why was that?

It's hard to give a specific reason. In the organisation generally, not just in Forest Products, there were changes going on and a lot of discussion of what was pure research and what was applied – a silly discussion, in my opinion. It seemed to me that universities had a complementary approach of doing both research and teaching, and I just wondered whether it wasn't time for a change. I had got my DSc at Melbourne University some years previously, and I began to think that it might be nice to teach.

So you applied for the Chair of Botany at Hobart, and returned to Tasmania?

Yes, to get back into academic work. That was a very good department. My predecessor there was Newton Barber, a distinguished geneticist, so I was a bit of a change. It got off wonderfully well – we got a big grant for a very good Siemens electron microscope – but unfortunately my younger daughter became quite ill in Melbourne and it was apparent that we couldn't move her to Hobart. And also there were a lot of medical facilities in Melbourne. So I was faced with the problem of getting back to Melbourne, either to CSIRO if they would still have me after leaving, or to another job. La Trobe University was just being started, though (that was in 1966, and they took their first students in '67) and I was able to get the Chair of Botany there.

Alan, obviously your family was an important factor in your career, so would you tell us a bit about them? When did you meet your wife?

My wife Beulah is a mathematician, and we met at CSIRO. We were married in 1945, about a year before the opportunity of going to England arose. I had never been out of Australia but she had, just before war broke out. As a matter of fact, her father was a businessman and was travelling in Europe. So she was in Germany at those terrible times of the Nuremberg rallies and so on, and although she was still in her teens that forms an important part of her memories. Anyway, our first child, Martin, was born after we returned, and we have now four children, two girls and two boys.

And they have all done remarkably well.

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Multifaceted academic leadership

You were the first Professor of Botany at La Trobe, weren't you?

Yes. That was a most unusual experience, because very rarely can you plan or even watch something develop from the beginning. It brought with it an awful lot of administration, however.

This being such a new place, you must have had to design laboratories and to think about the kind of department you wanted.

Well, I had a very good lab manager to design the laboratories. I tried to make the department a pretty balanced one, because we had to think of the undergraduate teaching, not just the research.

So you included disciplines like ecology, taxonomy, anatomy, physiology and so on?

Yes. One thing we didn't have was genetics, but we were fortunate that the university created a Foundation Chair in Genetics, with Peter Parsons, and so all the genetics we wanted for our courses was in the same building, on another floor.

Could you continue your microfibril and reaction tissue work there?

Oh, I brought the problems with me. And the links with CSIRO were maintained.

I suspect you rather liked the teaching, but I wonder whether fundamentally you aren't a researcher – you like to base your teaching on having your feet firmly in a laboratory.

I think so. I must admit I do like teaching, but you never get anything the way you really want it. As the administration grew, the teaching became more of a chore, because you dared not take your eye off what money was coming in, and that sort of thing. And an interesting change occurred. When the university was starting, the Vice-Chancellor, David Myers, was working on the assumption that there would be twice as many physical science students as biological ones. Within about five years that was reversed – the swing was occurring all over Australia, I think – and that had tremendous implications on the buildings, of course.

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Fruitful applications of freeze-etching techniques

Quite quickly in the '70s you became involved in freeze-etching technique. Would you like to tell us about that development?

Yes, I'd like to mention it, because I think it was important at the time.

The problem if you want to look at the living contents, the cytoplasm, of a cell, as distinct from the cell walls, is that you have got to kill it. It is usual to use all sorts of violent chemicals such as osmic acid or chromium salts for that purpose, but this naturally causes artefacts in the killing of the cell. So a technique of freeze-etching was developed, particularly by Hans Moor – an associate of Frey-Wyssling and Muhlethaler, whom I mentioned a short while ago.

The technique is based on the fact that if you take, say, a yeast cell, and you freeze it – very fast or very slow – so it is at a temperature of liquid nitrogen, round about minus 190°, and then thaw it out again, if you control the conditions and rate of freezing and rate of thawing you can get about a 95 per cent survival rate. So they built a special machine to enable the whole operation to be done in a high vacuum. You would take frozen cells and put them on a little table, or bench, enclosed in a bell jar which could be evacuated. Built in to this instrument was a microtome knife which had liquid nitrogen pumped through it. You could then move this microtome knife round and shatter the cells sitting on the table – all this being done under high vacuum.

If you had the knife at a temperature a little higher than that of the liquid nitrogen freezing the cells, the water molecules would be picked out of the exposed structure. We would first of all cut the cells with the knife, and then raise the temperature of the knife a little bit and bring it back, whereupon the water molecules would pick out from the exposed surface of the cell. That's the etching part of it: if you had an organelle like a mitochondrion or a plastid in there, you accentuated its substructure by this etching process.

Then, built in to this same bell was a filament, so that having etched it you could evaporate metal onto it.

So that what was on the 'windward' side would stand proud as the metal coated it, like a snowstorm? And what was on the other side would shatter?

Yes. You then strengthened that metal coating with a film of carbon, and at the end of all that you let air into the whole thing and soaked this replica off the surface of a cell which theoretically could have survived the freezing. This was supposed to be a way round this artefact formation, so that when you examined it in the electron microscope, very beautiful images could be got. Of course, with time all this has evolved and people have published papers on the artefacts of freeze-etching! But that happens to everyone.

We got into that technique very heavily, and obtained some nice results in relation particularly to development of the nucleus in the cell. The money for that – £13,000 – came from three pulp and paper companies, of all people, and about a quarter of it from the university.

That was massive money in those days! It would be quite nice to know about some of the structures that you found.

The most spectacular results were achieved by three students in particular. One of them, Brian Fair, from Canada, was working with us. A freeze-etching image of a nucleus which has been shaved off shows that there are two membranes limiting the nucleus, and there are nuclear pores. At this phase of the cell cycle, the membrane breaks down when it divides, but you can see an incredibly regular array of the nuclear pores.

A picture illustrating the work of another student has the outer membrane peeled off and only the inner of the two showing. In the arrangement of the pores and the interaction between the nucleoplasm inside the nucleus and the cytoplasm outside, there is a substructure which changes with the exchange of the materials from the nucleoplasm to the cytoplasm. I won't go too far into that, because we didn't show it. There was also another student who did some very beautiful freeze-etching on collenchyma cells – which reverts a bit to the cell wall story.

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Cell extension: multinet or helicoid?

Let's turn to your collenchyma work, because in the late 1970s you went for a year to Nijmegen, in Holland, to work with somebody rather interesting.

I had corresponded an awful lot with Andre Sassen, at Nijmegen, who was interested in the cell wall particularly. I have mentioned the question of what were the changes in the coleoptile. The primary wall is much simpler; it just appears to be one layer when you look at it. And when you look in the electron microscope, the microfibrils on the inner and outer surfaces are different. On the inner surface they are in a flat helix or transverse, and then, no matter how much the cells extend, on the inner surface they remain that way. But when you look at the outer surface, you see that they become progressively disoriented. In a cell that is elongated a lot, they become perhaps nearly longitudinal on the outside but you have still got new ones forming on the inside, transversed. It can be seen that the new ones are forming transversely all the time, but as the cell elongates they gradually become disoriented.

From that simple observation of the difference on the inner and outer surfaces, a Dutchman, P A Roelofsen – of Preston's vintage, not of Sassen's – proposed a multinet hypothesis. I supported this hypothesis very strongly. I had evidence for it in differentiating cells from cambium, in coleoptiles, and the game seemed to be sewn up there.

But there also occurs in elongating tissues this collenchyma, which has very thick walls.

Yes, strengthening tissue but not as complex as the kind of wood tissues, the tracheids, we have talked about.

That's right. In an optical microscope it has a glaucous appearance. It is partly layered with pectin-rich (non-cellulose-rich) and cellulose-rich lamellae. What so interested us was that when we started to do the cell wall structure and so on, it was not like the multinet even though I tried to interpret it in multinet terms. If you looked at the lamellae in the thick walls of the collenchyma – shadow cast, in a longitudinal section – the interesting thing was that they appeared to have been longitudinally oriented or transversely oriented. The interpretation I put on that was that you had these lamellae and that they were disoriented in the terms of the multinet hypothesis. There seemed to be quite clearly microfibrils, transverse, and so on. This was about the time I went to see Sassen, and we were intrigued by this.

At about that time, a completely different concept was proposed by Bjorn-Paul Rolent, from Paris. We organised a little cell wall symposium in Nijmegen in about 1978, and Rolent came to that. His concept was different from the multinet interpretation and it seemed to be absolutely correct. That is, when the microfibrils are deposited, they are not put down longitudinally and transverse as that would suggest, but they are put down and then gradually shift in orientation as the wall thickens, to form a helicoid. And when you start to use very sophisticated staining techniques for primary walls, even those of the coleoptile, you can detect evidence for this helicoid.

So you'd got it right.

And I think he has got it right! We were trying to do it, but failed dismally. Working with Sassen we did quite a lot of work on the collenchyma as well as the rest, and still our own observations seemed to support the multinet. But at that meeting in Nijmegen I began to have serious doubts, after watching Roelofsen's very sophisticated staining methods. As the evidence has accumulated I think the helicoid concept is pretty generally applicable in extending cells.

That was a good time. Those cell wall meetings have gone on ever since. I think they had 14 or 15 people at the first one, and the last one, in Abyssinia, produced a volume with about 200 papers. That's nice, because you can keep your interest in these things.

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The continuing attraction of unsolved problems

So your strong interest in collenchyma and the microfibrils story continues to some extent in your retirement?

Oh yes. There's been a tremendous development in the techniques of molecular biology, and particularly immunocytochemistry, where you can look at living cells, and also the work on cellulose biosynthesis. In about 1982 I worked for a while with Malcolm Brown at Austin, in Texas. He worked initially with a bacterium, acetobacter, which generates cellulose, and he worked a lot on cellulose biosynthesis. But there are other people in the US, such as Devi Delmar, in California, and a group at the Research School of Biological Sciences, in the Australian National University – including one of our former staff members, Richard Williamson, working on cellulose biosynthesis. Early this year they published a very elegant paper.

Something I didn't get onto is the site of synthesis of cellulose in the cytoplasm, which all relates back into the structures. There are still unsolved problems. We don't really know what determines the orientation of the microfibrils. There is the interesting observation that their orientation parallels that of the microtubules in the cytoplasm, but the exact model of that interrelation I think is not yet clear. They are getting there, though, and there is this beautiful work on biosynthesis. It is a topic that someone like myself can still appreciate, even although I haven't done much about it. La Trobe very kindly provides me with a room, but my own research is becoming less and less.

Alan, it has been great today to go through the various phases of your career. We haven't had time to do justice to it all, but thank you very much.

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William Roderick (Bill) Blevin was born in Inverell, NSW in 1929. He completed his secondary schooling at Tamworth High School (1945) before deciding, in a circular fashion, to study at New England University College (NEUC) to become a science teacher. Blevin graduated with a BSc (Hons 1) in physics in 1950. He continued in research for his masters of science (MSc, 1952). Blevin completed his DipEd in 1951 and spent a year as a lecturer in physics at NEUC.

In 1953 Blevin joined the CSIRO Division of Physics as a research scientist. Here he led the optical radiometry group and progressed to chief research scientist in 1976. During this time he was awarded a DSc from the University of New England (UNE, 1972). Blevin served as acting chief (1979-80), assistant chief and chief standards scientist (1980-88) and finally chief (1988-94) of CSIRO Division of Applied Physics before his retirement in 1994. One of Blevin's major achievements while at CSIRO was to have the SI unit of light intensity (the candela) redefined in 1979 to be on a firm physical basis.

During Blevin's career he was also active in the international standards community. He served as president (1980-96) of the Consultative Committee for Photometry and Radiometry, and as vice-president (1992-96) and secretary (1997-2000) of the Comité International des Poids et Mesures (CIPM, the International Committee of Weights and Measures). In 1998, at the request of CIPM, he completed a strategic plan for the 21st century for the worldwide measurement system and, in particular, for the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures), located at Sèvres in France.

Interviewed by Professor Neville Fletcher 30 March 2010

Contents

• Family history
• School days
• Decisions for the future
• Beginnings in research
• Move to CSIRO
• What is a National Standards Laboratory?
• Photometry, Radiometry and Colorimetry
• Additional honorary roles
• Establishing contacts overseas
• Contributions to optical radiometry
• Stefan-Boltzmann constant
• Doctor of Science
• Redefining the candela
• Focus on industrial research and revenue raising
• Move into the 'administrative quagmire'
• Term as Chief of Division
• Retirement and continuing work with BIPM
• Evaluating the future of measurement in Australia

Good morning, Bill. It's great to be talking with you. We've known each other for a very long time, haven't we?

Yes, Neville. Let me see. I started university at New England University College in 1946 as a student in residence. You, I think, came the following year as a student living at home in Armidale.

Family history

I didn't get to discover anything about your pre­university days. I would be interested to hear just how you came to the university and what life was like before that.

I'd be pleased to tell you a bit about the family background. My mother was a McRae and her grandfather had come out from Scotland in the 1850s, no convict blood in my family line. In 1890 her father (my grandfather) selected a property in virgin bush some 56 kilometres east of Armidale in New South Wales, up in the New England area. It really was a lonely bush settlement. My mother was born in 1894, and that was her home until she married much later. Also, that property which they called Ferndale, with mainly cattle and sheep, was the only place when I was a child that we ever went for our annual Christmas holidays. We always went back to my grandparents' place at Ferndale.

It's nice knowing your family background, isn't it?

Yes. My father's family had come out even earlier. They came from Ireland and arrived in Sydney in 1841, so they got out just before the potato famine. They also went up into northern New South Wales. They had one generation around the Maitland area and then they moved up into the Tamworth area. They were mainly into farming, a bit of gold scratching and raising horses, I guess. But my father, born in 1888, at the age of 15 became what they used to call a pupil­teacher. So he started being a primary schoolteacher, without any real, formal training, up in the north-west of New South Wales.

Yes. That seemed to be the way they did it. My grandmother was a pupil-teacher too.

I don't think they had teachers colleges in those days; they started a few years later.

You were born in Inverell?

Yes, I was born in Inverell. Before my parents married, my father went off to the First World War. Actually, how they came to meet was that there was a little school a few miles from Ferndale, where my mother lived, and the McRae family always boarded the teacher. My father came along as one of the teachers and I guess they paired up. But, when his mother died in 1916, he went off to the First World War, so it wasn't until after he returned that they married in 1920. But then they made up for lost time: they had six children in about 13 or 14 years. I was the fifth of two girls and then four boys and I was born in 1929. I was born in Inverell, as you say, and then in 1937 my family moved to the Tamworth area.

School days

So you grew up and went to school mostly in Tamworth.

Well, I went to primary school where my father was the teacher, because there was a teacher's residence provided. So I started in a little place called Brodies Plains, which was just outside of Inverell. Then we moved down to Duri, near Tamworth, and I went to primary school there. Actually, that was a bigger school and there should have been two teachers, but during my time there was mostly only one. Some of the pupils, including me, used to get called upon to do a fair bit of teaching to assist my father. Teaching a lot of kids all in one room was a pretty difficult job for him.

Then, for high school, I took the train into Tamworth, which was 12 miles or 19-or-so kilometres away. That was a bit of a trek; we had a fair walk at each end and a train trip. But I had all my secondary schooling at Tamworth High School. As far as science was concerned, at high school we did combined physics and chemistry for three years, which I found quite interesting. When it came to the fourth and fifth years, there were only five years of secondary education in those days, Tamworth only offered chemistry; it didn't offer physics and it didn't offer biology. So I took chemistry and quite liked it.

Apart from what you learned at school, your hobbies are often pretty important. Did you have any particular hobbies while you were at high school?

The thing that sticks out in my mind most is catching rabbits and selling rabbit skins to earn pocket-money. We were not a well-to-do family, as you might imagine; it was a big family and there was just one modest income. Rabbit skins brought extraordinarily good prices during World War II because they were used for military hats and various things. So that was a big hobby. But there were other things, such as crystal radio sets and I started to do a bit of photography. The previous teacher at Duri had left a shed full of old stuff like 19th century photographic gear, acetylene bicycle lamps and the like, and I found that there was a lot of fun to be had with those things. I played a bit of tennis but I was never a great one for athletics and certainly not for singing or music.

Decisions for the future

What led you to enrol in science then and why at the New England University College in Armidale?

The first big decision was whether or not to go to university. I really got very little vocational guidance from my father about that. He was pretty much of the feeling, I suppose, coming out of the depression, that what I wanted more than anything else was security. He thought that security probably lay with working with one of the major banks or with the Public Service. However, when I was in my last year of high school, I actually had a vocational test done by some people who came up from Sydney or Newcastle; they put me through a rigmarole of tests with a lot of numerical testing. They had sort of gear trains and you had to turn one gear and know where the other gears would go. They had lever systems and that sort of thing. I think their report, more than anything else, steered me towards science. If you don't mind, I'll read you an extract of that. They say:

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE BUREAU REPORT
ON
William Roderick Blevin
Aged 15 years 8 months
Tested 18th July, 1945

The test results showed outstanding capacity for intellectual development, particularly in the sphere of number. All other results were good. The implications of the tests suggest that you should have little difficulty in coping with University studies of an honours standard.
Your school record corroborates the test findings and you should gain a University Exhibition and Bursary at the Leaving Certificate Examination this year.

Well, that was pretty encouraging, I must say. But, despite that, I applied for various other positions, including in the bank—which I was offered and didn't take. Until I had done my leaving certificate, I had never been to Sydney and I had never seen the sea. We were very much a bush family. But I applied for a few jobs in Sydney. One, I remember, was with the railways department, which was advertising for a laboratory trainee in chemistry. I still remember being interviewed by a couple of fairly elderly, kindly gentlemen from the railways department who heard me out and then just said that I was completely overqualified for what they had in mind and should go to university.

I had been offered a teachers college or education department scholarship to train to be a science teacher. That would have specified that I do a science degree at Armidale at the New England University College (NEUC), which in those days was a college of Sydney University, and then do the teaching part of the training at the Armidale Teachers College. I accepted that, to start with. But then I did get a university exhibition, which paid for the university tuition fees, so I rejected the teachers college scholarship and started doing a science course.

After two or three months, without any prompting from my parents, it was becoming clear to me that the expenses involved, such as the living away from home expenses and sundry other expenses, were going to be a hardship for my parents. I decided that I would try to recover the teachers college scholarship. The college principal, Mr C. B. Newling, was a character of a chap, everybody used to call him 'Pop Newling'. He used to come out to the university to give lectures in education to the arts faculty. I saw him coming out after one of his lectures and going to his car, so I went down and told him, rather naively I guess, that I'd been thinking about my future again and had decided that I thought I was cut out to be a teacher after all. If possible, I should like to get my teachers college scholarship back. He looked at me with his head on one side and asked, 'What do you want son? £100?' He had read me like a book. My heart fell, but he went on, 'And how's your dad and how's your brother Bob?'—he had trained to be a primary teacher earlier—and then I knew that I was in. So I recovered the scholarship. Of course, it meant that I was under a financial bond to go teaching, but that's what took me into the New England University College.

A lot of the students at NEUC in those days were training to be teachers, weren't they?

The majority. Of course, there weren't all that many. I think the total number of undergraduates at NEUC was slightly less than 300 the year I entered. And that was a sort of boom year because, as well as the students coming from school, a significant number of ex-service people, men and women—mainly men in those days, were coming back, and they were older and a bit more mature than us. But, yes, many of them were trainee teachers.

What was it that led you to go into physics instead of chemistry, which was the subject that you studied at high school?

Well, when I came to the university, I at first thought that I would major in chemistry. But by the end of the first year, I'd eliminated chemistry. But I'd taken quite a liking, particularly to physics, but also to geology. I think those decisions were probably based on the quality of the teaching as much as anything else. In physics I was greatly influenced by a chap there, called Jack Somerville, who was the founder of both the physics and the mathematics departments at the New England University College and later became the first professor of physics there. I had to take the junior physics course, because I hadn't done physics at high school. Somerville always took it himself, I think because he thought that, if you were going to enthuse students, the time to do it was in the first year. Similarly, I was enthused with geology but perhaps not to the same degree, and less so with chemistry.

Then at the end of the second year I had a few months as a vacation student in Tasmania with Alan Voisey, the head of the NEUC geology department. I also met up there with Professor Sam Carey, a geologist from the University of Tasmania, who was also a consultant to the hydro­electric commission and who later became a Fellow of the Academy. They were enthusiastic—there's no doubt about that—but the geology down there was extraordinarily boring. We had aerial maps from which we could tell every rock boundary that we were supposed to be mapping before we got there, and we were going around checking them; and there were no fossils. So I came back and decided to go for physics, and I've never regretted that.

Beginnings in research

So you went on and did an honours degree in physics, which was a fourth year, and you did well with that.

Yes. At fourth year we started to think quite a bit in the direction of research. Jack Somerville had some history in researching various aspects of glow discharges and that sort of thing. But in 1949, the year that I did my honours, he decided to start a new field; it was still related to gas discharges, but this was studying transient arc discharges. These were discharges, little arcs, just going a few millimetres through the air onto metal cathodes and the aim was to study what went on at the cathode. When I started that work for him, we were looking mainly at the molten sort of marks or sometimes just discoloured patches and we were studying the thermal conduction and trying to work out the properties of these arcs, which were of the duration of anything from milliseconds down. I think the shortest ones that I looked at had a duration of one microsecond, which is a millionth of a second, of course. So that was good fun and I was pleased to be awarded Honours Class 1.

Then, of course, the next year, if you remember, you came along. You also started to do research for what I guess was your honours year.

Yes, that's right.

I was now enrolled as an MSc student. Your research was in essentially the same field but using quite different techniques. You were making what they called Kerr cell cameras, which allowed you to take photographs of the whole arc. I was still looking at the electrodes and we could wed our results. I remember that we had a joint paper published with Somerville, and that drew on both sources.

That was our entry into research in physics.

Some years after us, a gentleman who later became a Professor of Physics at the University of Western Australia came along, Jim Williams, and he also did work in this area, but he was looking at arcs of much shorter duration and he did some good work in that area. So it's interesting that the three of us have all eventually been elected to the Academy of Science. I thought, 'Well that says something; Somerville didn't pick a bad field when he decided he'd start off some work on arcs.'

Yes, it was a good field, interesting and doable.

Yes; and with very modest apparatus, in lots of ways. Many of our electronics components were from captured Japanese equipment and we had to measure the characteristics of the thermionic valves and then decide whether or not we could use them. Of course, there were no transistors in those days; everything was thermionic valves.

Yes. I remember the basement of the building being full of old radar sets. Then you got to be a temporary lecturer in physics for a while?

Yes. Well, it wasn't quite my intention in one way, but Jack Somerville had two things he was very keen to do. He'd done quite a bit of research, but he didn't have a doctorate. He was keen to compile or bring together his research and submit a DSc thesis, but he was also keen to have a sabbatical year away, actually at Swansea in Wales. The NEUC department was so small that they had to appoint somebody to help fill in, so here's this young guy who got appointed a temporary lecturer for a year—for my own good but also, I think, partly to let Jack Somerville get away.

It was a good year and I carried on some more work on anodes, the other electrode from which the arcs went. In fact, I'd started that in my honours year. The original direction was pointing us towards studying the cathodes. But, just for the hell of it one day, I thought: 'I wonder what would happen if I reversed the polarity and looked at what happens to the other electrode,' and it was a very different phenomenon. Instead of messy sorts of molten areas, there were nice pools. So it ended up that there was quite a bit of research to be done at both ends. I think that, you and I, and no doubt Jim after us, all did work on both anodes and cathodes. That was an interesting year. I am not sure how good a teacher I was, probably not bad.

Move to CSIRO

At the end of that year, 1952, you decided to leave your position at NEUC and join CSIRO. What was it that led to that decision?

Well, it was my own decision. Somerville was still away at Swansea; I didn't communicate with him about it and I probably should have done. I think he was disappointed. But I had been told by various people that you shouldn't stay too long in the institution where you do your first degree. Of course, the done thing was to do a PhD. In those days you could not do a PhD in any Australian university and I didn't really think, with my economic circumstances, there was any way I could get away to do a PhD overseas. But I still had this in my mind: that I should be getting out into a bigger pool than what was a quite small physics department at Armidale.

So I applied for two jobs, both with CSIRO and both in Sydney. One was with the National Standards Laboratory (NSL) on the Sydney University campus, which we'll come to later on; and the other was with a new Division just being set up, which was the Division of Wool Physics at Ryde. This was being set up by Victor Burgmann, who later became Chairman of CSIRO, and I was offered both jobs. Some of my decisions, on looking back, were not very sophisticated; they were pretty naive. I chose the one at the National Standards Laboratory simply because it was an existing and much bigger Division. So, essentially, that's what took me to the National Standards Laboratory.

Somerville, when he came back, told me things I didn't know. It just shows that I hadn't been very inquiring, I suppose. He said, 'Well, you know, we expect to get autonomy in just one more year.' If I'd stayed on one more year, NEUC would have become the University of New England. And he thought that I needed only about one more year of research and I'd have enough research to put in a PhD thesis. All the universities in Australia were about to start awarding PhDs. Anyway, it was too late for me, but my younger brother, Harry, went on to gain BSc (Hons) and PhD degrees in physics at UNE, under Somerville's supervision.

There was another complication too. In my later years as an undergraduate, I'd become rather attached to a young lady, Doreen Graham. Doreen was also training to be a science and mathematics teacher and, while I was fiddling around doing research on arcs, she had gone teaching to Wollongong. So we'd been essentially that far apart for a couple of years and we were thinking it was just about time we got a bit closer and even got married. That helped me to decide to come to Sydney. She managed to get the Education Department to move her from Wollongong High School, where she'd spent her first two years, to North Sydney Girls High School and we began our married life. I'd just like to say that we had a very long and successful marriage. Doreen passed away just over a year ago, but we really had a long time together and she helped in my career in many ways.

And so began the next part of your life in 1953 in Sydney. Whereabouts did you live in Sydney?

We started off renting part of a house in Epping and, two or three years later, bought a modest house in Carlingford, where we stayed for 11 years. By then we wanted to get closer to the railway and to schools since we had produced three children fairly quickly in the first five or six years of our marriage. So we moved to Cheltenham and lived there for over 40 years. We weren't great ones for hopping and skipping around.

And I guess that, from Cheltenham, you had to catch the train into the CSIRO every morning? In those days, CSIRO's National Standards Laboratory was at Sydney University?

That's right. I'd get the train to Redfern and walk to the University from there.

What is a National Standards Laboratory?

What did the National Standards Laboratory (NSL) do, particularly in those days, and what was the bit of its work that you were involved in?

Well, CSIRO had been around for quite a while but, prior to the war, most of its work had been in biological sciences and it was interested in the application of science in industry and so on. The decision was made just prior to the war, not to do with the war but independently, that it should get more into physical sciences and one of the first things recommended was to set up a national standards laboratory that would maintain Australia's physical standards of measurement. The NSL would be the final arbiter as to how long a metre was, how long a second lasted and all sorts of units, including nuclear quantities etc.

They really set out thinking that the NSL would be a subset of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, which had had that job for Britain since about 1900. Most of the major countries had set up national laboratories at about that time. Certainly they had done so in Russia, in Germany and in the USA. So Australia came to the party some 40 years later. NSL quickly became the leading organisation in Australia's national measurement system, collaborating closely with the National Standards Commission (NSC) involved in legal metrology, the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA) involved in laboratory accreditation, the Standards Association of Australia (SAA) involved in documentary standards, and the States' Offices of Weights and Measures which took care of trade measurements.

Photometry, Radiometry and Colorimetry

Soon after the war, NSL was structured as three Divisions of CSIRO. One was Metrology, dealing with length and mass and a lot of things like that; one was Electrotechnology; and another one was Physics, which had temperature, light and the other bits. The bit that I was brought in to do was probably one of the least accurate ones and that was basically what they called the photometry section, which is the measurement of light. Light had been measured for over 100 years and it was different from the other units in that the detector used to measure light was traditionally the human eye. There were few other useful detectors at that time. So photometry essentially had a biological element to it. Right up to World War II, most measurements in photometry were done visually with special instruments. It's amazing how accurately the eye can compare the brightness of two patches of light, provided that certain conditions are met. But photocells were starting to appear and there was starting to be a move towards physical methods of measuring light.

We were also interested in a subject called radiometry or optical radiometry, which is a similar subject: you're still measuring radiation, but you're not taking any account of the visual effect. So you measure optical power in watts, just like you measure electrical power in watts and so on. Colorimetry was more related to photometry; it took into account physiological effects. It was more complicated than photometry because, with photometry, particularly in daylight, there is one curve that more or less tells you how sensitive the eye is to the different colours of the spectrum. It's a bell shaped curve, peaking in the yellow-green and falling off rapidly at each end of the spectrum. In colorimetry you need three curves and you can actually measure colour digitally and end up with numbers and uncertainties and so on, just like other physical quantities.

So the group that I was brought down to take charge of was concerned with all three of these, although there were other people already there so I was learning from the technical assistants for a while. There were plenty of applications of these things, and I must say that didn't worry me a bit. In fact, I think I was attracted by being in some area of physics that had immediate and varied applications. I reported to a chap by the name of Ron Giovanelli, who had looked after this group. He was one of a number of people who had spent a period at NPL in London just at the outbreak of World War II in order to learn how to run a standards laboratory. But when they came back they were very much diverted for some years by wartime problems. However Giovanelli did arrange for a lot of equipment to be sent out to Australia soon after the war, including a lot of so-called standard lamps that would be the Australian standards for photometry. A few of them had been calibrated, but a lot of them needed to be calibrated by us. They were specially made tungsten filament lamps, for the most part.

One of my first jobs was to supervise and participate in the calibration of some hundreds of these lamps which were of different powers and operated at different filament temperatures. I immediately found some scope for research because tungsten filaments in new lamps are unstable things and, when they are first operated, they recrystallise. So I set myself the problem of deciding whether in order to stabilise them, it was best to do what other people had done and run them at the temperature they would finally be operated at? Or could you do it, and perhaps even do it better, by using a lower temperature and a longer time? That turned out to be an interesting area of research. We had people in the Division who were quite good on metal physics and could give me some guidance. That was my first published paper out of the National Standards Laboratory and it got quite a bit of attention around the other standards labs.

But the range of interest in these subjects just amazed me, really. It was far from limited to just providing standards for Australian lamp manufacturers. For example, we collaborated extensively in the development of improved street-lighting technology and of more effective colour signals for road traffic, airport runways and maritime applications; and we encouraged and assisted a wide range of manufacturers to adopt physical rather than visual methods to control the colour of their products. There were scientists requiring assistance in developing deep-sea photometers to measure light deep under the water. There were other people who were researching aurorae in Antarctica and wanted accurate calibration of an artificial aurora that they had made as a reference standard. You had to sit in the darkroom with it for half an hour before you could even see it and then they still wanted to know how bright that was, in the photometric units. With the Vietnam War, I remember the great trouble that the military had in measuring some of their high-intensity flares that were shot high in the sky and lit up the countryside, and we were able to sort out what was wrong with their apparatus.

One of the activities that had started in Giovanelli's day and actually related to colorimetry in a way, was measuring the haemoglobin content of blood. Giovanelli got to know Dr Bob Walsh, who at that stage was the head of the Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service in Sydney. They serviced not only all of Australia but also the region around us and needed access to very accurate spectral measurements. For example, spectrophotometry was used to measure the different absorption characteristics of oxidised blood and so on. Giovanelli set up an arrangement with Walsh whereby we would periodically calibrate a sample of blood for him, a sample of a big amount that the Red Cross would then distribute throughout the region. So we helped to maintain the haemoglobin standards for years and years. I think they used to send some samples to Europe, just to check that our region agreed with their region and so on.

Later on, Dr Wootton of the Post-Graduate Medical School in London got in touch with us. There was a new method coming out where, if you mixed blood with hydrogen cyanide, you got a derivative called cyanmethaemoglobin, which had the advantage over oxyhaemoglobin of being extremely stable. It could go for months without changing; whereas the whole nature of oxyhaemoglobin is that it's meant to be unstable so that you can get oxygen into the haemoglobin and out of it again. There was an interest in making accurate measurements of the spectral properties of this derivative. Dr Wootton could actually do the chemical determination of how much haemoglobin was in a batch of this chemical, but he wanted someone to collaborate with, who was more expert than he in spectral measurements, and he couldn't really get people interested enough in Britain. So we did it remotely and we had samples of blood and cyanmethemoglobin going backwards and forwards.

Our measurements contributed to the internationally adopted value for that, and I must say that led to my one and only paper— a shared paper—in the Lancet. It's nice to be able to say you have had a paper published in the Lancet. I always like telling my GP: 'When I published in the Lancet'. Anyway cyanmethaemoglobin was so stable that it was developed as a commercial product, although not by us but in America. There was no need to have us involved in haemoglobinometry any longer so that's when we bowed out of that field.

Did CSIRO make a lot of money out of it?

No. CSIRO used to be very kind to people in those days; we charged almost nominal fees for most things. We did these things for the public good, you might say.

A body had been set up in Australia called the Australian National Committee on Illumination, and Giovanelli had been the secretary of that until I came along. Quite clearly, he was offloading some of his responsibilities on to me, so I soon became the secretary. That was an interesting eventuality because one of the Committee members, Dr Albert Dresler, who later became the president was quite a distinguished German. He had been brought up in Britain and was an Anglophile but, during World War I, he had gone back to Germany or been exchanged, and there he became a prominent electrical engineer and head of the lighting laboratory of Siemens in Berlin. After World War II, his big aim was to get as far from Europe as he could, so he came to Australia. He worked as a lighting consultant with the Department of Labour and National Service in Melbourne and he used to come fairly frequently to Sydney. He didn't have a lab any more and he used to come and visit Giovanelli and me. He was a wealth of information about what had happened in lighting circles and photometry circles in his day.

Additional honorary roles

You mention being secretary of a number of organisations in those days.

Yes. I guess when you come as a new, young fellow to an institution they're always looking for somebody to fill honorary positions. There was not an Australian Institute of Physics in those days. Britain had actually had two institutes of physics, one they called the 'Institute of Physics' and the other the 'Physical Society'. Then they combined but kept the two names, so it had this unwieldy name of the 'Institute of Physics and the Physical Society'. When I came to Sydney, the chairman of the New South Wales branch was a very distinguished radio astronomer, Dr Joe Pawsey, and I was invited to be secretary. That was an advantage with coming to a big institution because I got to know Joe Pawsey very well. The two of us would be organising the monthly talks and meetings and so on. He was a delightful man and first-rate physicist, of course.

There are a couple of interesting things that I will mention. One is that it was at about that time that the decision was made by physicists from around the different states to set up an Australian Institute of Physics, so I was involved in the meetings going on about that. Another interesting thing, it harks back to Armidale a bit, is that the physics department at UNE had on board a Dr Kurt Landecker, who I think had come up from Sydney University.

Yes, I remember him.

He had done some work on a method of making very strong radio pulses that you could reflect off the moon; of course this was early days in looking beyond the earth. He went to patent it and the strangest thing happened; the Americans put their nose into the matter and they banned publication of Landecker's invention. It wasn't to be published and a patent wasn't to be granted et cetera. Of course, Somerville really went to great lengths to get this overturned.

Yes. That was for security reasons, wasn't it? They thought it would be useful for military operations.

Military purposes, yes. The American demand could not be disregarded however because the next thing the Australian government sent Landecker a similar letter. Eventually, Somerville did get the demands overturned but, as part of my job as secretary of the physics institute I had the interesting task of writing this incident up and getting it published in the Australian Journal of Science, warning that sometimes it pays to publish first and patent second. That was an interesting episode.

In addition to your work with haemoglobin, did you have any other work that had different medical applications?

Yes. There was one interesting episode that I really only had a fairly minor part in. Dr Doug Cohen, the senior surgeon at the Children's Hospital, which in those days was not far from Sydney University, was tooling up, wanting to do his first open-heart surgery. He had the cooperation of a manufacturer of pumps up in Brookvale, in northern Sydney. He used to work with the pump manufacturer at weekends, a man by the name of Ebsary. He had made a lot of use of the temperature specialists at the National Standards Laboratory—particularly a man named Alan Harper, who was the head of that section—in preparing the apparatus to cool the bodies down and to control the temperature of the blood. They then asked me whether I would make a little haemoglobin meter so that they could measure the amount of oxygen being put into the blood. So I went along a few times to the factory.

The last time I participated I got a phone call —I can remember that it was in October 1958—saying that my wife was going into labour quite a distance away, expecting our third child. So I rushed home and all ended happily. I was invited to be present at some of the first uses of this apparatus for open-heart surgery; Harper was certainly there, controlling temperatures, but I opted out.

Establishing contacts overseas

So far we have talked only about your work on standards with CSIRO. Did you have any contacts and influences from overseas?

Well, there were lots of interactions with other people. Of course, I had 'written interactions' and did a lot of reading of their published work but I did not actually get to travel abroad until 1959. Giovanelli was very keen that I take an extended trip and visit many places, which I did. It's a wonder that my marriage didn't end at that stage, because I left my wife with a baby only seven or eight months old and two other young children and not much money. But it was of great value to me and I think to CSIRO. I quickly learned that we were better off than I had thought we were. When I say 'better off', I think we were more skilled than I had thought. We could compare pretty well with many others in the field. I went to most of the major standards labs, starting off with Japan, then India, Russia, Britain and several places in Western Europe and, eventually, the United States and Canada. I visited a number of lamp manufacturers, such as the General Electric Company in England, Siemens and Philips in Europe, and GE in America; and laboratories that were interested in physical colour measurement, such as ICI and Imperial College; and I went to a number of conferences.

Dresler, the German guy whom I mentioned before, and I both attended a quadrennial session in Brussels of the International Commission on Illumination. It had been the major international body dealing with many aspects of lighting and photometry ever since the turn of the century. They ranged from applied things, like architecture, street-lighting and so on, back to more basic things like vision and measurement. Dresler introduced me to all sorts of people, and that was of great value. It was a very tiring journey but one which, I think, did a lot of preparation for the rest of my career in that field.

Contributions to optical radiometry

And, when you got back, did that experience influence in a large way what you did for the next several years?

Yes. One thing that I certainly learned was that the subject of optical radiometry, that is, the measuring of radiation without worrying about vision, was in a pretty poor state. I thought to myself, 'Well, if we can't measure radiation in ordinary physical units to determine how much power there is in watts or microwatts or whatever, it's surely going to be harder to do the equivalent measurement while also allowing for the curves that control vision.' It seemed to me that it was important that we learn to measure radiation better. In other words, it did persuade me to spend several years concentrating on radiometry rather than photometry. Although we had to keep up with the photometric needs of our customers. I might say that Giovanelli was opposed to that. He said, 'Oh, that's an old classical subject,' and I said, 'Yeah, but we're no good at it; nobody's any good at it.' Anyway, he gave me my head, so we did quite a lot of work improving radiometry.

Two of the people at NPL in England had done some good work in this area and they had even been talking about perhaps some day being able to perform radiometry accurately enough that one could base photometry on radiometry, and this was in the back of my mind too. By this time, our Australian laboratory was starting to cooperate with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris. It was only after World War II that Australia had become a signatory to the Metric Treaty of 1875 that established that laboratory, but we were now being invited onto several of the related technical or consultative committees. This included the Consultative Committee for Photometry (CCP) that dealt primarily with photometry but also radiometry. The CCP organised some comparisons of radiometric measurements between the member laboratories, most of the preparatory work being done by the NPL in England. But, from the work that we had already done, I was able to point out a few shortcomings in what they were planning.

People had got too used to doing photometry but were overlooking things that were very basic; for example, hanging a black cloth up behind a lamp to absorb the radiation. That worked fine with visible light, but virtually every black cloth is white as soon as you get outside the visible spectrum, particularly into the infra-red; just like black cattle are white in the infra-red, as I was to find later. Although optical path-lengths of only about a metre or so were being used, absorption by atmospheric water vapour, even in the very near infra-red, could not be ignored; so it was necessary to take the laboratory humidity into account. The most common way to establish a radiation scale was to use a so-called electrical substitution radiometer, which incorporated a blackened thermal receiver that could be heated alternately by radiation and by an inbuilt electrical element. So you had to know quite a bit about the optical and thermal transport properties of black surfaces. In fact, the amount of time I spent researching black surfaces was quite amazing.

Some of the blacks that were in use at that time were quite interesting. One was a black paint made in England that had actually been developed during World War II to make their night-flying military aircraft harder to see. But it wasn't very good for radiometry, because its optical absorption properties varied too greatly across the spectrum, it wasn't all that black after all! I researched and made much use of gold-black coatings, about which I had gained some information from my earlier trips to the German standards lab. If you evaporate gold and it arrives on a surface hot, it forms a normal crystalline gold structure and looks like yellow gold; but, if it's dead cool when it arrives it forms a very low-density structure that is as black as can be. If you deposit a patch of it on black paint it looks like a black hole because it's so much blacker than any black paint. So there were things like that that I was able to contribute. Previously we had used overseas standards for radiation measurement but now, for the first time, we had developed some Australian standards that we had more faith in.

Unforeseen applications for a new measurement capability often appear faster than you expect. For example, lasers came along and people using them wanted to know whether their lasers were safe. They looked to the National Standards Laboratory to have standards for laser power, and we had the expertise already because of our radiometry research. Then we had other interesting people contact us. There was a professor of botany from the University of New South Wales, a Fellow of this Academy and of the Royal Society, the late Professor H. Newton Barber. You probably know his son, Michael Barber, who is also a Fellow of the Academy. Professor Newton Barber was interested in foliage on trees and other plants growing up near the tree line in the Australian alps and he was wondering whether their radiative properties were different from those of other plants. He had a PhD student working with me at NSL for a period, using equipment we that we had developed to measure the optical properties of materials in the near and middle infra-red regions of the spectrum. Perhaps the reason the alpine plants could survive was that they held on to their heat and didn't radiate it out? It was an interesting proposal, but the measurements showed that they were just as effective as radiators as other plants.

So there were lots of instances like that. Once you get a new capability to do measurements it's amazing how the opportunity arises to use it. Optical fibres came along. People dealing in optical fibre technology in due course became expert themselves, but earlier on they wanted help from us on measuring the power being transmitted through optical fibres and so on. So radiometry had a lot of applications.

I guess that all this work done in Australia had an influence on what was done in overseas countries and on overseas international standards. Is that right?

Stefan-Boltzmann constant

Yes. However I think that our greatest influence on international radiometry was the thing that we did next, and that was to tackle a problem that again I'd learned about from colleagues in Germany. This problem had been recognised but unresolved ever since the year 1900 when Max Planck derived his celebrated law governing the spectral energy distribution of the radiation emitted by a blackbody at absolute temperature (T). Some 20 years earlier Stefan and Boltzmann had discovered that the amount of heat emitted by a hot body varies as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. So, if you increase the absolute temperature by a factor of two, the amount of heat radiated goes up 16 times. The constant of proportionality is known as the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. When Plank's law came out, it became possible to calculate the value of this constant from three other and more fundamental constants. The trouble was that nobody could ever get agreement between the theoretical value calculated from these fundamental constants and the measured value.

That had gone on for 50 or 60 years and reflected adversely on the confidence held in radiometric measurements. It wasn't a minute disagreement; it was about 1.5 per cent on average and quite often worse than that. So we decided that we'd have a go at measuring the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. It was a very difficult measurement, perhaps the most demanding bit of experimental work that I and my partners undertook, and I must say that in all this work I had partners; one particular partner by the name of Bill Brown did a lot of work with me throughout my career. The measurements had to be done in a vacuum. For the radiation source we developed a cavity radiator (blackbody) operated at the melting point of gold, which is a very dull red sort of a heat, and for the detector a sophisticated electrically calibrated radiometer operated at room temperature.

Many potential sources of error were identified, often common to other areas of radiometry. We even found instances where Planck's law had been used incorrectly. Further, it was necessary to make a more careful analysis of the bending or diffraction of the radiation beam as it passed through apertures, even ones large enough to be able to put your finger through. There were many such factors to consider but, at the end of the day, our measured value for the Stefan-Boltzmann constant agreed with the theoretical value to within slightly better than 0.1 per cent, and that was about the limit of the accuracy of our measurement.

At that time we happened to have a visit from the then Director of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, Dr Lewis Branscombe, who was very impressed by the work that we were doing, and that had a significant influence on later developments.

This takes you back to UNE and your doctorate and your subsequent membership of the university council, doesn't it?

Doctor of Science

Yes, that's right. Ron Giovanelli, who long before now had become Chief of the Division of Physics, had always stressed to me that, when I had the appropriate amount of published research, I should submit a thesis for a doctor of science degree. I had to decide whether I'd submit it to the University of New England or to the University of Sydney. My earlier BSc and MSc degrees were University of Sydney degrees, although the work had been performed at the New England University College. But for two reasons I chose New England. One was that that is where my sentimentality was, my feeling of most connection. The second reason was that people were still trying to 'calibrate' Harry Messel. I probably would have had the same overseas assessors of the thesis either way. Anyway, I'm glad that I went with the University of New England and, of course, was pleased to be awarded a DSc. I was only the second DSc in physics from the University of New England; Landecker, whom I've already mentioned, was the first. Then I was pleased later to serve on the UNE Council for 10 years or so, and honoured in 1995 to receive a UNE Distinguished Alumni Award.

Redefining the candela

And then back to radiometry: you had international interactions, didn't you, to get improved standards and things like that in the photometric area?

Yes. We decided that we'd done a fair bit for radiometry, and that we should now get back to basing photometry on radiometry. We had to broaden the radiometry that we'd done, which had been mainly broadband and not splitting the spectrum into lots of narrow bands; we had to do a lot of that sort of work. I won't dwell on that, although I had some very good support staff doing that, but personally I was keen to get back to getting photometry onto a proper base. I'd absolutely convinced myself that it was much better working from the receiver end, i.e. the detector end, in both of these fields, rather than dealing with high temperature sources. It was always difficult in practice dealing with high temperature sources. The Consultative Committee for Photometry (CCP) normally met every four years. In 1971, I managed to persuade them that we ought to broaden the name of that committee to include 'radiometry', which they did. Also at that meeting I formally proposed for the first time changing the definition of the SI base unit of photometry, the candela, to relate it directly to the watt. The Committee members didn't agree to that proposal spontaneously, but some of them were interested in it and a few were doing rather similar work already. Anyway, soon after the 1971 meeting, I decided that I was really going to push for this redefinition and make it almost like a mission. It became clear to me that I'd have to persuade at least one of the major standards labs around the world to partner me on this mission.

By coincidence it was at about that time I received an invitation to spend a year at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards as what they called an 'expert consultant'. The invitation came from a subsequent NBS Director, Dr Ernest Ambler, although he told me later that it was actually initiated by Branscombe after his visit to NSL a year or two previously. They wanted to see whether I could add to what they were trying to do at NBS in the whole area of radiometry and photometry. I saw it principally as an opportunity to talk them into supporting the redefinition of the candela. It was an interesting process because I tended to find, and this happened around the world, that the older people took a lot of persuading but the younger people would come on board pretty quickly. By 'younger' I mean people of my age or younger, and I guess that I was in my mid-forties at that stage.

During my year at NBS, 1973, we prepared and published a major joint paper, which detailed the case for changing the definition of the candela. It was a big deal to change the definition of one of the seven base units of the International System of Units (SI). We tried at first to go one step further and get them to adopt the lumen, which is the unit of luminous flux, as the SI base unit, instead of the candela. But we lost that argument out of hand on the grounds that SI was only 20 or 30 years old and not yet fully accepted worldwide—'And the last thing we want to do is destabilise it.' It wasn't for any technical reason, but I could see the merits of their argument.

On the Consultative Committee for Photometry and Radiometry (CCPR) there was some opposition to redefining the candela. The National Physical Laboratory in England was at first not supportive; the people there who had earlier made a somewhat similar proposal had retired and the next generation were lukewarm. The person most opposed was a Russian lady, Madam V.E. Kartachevskaia, who had long been in charge of photometry at the Russian standards laboratory, the Mendeleev Institute in Leningrad. I'd got to know her well over the years; but she was implacably opposed to the proposed redefinition. Eventually, after another meeting or two, the CCPR did decide in 1977 that it would press for the proposed new definition of the candela to be adopted. One of the fortunate things was that often the Russian delegation used to turn up a day late for meetings because they had trouble getting their visas in time. We nearly always met at the BIPM in Sèvres, but the critical 1977 meeting of CCPR, for exceptional reasons, was held at the NPL in London. Madam Kartachevskaia turned up a day late. My first contact with her was an informal one and she said, 'Well, Mr Blevin, I understand you have decided to change the definition of the candela and to see afterwards whether it is a good idea, instead of the reverse order which is the normal case.' Oh, she was really biting, I must say. But fortunately Dr J. Terrien, the Director of the BIPM and a very accomplished tactician, was nearby and responded 'Well, I felt the same as you, Madam Karchevskaya, until I heard all the debate and reasons yesterday and I completely changed my mind—and so would you have done if you had been there.' Well, that fixed her. It was only later that I discovered why she was so adamant in her opposition; it was because the Russian lab that was expert in radiometry wasn't her lab in Leningrad, but another optical physics laboratory in Moscow, and she suspected or probably knew that she would lose responsibility for that part of her work—and that's what happened. So that was her last participation and that was sad.

Anyway, the definition did get changed. It was now on a firm physical background and allowed the adoption of alternative methods to develop photometric standards, mostly based on detectors rather than sources. Soon afterwards I was appointed chairman of the CCPR and a member of the International Committee of Weights and Measures (CIPM), which is essentially the board responsible for the operation of the BIPM.

Dr Terry Quinn, an outstanding NPL scientist whom I knew well and who became not the next but a subsequent director of the BIPM, decided that he would redo my Stefan-Boltzmann experiment. But he was very ambitious. He said, 'Well, the trouble with your measurement is'—not 'trouble'; he didn't put it that way—'you use the melting point of gold as your source, but the only temperature we know exactly is the triple point of water'—which is roughly the freezing point of ice—'because that's how the temperature scale is defined'. So he argued that the radiator should be way down at that temperature which meant his detector had to be cryogenic, down at liquid helium temperatures. But there were big advantages in radiometry in having a detector at liquid helium temperatures, which I will not try to go into now. It took some 15 years after my measurement before his result came to light. It also agreed very well with the fundamental constants, somewhat better than mine, and the uncertainty was less.

One of the things that came out of that, however, was that cryogenic radiometers started to get made commercially, both in Britain and in the US, and standards labs started buying these, we even bought one in Sydney. Then there were other new approaches to the subject. The Americans found that there were now some very high-class, monocrystalline, silicon photodiodes available that had almost 100 per cent internal quantum efficiency: every quantum or parcel of light that went in produced an electron. They did some good work on that.

Instead of there being only two or three major labs developing standards for photometry, now there were something like 15 to 20 working on it. So redefinition of the candela had a big influence.

Focus on industrial research and revenue raising

That work on internationalising standards took you to a lot of places overseas, including England and the USA. When you returned from that, did you find that things had changed in CSIRO?

Yes, certainly things were starting to change and they were changing also, of course, in the National Standards Laboratory. Giovanelli, who had become more and more engaged in his personal scientific pursuits—he had quite a group on solar physics—wanted now to work full time on that, so he retired from his position as Chief of Division. That left another long-serving man, Fred Lehany, as the only remaining Chief and the lab was now a single CSIRO Division. For some years it had been planning to move to a new site. Previously we had been housed mainly at Sydney University, but we had long outgrown the accommodation there. A large, new complex specially designed to be a standards laboratory, with great attention to the physical environment control et cetera, was under construction at Lindfield, a northern Sydney suburb.

There were also political pressures on CSIRO, and the Executive in turn was putting pressures on various parts of the Organisation, to do more for manufacturing industry. In fact, I was asked by Victor Burgmann, who by then was the Chairman of CSIRO, to lead a working party on how the Organisation —the National Standards Laboratory, in particular—could do more to help manufacturing industry. Other members of the working party were John Goldberg from the National Standards Laboratory, which by then had been renamed the National Measurement Laboratory (NML), and Dr Peter Robinson from the Division of Tribophysics. We visited lots of industries, talked to them about the matter and then brought down a report saying that, yes, there was scope for greater assistance and outlining how this might best be achieved.

I was a bit surprised on that mission to find that many of the NML staff had been much less broad in their dealing with industry than I and my group had been. They had done the standards and calibration traceability bit quite well, but had not been looking for wider applications of their expertise to the same extent. The younger NML staff were reasonably enthusiastic about our recommendations but most of the older staff people were anything but. It turned out that our report went up to the Executive in August 1977, at about the same time as it received a much more massive report prepared by a committee led by Professor Arthur Birch following a review of CSIRO as a whole. The Birch Report led to the formation of a system of Institutes within CSIRO, each comprising several Divisions, and it pressed the Organisation to earn much more money. So all these sorts of things were happening soon after my return.

The new NML buildings at Lindfield were occupied in 1977-78 and officially opened on 23 February 1979. By then the Chairman of CSIRO was the distinguished astronomer Dr Paul Wild and, in preparation for Lehany's approaching retirement, there had been a review of NML, commissioned by the Executive and led by Dr John Philip, Chief of the Division of Environmental Mechanics. Although we knew that the Executive, after receiving Philip's report in December 1978, had made its decisions about the future of NML, it hadn't told Lehany or the staff prior to the official opening, what those decisions were. The official opening of the lab was performed by the then Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowan, and a wide range of distinguished people, including some from overseas, were in attendance as our guests. CSIRO had told Sir Zelman Cowan of the impending changes to NML for inclusion in his address. So the first we heard of these changes was from the Governor-General at the official opening—and Lehany almost fell off his chair. It really wasn't well handled.

Times were changing. Lehany retired soon after the opening and not long after that, another senior man, Alan Harper, who for years had been running what essentially was the sister body, the National Standards Commission—and during that time had brought metrication to Australia— also retired. Many of the NML people were pointing at me as the guy who now had to get into the 'administrative quagmire', as one of my colleagues used to call it. I have often wondered what would have happened to my career if I had opted to keep on being an individual researcher. But I guess that somebody had to get into the management quagmire and I got in. That was to make a big difference, of course, to my future. It really marked the end of my personal research career.

Move into the 'administrative quagmire'

Yes, because you were appointed Assistant Chief to John Lowke and also Chief Standards Scientist, weren't you? So you had a really large bag of responsibilities.

Yes, that's right. After Lehany retired, I was appointed as Acting Chief for about nine months, while they looked around for his successor. I knew that, when they are looking for a big change, they usually do not look for an internal person to take over, so I wasn't surprised when they appointed an external person— Dr John Lowke. John was a good theoretical physicist who, after gaining his PhD in Australia, had spent quite a while working with Westinghouse in the States and then had gone to the electrical engineering department of Sydney University. He was very inexperienced in administration, I might say, and a very nice guy. When he was appointed Chief, I was made Assistant Chief but also made responsible for the standards program. I was determined that I had to do my best at both tasks, give John all the support that I could but also, as best I could in the climate, look after the continuing welfare of the standards program.

The Division was renamed the Division of Applied Physics and made one of the Divisions of the new Institute of Physical Sciences, with John Philip as our first Institute Director. Philip had a pretty wide reputation of being a very fine scientist but very poor in personnel skills. In fact, we generally thought in our Division that he went around trying to upset people. So that made it an extraordinarily difficult period and very bad for the morale of the staff. The resources allocated to the standards—it was CSIRO policy—were getting cut more and more and diverted to other areas of research and assistance to industry. At about that time the Department of Defence, which had maintained its own standards facilities, decided to give that up and transferred quite a lot of people and vacant positions to CSIRO because now it would be looking to CSIRO to do this job for it.

But despite that growth of resource and increased responsibility, the total numbers that we had in standards kept falling, falling and falling, and I could see disaster somewhere down the road. I had to decide how I could responsibly do something about it. I had to follow CSIRO policy but, on the other hand, I felt a unique responsibility, being the senior standards man, somehow to be heard. The government had appointed me Chairman of the National Standards Commission, which was an independent body from CSIRO, and I decided to use that avenue to organise a conference in September 1982 entitled 'Australia's Measurement System … Does it need re-thinking?' It was very well attended: we got about 250 people along and filled the lecture theatre. There were a lot of people from industry, and I had managed to get the Science Minister, who at that time was David Thompson of the Fraser government, to open the conference and CSIRO Chairman Paul Wild to chair the first session.

After lunch I was to speak and I gave a very factual account of the decreased resourcing of the standards effort over the previous three or four years. But then I became more outspoken and expressed my personal view that it was very dangerous to have this great drop-off and my concern that it would be very harmful to Australia's standards set-up. I hadn't been aware—not that it would have changed anything—that Paul Wild, who had disappeared during the morning session, had come back in and was standing at the back of the lecture theatre. He stamped out, obviously in somewhat of a temper, at the end of my presentation. He never spoke to me about it. I'd known Paul for many years, of course. There was quite a long discussion session after that, during which John Lowke defended CSIRO's policy. A lot of people from industry spoke up and there were different points of view expressed. Some people thought that I was just some guy who didn't want to do what his boss wanted him to do, but others understood my concern. I remember that Professor Lew Davies, a fellow of the academy, spoke very strongly in support of what I'd had to say. He emphasised that developing new products and devices for industry could be done by all sorts of people, including industry itself, but that only one body—and it had to be a government body—could really be responsible for the national measurement standards.

It ended up that a decision was reached, without discord, that the National Standards Commission should organise to have regular reviews of the whole measurement system going ahead, and that started from there on. Some people thought I'd really done myself in and that I'd never recover from that initiative, but I'm glad to say that that didn't eventuate. In fact in 1983, the very next year, I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences, and I suspect that my election wasn't entirely independent of the conference that we'd had. Then in 1985 I was elected a Fellow of this Academy, and in 1989 I was honoured to be awarded Membership of the Order of Australia (AM) for 'service to science, particularly in the field of applied physics'.

Also in 1983 a new Institute Director had been appointed, and you know who that was, Neville: it was you.

That's right.

You called for a review and particularly of the calibration services, because there'd been a growing amount of criticism from some parts of industry that they weren't getting adequate services. Anyway, a few things arose out of that that were very good. One was that we were advised—required, actually—to set up a formal Standards Advisory Committee and we made the good decision to appoint Professor Tony Klein from the Physics School of Melbourne University to lead that. There were people on the Committee, of course, from defence and from various other bodies concerned with the measurement system, as well as from industry generally. Tony Klein, who later was elected to this Academy, did a marvellous job. He appreciated the good physics in the standards work and was very good at raising the morale of the people involved.

Another thing that came out of that review was that we were encouraged to make formal agreements with some of the major national labs overseas, recognising the equivalence of their standards and ours. There was quite a bit of interest in offset manufacturing at about that time. An example that comes to mind is the Hughes Aircraft Company. They had a big contract making war planes for the Australian government, but the government wanted as much of that business as possible to be subcontracted to Australian companies.

One of the companies that got quite a lot of very high-tech business out of that was Philips Defence Systems Australia, down Liverpool way in Sydney. Anyway, it took a lot of organising and numerous measurement intercomparisons, but we did succeed in getting agreement with the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory and, for defence reasons particularly, with the National Bureau of Standards in the United States, jointly signing very formal statements recognising the equivalence, to within a certain accuracy, of our standards. That certainly did help a lot in procuring some of these offset contracts; although, even then, Hughes Aircraft wanted to do a direct comparison of their standards and ours. We did that once, but then they agreed that it wasn't necessarily the way to go. They had a very sophisticated lab at Philips Defence Systems and they were kind enough to get me officially to open it. Later we signed similar agreements with the Canadian and New Zealand standards labs.

Term as Chief of Division

In 1988 there was a big reconstruction of CSIRO, with new institutes and things like that. What happened then?

Well, it took a long while before we knew what was going to happen. But obviously there was going to be a very big change to CSIRO in general. Again, there was more emphasis on CSIRO to be earning more of its money and asking for less from the government. There was a reorganisation of the Institutes and we became part of an Institute of Industrial Technologies. Dr Colin Adam, a man who was pretty new to CSIRO, was made the Director of that Institute. John Lowke's term as Chief of the Division of Applied Physics had finished and I was asked to take that position. So, again, I still had the job of balancing the standards bit with the industry bit, but obviously I had to do what my masters wanted, which was weighted very heavily on the industrial research side.

Colin Adam had more of a finger in the organisation of the Division than had been normal in earlier days, but we decided that the Division should have five research programs. So I selected and nominated five appropriate people from within the Division to serve as program managers. Colin was happy with four of them but he wanted one from outside—I think, partly pro forma—and we recruited a scientist from ANSTO, Ian Pollock. Thus we had five Program Managers, an Assistant Chief and myself, and essentially we were a very happy group of seven; we got on well with each other. Each research program had part of the standards responsibility and a range of industrial projects, usually in partnership with a company. But the pressures to move resources out of the standards activity didn't ease up; they were still very heavy. However, I think that, on the whole, the staff found they now had a management team that, within the constraints set by CSIRO policy, was being evenly balanced and getting along. I'm glad to say that most of the feedback I got from staff was that it was a reasonably happy time. Colin Adam was an interesting Director. He used to come and talk to the Division occasionally and he was a good salesman at getting his line across.

In general, things were somewhat more relaxed than they had been for a few years. Nevertheless, it was getting more and more difficult to carry out the standards function effectively. In fact, I was asked by a few people, both external and internal, why didn't I try to lead the standards groups out of CSIRO? But I don't know whether I was just naive or hopeful: I always thought that at some stage things would turn around—which they don't often do. So I didn't do that. We were certainly putting our emphasis heavily into other projects—and we had some good projects; there is no doubt about that. One thing that Colin Adam did, which was very effective, was to build up a strong relationship with the Boeing Aircraft Company. A number of Divisions, including ours developed projects with them, which was quite interesting because they were pretty good people to collaborate with.

We also had quite a bit of success in many of our projects with local industry. For example, we developed a really first-rate laser device for the Royal Australian Mint, which allowed them to measure rapidly and accurately the profile, or relief map if you like, of the coins and medals etc that they manufactured, including the dies used and their rate of wear. I still remember quite well the presentation of that instrument to the Controller of the Mint by Dr John Stocker, who was the Chief Executive of CSIRO at that time. Similar instruments were later supplied under contract to the national mints of the USA and China.

Another thing we'd gotten into in the standards area was regional cooperation and the establishment of an Asia-Pacific Metrology Programme, complementing the worldwide cooperation through the BIPM. The experience in negotiating bilateral agreements with the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand had clearly demonstrated the impracticality of having a bilateral agreement with every other country, so we had to get more and more into a multilateral sort of system. That got underway in the Asia-Pacific region in some ways faster than it did in Europe or North America, despite the great disparity in the stage of development of the member states. Countries like Vietnam for example at that stage had a pretty rudimentary industry in many ways, but they still needed measurement skills appropriate for their industry and recognised internationally so that their products would be accepted in other countries. That took off rather well. Anyway, it was an interesting occasion.

Retirement and continuing work with BIPM

That interesting occasion came to an end because in CSIRO you were required to retire before you reached 65. But you were able to stay on as an Honorary Research Fellow and continue activities within the Division. What happened then?

Well, I had that title; but I decided that, because there was ongoing work with companies, most of which was confidential et cetera, it wasn't sensible for me to stay on in that sort of area. So, after I retired, I concentrated principally on relating with the BIPM in Paris. By about that time, Terry Quinn, the man who had done the Stefan-Boltzmann measurement after me, had become the Director of the Bureau, and he and I had a very good relationship. Earlier I had been put onto the executive of the CIPM, then appointed Vice-President but, more importantly, after that, Secretary, which was a more executive sort of a position. With much backing from the Asia-Pacific group and particularly Barry Inglis who was running that group, Terry Quinn and I started to set up the guidelines for establishing multilateral recognition of standards and measurement capabilities worldwide, and it was a huge effort. We had to have meetings and get the support of the directors of all the standards labs around the world et cetera. But the decision to proceed was reached by 1998, if I remember rightly, and I understand that in 2009 an international conference was held to review how much had been achieved in 10 years. One of the spokesmen at that conference was a senior executive from Boeing, who said what enormous value the multilateral arrangement had been to Boeing and to their sub-manufacturers. He said that he could hardly have believed that a big modern company like Boeing could gain so much from an initiative under an ancient treaty like the Metre Treaty, which had been signed in 1875.

Then late in the piece I was asked by the CIPM to write the first strategic plan for the BIPM. So a lot of time in my last two or three years was spent on developing a strategic plan for how the measurement system worldwide, but particularly the role of the BIPM, should evolve in the 21st century. Of course this came after consultation with standard labs all around a world. The plan had to go before a General Conference of delegates of the governments of the member states. I'm glad to say that it was adopted.

When I retired from the CIPM in the year 2000—they wanted me to stay on, but I said no, that I wanted to get out before they start asking, “What's that old bugger still doing around here?” Anyway, they were kind enough to present me with a bound copy of the strategic plan and a nice piece of Sèvres porcelain.

After my retirement from CSIRO I was honoured in 1996 to be awarded the Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture and the Lloyd Rees Lecture by this Academy. Then, at about the time I retired from the CIPM, I was delighted to learn that Terry Quinn was being proposed for election to the Royal Society. I was invited, as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science with a broad knowledge of Quinn's achievements, to support his nomination. The proposer was Professor Ian Mills FRS, a chemist from Reading University, who has assisted the CIPM over many years in the continuing development of the International System of Units. I am very glad to say that Terry was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002.

Yes. It's good to see measurement and standards being recognised for the underlining importance that they have for essentially everything that we do in the way of manufacturing and living. It's also good to see that you too have been recognised for your contributions to standards and to other branches of physics around the world and particularly here in Australia.

Evaluating the future of measurement in Australia

Since your retirement from CSIRO, changes have gone on, haven't they? Nothing stays still and there have been changes to measurements, measurement institutes and so on in Australia. What do you think about those?

I look back on a long period in the field with which to compare what has happened since. But I would first like to say that I'm very grateful to CSIRO for the long and interesting career I had working in metrology and in other areas of applied physics. Standards, essentially, is applied physics; some of it is applied chemistry these days. I'm grateful for that; although I was disappointed that CSIRO, to some extent, lost the plot in my last 10 or 20 years. Of course, I am a biased observer, but I think that they really were overlooking how basically important it is for every country—more and more, with global manufacture et cetera—to have a first-rate measurement system.

Unfortunately, after my retirement, apparently things got harder with resources for the standards area. Barry Inglis took over as Chief Standards Scientist. He was a first-rate guy. He had worked extremely hard on both the industrial physics and the standards programs, and on developing the Asia-Pacific Metrology Programme. But he just saw, I guess, that my earlier worries were coming true in that it was becoming impossible to operate the standards system effectively. He and a senior man from industry, Bruce Kean, who had replaced Professor Tony Klein as Chairman of the National Standards Advisory Committee, decided to talk directly with the Chief Executive of CSIRO about the impossible situation that was developing for the standards program. It was a different chief executive from the ones that I had known when I was still there. I understand that they got a very poor reception and, indeed, were told that CSIRO 'tolerated being responsible for the standards and national measurements system but did not welcome it'.

That's a bit terrible, isn't it?

Well, it was enough to convince Barry Inglis that he really did have to see whether a suitable opportunity could be found to take that function out of CSIRO. Then some further government review of the measurement and technology area came along that allowed him to do that in a way that persuaded the government to set up a new body altogether, called the National Measurement Institute (NMI). It includes the former CSIRO standards program, the National Standards Commission and another body called the Australian Government Analytical Laboratories, which is essentially concerned with reliable and high-accuracy analytical chemistry. By agreement between the Commonwealth and State governments the state offices formerly responsible for trade measurements are currently being transferred to the NMI also. I understand that initially Inglis thought that the NMI might have been established as a statutory authority, like the National Standards Commission had been; but, in fact, it was set up on 1st July 2004 within the government department that is now the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research—quite a title.

The Institute seems to be progressing extremely well and gaining synergy from having its several components under the one management. I congratulate Barry Inglis, who was appointed the foundation director of the NMI, with the title of Chief Executive and Chief Metrologist— he was given both positions. A chemist, Dr Laurie Besley, who also came from my former staff, has succeeded Inglis as Director and also seems to be doing extremely well, as are the staff generally. I congratulate them all and the Department for getting the Institute off the ground and effective so quickly.

I have one serious concern; and that is that the buildings of the National Measurement Laboratory at Lindfield, which were very expensive and designed specifically to meet the needs of a standards laboratory, were not passed over to the new Institute. So, essentially, the National Measurement Institute is a tenant on a CSIRO site. CSIRO is still hard-pressed for funds and one wonders whether the future of that unique building is assured; I certainly hope it is. The other thing is that it is very important that there continue to be an appropriate amount of basic scientific research done within that institute, because it is much easier to see the good things being done at the application end of such an institute, but it does need some long­term thinking to realise that continued research and the esteem of your fellow institutes overseas are essential.

That's great, Bill. It's wonderful to look to the future and see that things are going well, and we hope that they continue to develop in a good way. It's good to see the recognition that your work has received for standards not only in Australia but also overseas. Bill, it has been great talking with you and I hope that everyone enjoys this interview.

Thank you, Neville.

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George Szekeres was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1911. Although showing an early interest in and talent for mathematics, he studied chemical engineering at the Technological University of Budapest and then worked in a leather factory. In 1939 he fled Europe with his wife, Esther, and spent the war years in Shanghai.

Szekeres went to the University of Adelaide in 1948, where he was appointed initially as a lecturer, then senior lecturer and reader in mathematics. In 1963 he took up the first chair of pure mathematics at the University of New South Wales, where he stayed for the remainder of his career. He officially retired in 1975, but continued publishing original papers for several years. In 1976 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of NSW. Professor Szekeres passed away in 2005.

Szekeres mathematical work extended over relativity theory, combinatorial problems in geometry, group theory, number theory, abstract algebra and real and complex analysis. He is perhaps best known for his coordinate system for understanding black holes in cosmology.

Interviewed by Imogen Jubb in 2004.

Contents

• Earliest memories
• Crucial influences
• A new level of mathematical culture
• Meeting Esther
• Escape to Shanghai
• Migrating to Australia and to university mathematics
• Putting down new roots
• Black hole coordinates
• An enduring graph theory problem
• Combinatorics: a new branch of mathematics
• From chemical engineer to celebrated mathematician
• A teacher, researcher, restless inquirer
• A happy music-maker
• Generations: the stories and influences continue
• Enjoying life in a beloved city
• A favourite number

Earliest memories

What are your earliest memories?

They are mostly family memories. I was brought up in Budapest. My father was really quite well-to-do. He was practically illiterate as far as I can gather, but he acquired a big leather factory in Budapest. We had a kind of river hut near the factory, where we spent the summer holidays.

When you were at school, did you know that you were cut out for mathematics?

In the last two school years it was obvious that I had a very good ability to solve mathematical problems. But there was a complication – a well-known old story. My father had no thought of mathematics; he just expected that his oldest son would continue with the leather factory and make it a flourishing enterprise. So I was brought up as a chemical engineer, a highly unmathematical profession at that time. I never went to a mathematics class. But as it worked out, I drifted to a new life which was not like my father imagined at all!

My mother was perfectly happy with whatever I was doing. She wanted to give me a chance to do mathematics. But of course I had to earn money, and chemistry was a much better paying proposition.

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Crucial influences

Did you have teachers who influenced your skills in chemistry or mathematics?

Not in chemistry, but I had an extraordinary physics teacher. He certainly had a positive influence. I really took to him very kindly. The physics he taught me came to be quite handy later, when my interests got mixed up occasionally with physics. The thing for which I am best known is my black hole coordinates system, which goes back to his teaching: what matters is the way you look at the problem.

He was a very good mathematician; he loved mathematics. So he was the one who suggested to me, when I was a high-school kid in my one-before-last year, that I should subscribe to a journal, which was the second great influence on me from my school years.

The journal has a complicated name: Középiskolai Matematikai és Fizikai Lapok, which means 'mathematical and physics high school journal'. This was published weekly from Budapest, of course – there was Budapest and then there was the rest of Hungary. Every week we got a stack of problems, usually quite out of the ordinary. They were excellent problems for our sort of high-school kids. Although I was not really sure, while I was at high school, what I wanted to do later at the uni, through the journal I discovered that I could do mathematical problems and I became certain that I would like to be a mathematician.

Did you ever meet any of the people who made the journal?

Well, I met lots of collaborators who solved these problems. We sent in the problems, and the names of the solvers were always published. The last issue of the year even had the photo of the best solver! I am there.

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A new level of mathematical culture

You said that you went on to study chemical engineering rather than mathematics. What happened to your mathematical inclinations?

Oh, we had regular, almost clublike, seminars at the university where we got together those who were mathematically interested – we all knew each other from the high school student journal. And one of them was a girl called Klein, Esther! She is still with me as my wife. She was a very bright student, and was a permanent member of this group. (This is one of my particularly nice recollections from my younger days.)

The size of the group varied; at the most, there would have been about 10, including a chemistry student, a complete outsider! Practically everybody has now become a significant mathematician. It was a totally private enterprise, known as the Anonymous group because we always met on two benches in the main park of Budapest, under the beautiful monument of a historical figure in Hungarian history whose name was not really known, hence 'Anonymous'. He had written books on the history of his own age, about the 15th century. When I went back to Budapest the statue was still there but the benches were gone. So it would be impossible today to have such a group again. Little things like this sometimes matter, I think. The fact that they put there two benches created a new level of mathematical culture in Budapest. (Mathematicians in Hungary are known as the Anonymous group ever since!)

We met perhaps once a week and tried to get through the problems in a well-known book. These were collections of problems from mathematical analysis, and we tried to solve the problems, one after the other. It was a marvellous experience, I must say.

I still think back to those times as the best cultural upbringing that I could get. It reflected the culture in which a very devoted mathematics teacher in Budapest had, at his own expense, published the mathematics journal for high school kids. I haven't found the like of that journal yet anywhere in the world, including France. That was a good program, beautiful, but not glamorous. (The journal is still going, after almost 100 years, but it is very different. In our time there were a dozen solvers of a problem; nowadays sometimes there are so many they just give you the number of kids who have solved the problem.)

Do you think such a culture can be re-created elsewhere?

I don't think so. It belongs to the culture of a city or a country. You get the bright students here as we had them in Hungary, no difference in that at all, but the culture is missing. Some of us did try to set up a high school journal in Australia, but you cannot copy these things, unfortunately. You have to transplant some of the whole culture. To me there is a message there, that culture belongs to all these activities at least as much as how clever a mathematician you are.

Just to tell you what is the great difference: when I was with the University of New South Wales we started a student journal, called Parabola. That became very well known all over Australia, and there were some mumblings that perhaps it would be good to have one high school journal for the whole country. Australia would have been an ideal country for this, and some of us did try to set up such a journal, but it never happened. Parabola was published quite differently to the Hungarian one.

Do you think those sorts of journals can be on line on the internet so that more people can solve problems there, rather than in a small group?

Oh, I don't think so. I have no connection at all with the internet and so I cannot really properly assess it, but there is no doubt that the personal touch, which belongs to that culture exactly, would go out. We knew each other before we even met, because we knew the names of the people. And there was a spirit, we wanted to solve the problem, we each wanted to show that we were better than the others.

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Meeting Esther

Tell me about meeting Esther in the Anonymous group.

Well, I knew Esther quite a long time before we actually met at the university. It was a matter-of-fact thing, as we slowly all met each other. It certainly wasn't love at first sight, and when we began to go out it was not the two of us together but a whole bunch of kids – very bright, and often the talk was around mathematics. And to me she was one of them.

Esther one day came out to the group with a geometry problem, which in some way is solved but even today is not perfectly solved. And my own reaction was that I had an added stimulus to solve it because of the way she asked the question! And I could solve the first aspect of the problem – after some struggle, I must say. Ah, it took me about two weeks to solve it.

I've heard that you call it the 'Happy Ending' problem, because it led to you and Esther getting married.

Oh, it was Paul Erdös who called it the 'Happy Ending'. You don't get married because of something like that. You know, we have been living now together for 70 years, a long time. We became friends in 1933, and in '37 we officially announced that we were together and got married. (Before that we were partners, as you might say nowadays.)

What sort of wedding did you have?

Just a simple civic one. But Esther's mother was very religious and for her sake I went to a wedding ceremony before a rabbi. I had to put on a hat but I had never had one, so an uncle of mine lent me a hat for this occasion. This so-called church wedding was 100 per cent for the sake of Esther's mother. We couldn't care less and I think we both treated it as a joke. Now the world has turned so that although some people still stick to weddings, nobody really regards them as very essential.

Anyway, to make a living I got work in a leather factory, not in Budapest but in a small town of about 5000 people. Those times, in the mid-'30s, were becoming more and more difficult. You see, we lived through the time when Hitler came to power, and we all looked out for opportunities elsewhere.

And were they difficult to find?

They were almost impossible to find. That I should get to Australia didn't even occur to me.

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Escape to Shanghai

You went to Shanghai, didn't you?

Yes. The time was determined because Hitler was already in Vienna and we knew it was urgent for us to decamp from Hungary. We decided to go to Shanghai, which was a so-called free port where no visas of any sort were required. The only things we were required to show from Budapest were a certificate of inoculation against cholera and typhoid and a smallpox vaccination certificate. And because of that there were about 20,000 refugees from Europe in Shanghai. It was quite a unique event in human history, this huge migration to a miserable place like Shanghai just to save our skins.

Did your whole family move to Shanghai?

No, only the two of us and my older brother. (I had two brothers, but now I have none.) My older brother had contracted tuberculosis, which was a fatal disease during those pre-penicillin times. But we found Shanghai was an absolutely impossible place for a TB sufferer. He died just a few weeks after Hiroshima, when it looked to us that now we had survived the war and he could enjoy the new world.

We fled to Shanghai in 1939, so we had got away. But we heard later of what happened to other people who didn't leave. My wife's mother was murdered, under circumstances that in a civilised society are really quite inconceivable. Poor thing, she didn't harm a fly in her life. But nobody could do anything.

Our escape was quite legal, mind you. We were able to get a perfectly good, valid Hungarian passport – yet only a few months later there was a war all over Europe. In '41 or '42, though, we had to send our passport to Tokyo to be extended, because about three months after we arrived in Shanghai it came under Japanese occupation.

What was your first impression when you arrived in Shanghai?

Misery! The Huanpu is the main river through Shanghai and Esther said, 'Oh, it's full of sediment. The water looks awful.' We approached the port from the sea, because Shanghai itself is quite a few kilometres up-river: 'Shanghai' means above the sea in Chinese. We looked out at the sea only once in our whole Shanghai time, Esther, my son and I.

We never experienced any hostility by the Chinese in Shanghai. Though they tried to help in all ways, we had no money at all, the two of us. So I worked as a chemical engineer. By that time I certainly knew that I was cut out for mathematics, but leather chemistry was a more useful profession.

How did you establish yourself in Shanghai and find a place to live?

That was not very difficult, I must say. All those thousands of refugees had to live somewhere, so this had to be organised, but there was no problem with it. And Esther thought, ah! now she would be pregnant with a child. In Budapest we couldn't think of this; the incredibly uncertain atmosphere there in the late '30s was not one where a child would want to have to be born. But we were optimists! In '39 I was 28 years old, a very optimistic age: 'Let's have a child,' and that was it, no matter whether we could afford to bring up a child! So at the first opportunity my son was born, in '40, a year after we got to Shanghai. And now Peter is in Adelaide.

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Migrating to Australia and to university mathematics

How did you come from Shanghai to Adelaide?

It happened because of two friends, both members, actually, of the little group who worked under the statue of 'Anonymous'. They moved to Australia almost at the same time that we left Hungary, in '39, but on a different ship. He has died by now but she, like Esther, lives in an old aged home. Our friendship has never slackened.

They first came to Sydney. Somehow they had got visas to Australia. In fact, that was a great farcical story which shows how absurdly Australia looked – and still does today – at the refugee problem. You had to put down, I think, £250 in money before you were let in to Australia. That was in Hungarian currency a very, very high amount, but our friends found out how to put down £250 and then they used the same money to help all the refugees whom they met to get in. They were really quite hilarious about circulating it. You see, once you had one amount of £250, nobody asked you for it again, so the same one could be produced again and again for people like us, who had no money at all.

I am absolutely convinced that the same thing happens today in Australia. It was an age-old game; it was very difficult, really, to get in. So when the latest refugee crisis came up I had a feeling of déjà vu, I must say!

Anyway, they were already in Adelaide after the war, and they got for me a lectureship at Adelaide Uni. Once I had a lectureship at a respectable university in Australia, then there was no doubt that I would get a visa to this country.

When did you learn to speak English?

Still back in Shanghai. But my son's so-called mother language was German, for a very simple reason – not because I preferred the German language to the English but because the refugees around us in Shanghai all spoke German. We thought it was much more important for Peter to learn German so that he could easily communicate with his future friends. But in no time, once we moved to Adelaide, he forgot all his German. I was quite amazed at that.

How old was Peter when you came to Adelaide?

We came to Adelaide in '48, when he was eight years. Oh, for him it was good fun to come here.

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Putting down new roots

Where did you live when you first came to Adelaide?

In Blair Athol. It was quite close to the abattoirs, and occasionally on a hot summer's day the smells were not at all pleasant! But it was a new Housing Commission establishment.

What was your first impression of Adelaide, or of Australia?

Oh, people think that I must have got a culture shock. Nothing of that sort. In fact, my first impression was one of relief from the bedlam of Shanghai, suddenly being plonked down in the most placid city you can imagine in the universe. The contrast was unbelievable to me. We settled down very well in Adelaide.

Esther was happily teaching here for years – she was a very, very good high school teacher – and then she did tutoring at the uni and so on. And I never had one moment of problem, once I had got into Australia. I started off as a lecturer; a few years afterward I became senior lecturer; and a few years later I became reader, which is nowadays called associate professor. Then, in '63, I got a chair at the University of New South Wales and we moved to Sydney.

We spent about 15 years in Adelaide, so I know Adelaide in and out. When we moved back here it was like returning to my original Australian hometown.

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Black hole coordinates

Perhaps you would explain some of your work. What about your black hole coordinates?

You know, it is probably through my little paper on the black holes that my name is best known to the widest readership, yet I never mentioned 'black holes'! That term didn't exist then. But I must say this was one of the papers which caused me the least effort. Somehow it was in my head, and I think I put the whole thing together in one afternoon. Sometimes you can put an incomparably bigger effort into a paper which affects people much less.

By the way, I tried to persuade the theoretical physicists that what I did there was not much different from the work of an earlier cosmologist, Georges Lemaitre. I could never dig up his footnote where he suggested something similar to what I worked out in this paper, but I did mention his name in my black hole paper.

Actually, I was interested in a much more general problem in geometry: what you should call a singularity of a place. This was at that time a very ill-defined concept, but I gave a method for deciding whether a point is a singularity or not. This was my purpose, and what they later called a 'black hole' was merely a little illustration of the method.

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An enduring graph theory problem

And graph theory? Can you explain that fairly simply?

Ye-e-s. In fact, Esther's great problem is a mixed graph theory. Her problem is very simple, as I will explain to you, but the answer is not so simple.

Firstly, this is the most usual way to express graph theory (but it is really much more complex). Say you take a number of points, then you pick out pairs of these points and connect each pair with a line. What you get is a graph.

In normal parlance, to draw a 'graph' means you plot your income or business data, but for the mathematician a graph simply means a visual picture of data. For example, suppose you take 10 points and to each you assign a number, an integer. Say to the first you assign 5 so you put it at a certain point, then to the second you assign another number and you put it at its appropriate point, and so on. Graph theory is the study of that sort of graph.

With that explanation in mind, let us turn to Esther's geometry problem. It is almost a schoolgirl's problem. She noticed that if you take any five points in a plane, then whichever way they are situated in the plane, you can always pick out four which form a convex quadrilateral.

I don't want to give you a high-brow mathematical definition of a convex quadrilateral but on paper I can show you how it differs from a concave one. [Draws] Here are four points; this is a convex quadrilateral. Now I will take another four points but this time they have a triangle inside them. This is concave – simply because if you take the 'envelope' of the whole configuration, this triangle then contains in its interior another point.

What Esther discovered was that if I give you any five points I can always pick out four of them which form a convex quadrilateral. She asked then, innocently, the following problem (which became my not quite solved problem): how many points in the plane do you need so that it should, with certainty, contain say five or six or any specific number of points – k points – which are in a convex configuration?

This turned out really to be a tricky problem. I could prove at that time that if the number of points is big enough, then you can always select a certain number – k – of points which are in a convex configuration. What is troublesome, what is unsolved, is that you don't know how many points in a plane you have to pick out, so that they should always form a basic convex configuration of k points. People have been able to show by experiment what the answer is likely to be, but so far nobody has managed to do it theoretically – minus 2, minus 1, what would it be?

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Combinatorics: a new branch of mathematics

What sorts of applications result from solving mathematical problems?

Well, the proof that I gave in my solution to Esther's problem was a bit intricate but it started off a whole branch of combinatorial mathematics. So my great contribution was not so much to solve the problem but to create a new branch of mathematics. It is nowadays called not by my name, unfortunately, but by that of a well-known British mathematician and logician, Ramsey – and even then for quite different reasons. He was interested in the main thing on which my proof rested but I didn't know about his work until later, because mathematicians don't really read logicians' works!

Could you tell me a little bit, then, about combinatorics?

One of the primitive, first problems in combinatorics is shown by this typical high school mathematical problem: if you have an object and you want to pick out k examples of this, what is the number of different ways you can do so? It is very easy to answer that. The magic formula that gives it is l times l-1 times l-2 times l-3 and so on, over k factorial. K factorial is k times k-1 times k-2 and so on. This gives you the number of ways how you can do various things in high school mathematics.

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From chemical engineer to celebrated mathematician

I believe you have become a Member of the Order of Australia for your achievements in mathematics.

It was certainly nice to get the Order of Australia, but I don't like to hang these things on the wall. Then I found that hanging it there was quite a shrewd move, because everyone seems to notice it when they enter the house. Even the cleaning lady! That's how your standing in the community goes.

When you talk about my achievements in mathematics, did you know that I became a mathematician without ever having a mathematics degree? It was very exceptional, I can tell you. I have a Doctor of Science degree from the University of New South Wales, but more an honorary degree. I was the head of the Pure Mathematics Department for years and years, and I think then they got the brilliant idea that they would give me an honorary degree – after I had got through quite a large number of PhD students! It is really very curious, my story. I think I was unique that without any mathematics degree I became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and so on, and even an Honorary Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Science, which people seem to know about but nobody ever mentions.

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A teacher, researcher, restless inquirer

Have you always enjoyed teaching mathematics?

I liked it very much, yes. And some classes took very well to me, I must say. This was a mixed affair. I didn't like to teach big classes, although in New South Wales I had occasionally to take big classes. I felt very comfortable with 20, at the most 30, students; then I could have very nice relations with the classes. I needed the personal contact with students. It didn't give me pleasure just to rattle off what I wanted to say to them – I wanted to use anecdotes and what not. I liked my contact with students.

Did you have a favourite area of research?

My interests flitted always from one subject or another – I am just that sort of person. I had an unusually large number of areas of research. I never settled down to a single subject, whereas in the present day people just settle down in a little narrow nook of mathematics and then they can live all their lives in the same area. When they turn 90 they publish in the same area as when they were 30 years old! That happens very often.

Do you think there is a problem that if you have only a narrow view of one area of mathematics, you miss out on the bigger picture?

That was really not my reason. It was simply that I am made like that. I cannot stick to one subject. But I do not change my interests: I have a couple of left-over problems from my old times. In fact, my last activity was to use the computer to try to solve a particular combinatorial problem.

I always thought, 'Ah, now I have settled down in retirement, in peace and quiet, nothing will interrupt my work.' So far it hasn't worked. First of all, your brain certainly goes downhill as you grow older. There is not a shadow of doubt. I am objective enough to watch what is happening to me, and I know that is a physical process that I cannot do anything about. It is very rare that mathematicians continue with their mathematics after 90, but I am now 94 and I am still doing some! I am just fortunate that I have no very serious health problems.

Esther, on the other hand, has to stay in a nursing home, poor thing. Every day I visit her still, and occasionally I take her out in her wheelchair for a little walk. But really she is now very helpless and it would be impossible for me to have her here. I cannot take care of her.

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A happy music-maker

I know you have a keen interest in music and played with an orchestra. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

I am a very keen musician. I play the violin and viola. I chose the violin because this belonged to a good education, but in point of fact I became absorbed in music. I was six when I started to learn the violin. I will tell you how I have my present instrument. When I first went back to Budapest after the war, I visited my old violin teacher – he was then well over 90 – and he sold his violin to me. (He was still alive the second time I went to Budapest, too.) Do you know, I was probably one of his favourite pupils. Anyway, that lovely old instrument was made in 1815 or something.

In Adelaide I never played in an orchestra but I did play a lot of chamber music. Then I went to Sydney and I joined the Ku-ring-gai Philharmonic Orchestra. This was very nice, and I got a liking for orchestral playing. In chamber music-making you have four people together, and only a pianist is needed. In orchestra playing you have a whole society around you, a crowd, and that's quite different. You have to be very careful how you play, because one player can do a disaster to the orchestra. It is really a bit of a responsibility, and I finally thought in the last year I was in Sydney that that was about enough, I could not carry on and produce the right quality of music.

Were your parents and your brothers interested in music?

In my mother's family, music never entered anybody's mind. My mother was practically tone deaf – I don't think she was able to reproduce singing on a particular pitch. My father never played any music; he was an illiterate person and his only cultural ambition was to make money. But I found out that his father was a church cantor in a small place in Hungary, so after the war I went with Esther to visit the place. Unfortunately, we couldn't even track down a tombstone from the old times. There were several gifted musicians in my father's family – one was almost a concert pianist – and that is evidently the branch from where I got my musical inclination. Really, music comes very easily to me. Do you know, I never ever practise, except if I sit down with friends to play some quartets or something.

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Generations: the stories and influences continue

Is there evidence of where you and Esther got your mathematical ability from?

That is a good question, but the answer is zero, an absolutely total blank. Esther, particularly, has no idea. She was a so-called illegitimate child (which now means nothing). Her mother was a housemaid in Carpatho-Rusyn, which at that time belonged to northern Hungary, and was seduced by a well-to-do young man. They tried to elope but when they got to the border they were stopped. And when it came to the point that he had to make a decision, he just shrugged his shoulder. So that was it – a very melancholy story. I never knew Esther's father and I don't think she ever met him, because her mother then, with this shame, moved to Budapest.

Are your children as interested in mathematics as you and Esther are?

Only one of them. My son became a mathematical physicist and was working with Paul Davies for a while. Peter says little about this. Like father, like son, he is not interested in publicity at all.

My daughter Judith has a maths degree from Wollongong, but by now she probably doesn't know any of what she learned. She is interested in university administration, so she is really in the enemy camp – but still we have good relations! There was a time when she changed jobs every one or two years; she just never settled down to a job. But now she is doing a PhD in university administration. She loves it, and she has produced several papers on the subject.

You mentioned that Peter lives in Adelaide.

Yes. That is why we moved here. I was happy living in Sydney, but on my last birthday I lost access to the drivers licence and that did it. We couldn't possibly continue to live at Turramurra, in the bush; it was not practical. So we happily moved to Adelaide. All our family is here. It was the only logical place to move to.

Do you have any grandchildren?

Ah, that's a trick question. We have, actually, but rather a step-grandchild, who comes from the first marriage of my son. He is Viv Szekeres, who is a big doer in the Migration Museum here in Adelaide.

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Enjoying life in a beloved city

You've mentioned going back to Hungary for the first time after the war. Have you got a favourite place in Budapest?

Budapest everywhere is my favourite place! There I was brought up, and I owe 90 per cent of what I did later, in turn, to the upbringing in Budapest. When we went back for a visit, I found the same intellectual atmosphere still there.

I went back to Budapest quite a few times. I had no quarrel with the regime in Hungary, even in Communist times. They did a few unpleasant things, mind you, so they were not quite innocent, but somehow basically I had respect for what they originally aimed for, to change Hungarian society to something less mediaeval. And they had! Once power got into their hands it was totally perverted, corrupted, but it didn't influence my wish to return.

I loved Budapest. It was very nice to be brought up there, because there was a sort of fermenting intellectual life which was very different from what I perceived later in Australia. But perhaps the times are gone for this sort of thing. When I go to Budapest I still have, a little bit, the feeling of something left over from those earlier times. But in some ways those times were very difficult and all the young ones who were around me were politically active in a way. I was never really active, because I would have made a rotten politician and, sure, I never quite liked political activity.

In a way, Esther was much more 'active' than I was. I was just going along with her. Nowadays her involvement doesn't look very serious. She was never a party member, a Communist or anything like that. But certainly she strongly felt that the ruling group was a rather reactionary regime – and it really was. Admiral Horty was the regent, the stand-in for the king. (Hungary was technically still a kingdom.) But to me, to all of us, it was not a pleasant regime.

Did your friend from Budapest, Paul Erdös, stay in Budapest, or did he leave as well?

He left Budapest in the mid-'30s. He was the nearest to what I would call a mathematical genius, and he became one of the leading mathematicians of the century, a very, very significant person. Finally, when he died, they counted 500 publications, which for a mathematician is quite a respectable number, quite unusual. I don't think I have collected more than 100.

We had a very good friendship, even after he left, and he came to Australia several times (which was largely my doing). We had several joint publications, the first being on the 'Happy Ending' problem when we were still practically university students.

You say in Hungary one of your favourite things is the intellectual environment. What is one of your favourite things in Australia?

Oh, I could tell you in one word: Australia is a very civilised country. And I love the civilised life that is in a civilised country. I found it here for the first time in my life, because Shanghai was certainly not one of those, and that to me meant very much. Once we settled down in Adelaide there was no looking away. Only if you have seen and you have lived in lots of other countries can you really appreciate the 'civilisedness' of Australia.

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A favourite number

Finally, here is a different sort of question for you. Have you got a favourite number?

A favourite number! Well, there was a time when I had. It was 137, the value of a defined structural constant which governs, in a way, the electromagnetic interaction sequence. But numerology doesn't work when you apply mathematics to the physical world.

At first Arthur Eddington, who was a very great man in English science, had some crazy theory in which the structural constant was exactly 137. Of course, as people experimented, measured it more exactly, it turned out to be 137.12 or something.

Eddington was a person about whom it was said that the philosopher thinks he is a marvellous physicist; the physicist thinks, oh! he is a very good mathematician; the mathematician thinks, oh! he is a good philosopher. But I liked his work and it had an effect on me.

Nowadays hardly anybody knows him, but he was very significant. After the World War he took part in a famous expedition in the history of science, to watch a solar eclipse somewhere in Brazil – the only place where total solar eclipses are visible. The intention was to measure the bending of light under the gravitational field which exists, and to demonstrate it experimentally. (It turned out that it is twice as big as was originally thought.) Unfortunately, just at the critical moment there were clouds all over the place and they couldn't really observe anything. These things happen, I am afraid! But Eddington's name was very well known.

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Mollie Holman received a BSc (Hons) from the University of Melbourne in 1951. From 1953 to 1954 Holman was a demonstrator in pharmacology as well as working in a research laboratory where she developed equipment to measure membrane potentials in frog skin and muscles. She received an MSc from the University of Melbourne in 1955. Holman then went to the UK on a Melbourne University Travelling Scholarship to work on the physiology of smooth muscle at the University of Oxford. She received a DPhil from Oxford in 1957. Holman returned to Australia in 1955 to take up a lectureship in physiology at the University of Melbourne. In 1963 Holman moved to the Department of Physiology at Monash University. Initially appointed as a senior lecturer, she became a reader in 1965 and professor in 1970. Holman retired in 1996, but remains actively engaged in teaching and research. In 1970, Holman was awarded a DSc by Monash University.

Interviewed by Dr Max Blythe in 1998.

Contents

• The roots of a 40-year passion
• School by day, physics by night
• To Melbourne and an extra year in science
• A science undergraduate at Melbourne University
• Frog skin and membrane potentials
• Turning to neuromuscular transmission
• Deciding to study smooth muscle, not cardiac
• Getting to Oxford
• Action potentials: something funny going on
• The practicalities of research
• New opportunities and wonderful collaboration
• Just what was being stimulated: cells or nerves?
• Wondering about neurotransmitters
• Inhibitory junction potentials
• Sidestepping the sidelines
• The great orchestra of the ganglia
• Links and inspiration
• Tidying up loose ends
• Into retirement a bit

The roots of a 40-year passion

Mollie, your work has been a passion of 40 years, two-thirds of a lifetime. You have said that it was really about the dialogue between the autonomic nervous system and smooth muscle, which before you started nobody had got into very well.

Well, not at the cellular level. Quite a bit was known about it from the descriptive point of view, but nobody had really looked at the nuts and bolts of it. I guess it turned me on because of such a variety of things happening in different tissues.

This is everything apart from voluntary movement of the body – all the movement of the intestine, blood vessels, ureters – an immense field of activity.

Yes, including the heart, skin, sweat glands, and going on all the time without any conscious involvement. I started reading about this in a longish literature survey as part of my Masters degree in Melbourne, and I was very fascinated. It seemed as though there were different nerves operating by different transmitters throughout the body, compared with the rather simple pattern of innervation of skeletal muscle.

You set out from that point in the early 1950s, and ever since you've been working to chart the performance of the autonomic nervous system in relation to smooth muscle. Let's now go right back to the beginning, to Tasmania in 1930.

That's the year I was born, so I don't really know much about it!

But your parents were established there. Your father was a doctor.

My father did medicine at Melbourne University and worked with one of the early Australian pioneers in radiology. He did a year at the Royal Melbourne as a resident. Then the main surgeon in northern Tasmania, John (later Sir John) Ramsay, was looking for somebody to set up X-rays in his private hospital in Launceston. Dad met my mother, Mollie Bain, in Launceston – I think through the Launceston Players, the local dramatic society. He had started acting in Ormond College, with the Ormond Dramatic Society, and he was keen on drama for the whole of his life.

You have told me that he really had a good feel for research and building apparatus. Was he essentially a hospital doctor when he came to Tasmania, working with the surgical team?

Oh yes. He probably made the X-ray apparatus work for Sir John Ramsay.

Your mother was a beautiful woman.

Mum was a very attractive lady. Those days were very different for women, especially in a small town like Launceston. She didn't go to work. She never had a job but she did raise four children, all girls.

Did they become scientists, like you?

No. My next sister, Jill, did arts and was a schoolteacher for many years. The next one did social work. She's still doing it on a voluntary basis, but social workers are born and not made. And the youngest didn't do a university degree.

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School by day, physics by night

You didn't get a chance to go to school very early, because your father was rather strongly anti-kindergarten. Can you explain that to me?

I started school when I was 7½, actually, at the beginning of 1938. War clouds were already well and truly looming up by then and there was certainly an anti-German feeling, including against the kindergarten idea. But the girls' grammar school, Broadland House, went right through from kindergarten up to when the girls finished school and left, so we were all in the same school. Launceston was a lovely place to be, because although it was a small town it was big enough to attract quite a few interesting visitors to Tasmania.

Was that school a good place to be?

Yes and no. We were a smallish group and were very happy, even though these were war years. We were very protected, I think. I went as far as Intermediate there.

It was a traditional education, with lots of the three Rs but not much science?

Languages, but no science at all.

You got to the top of the class quite early on, didn't you?

Because I started at school so late I was behind the eight ball a bit, but by the time I was about 11 or 12 I had got to the top of the class. Then I went down and was beaten into third. But I had a lot of extracurricular activities as an early teenager. I was very fond of roller-skating.

While still at school, at the age of 14 or 15, you had the unusual experience of going to an evening school, with senior people, to do the physics that your remarkable father thought you should be doing.

The others were mostly apprentices and young people a little bit older than I was. I did the equivalent of Intermediate physics. The Intermediate exam was the public exam that you took in school before you went on to do University Entrance or Matriculation, or Leaving. The course was in fact called Introduction to Science and Engineering, so quite a few of the people in the class probably would have been apprentice engineers. I absolutely loved it: it all seemed very logical and satisfactory.

Were you building apparatus for the first time?

Oh, just doing very simple-minded experiments that our teacher had set me.

That would be getting towards the end of the war years. What was the war like in Launceston? Or did it pass you by?

There were definitely clouds. My mother's brother Jim was in the Army throughout, in the Middle East and later in New Guinea. He was very close to action a lot of the time and we were always worried for him. My mother's elder brother Tom was in the Navy, as was her younger brother Bob. So I had three close relations very much involved in the war. Dad did quite a lot of work for the Army as well, in looking after people, examining people wanting to join up and so on.

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To Melbourne and an extra year in science

You later moved to Melbourne. I think that again was your father's idea. He must have been a potent source of ideas.

Yes, he was. That was 1945, and I did my last three years of schooling in Melbourne.

Weren't you going to see a gran – your father's mother – who lived in Melbourne?

Yes. She had never seen any of the children.

And your father knew a head teacher there.

Dorothy Ross was the headmistress of Merton Hall, the Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. Dad had a great admiration for her, as I think a lot of people did. She was an amazing woman, an Australian, who had done a degree in psychology. Also, Dad had an assistant called Jean Hill – a doctor and an outstanding person – who had been to Merton Hall.

Was boarding a bit of a culture shock?

Well, it was. I had a network of friends in Tasmania, and we'd had lots of wonderful parties in Launceston to celebrate the end of the war. Leaving there was a bit of a shock to the system. However, as boarders at Merton Hall we were treated like adults, really. It was amazing, and a wonderful school.

Did you do science there?

Yes, plus a few other things as well. I was editress of the school magazine in my last year at school. I wouldn't say I was exactly sporty – quite the reverse – but I did play basketball. Not hockey, as it was quite apparent by then that I was somewhat shortsighted. Playing in glasses with a hockey ball would have been a bit dangerous.

When did the idea dawn that you were going to have a scientific career? Was that earlier when you did the physics in Launceston?

Pretty much throughout my career I was never sure what exactly I wanted to do, but I kept my options open because that meant doing things that later didn't limit the direction in which I could go. From Broadland on, I knew it would be something to do with science, but just what I didn't really know.

As you got towards the upper grades, you must have had a wide base. Was there a lot of sport? Were you a swot, were you a reader, were you highly focused?

There was not that much sport. I always enjoyed studying, for some unknown reason, so it was never an effort. I always read a lot, and at Merton Hall I did one year of Greek and Roman history, which I absolutely loved and still do.

Tell me about the decision to go to Melbourne University.

No choice about that in those days. If you were doing science for your University Entrance and did well enough, you went to Melbourne University. At Merton Hall, after Intermediate you did first of all a Leaving Certificate, and then you had a choice. You could do one more year at school and then University Entrance. But Miss Ross liked people to have an extra year, which she called the honours year, in between Leaving and Matric. You could pick up some additional subjects or, if you really were keen to do a science, you could have an extra year of science to improve your chances of getting good marks at University Entrance.

Were there any teachers who particularly switched you on in science?

Oh, my chemistry teacher, Miss Irving, was wonderful. She was extremely enthusiastic.

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A science undergraduate at Melbourne University

To me, your first year at Melbourne University sounded unusual.

Yes. It was a wonderful first year. After the war, Melbourne University set up a branch at Mildura, in an old Air Force base. It was there really to take care of the bulge of people returning from the war and wanting to enrol, especially in engineering, dentistry and medicine. They also took a small number of people who were enrolled in science. At that stage I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go to med eventually, stay with science or what, so I did first year medicine plus engineering maths, which gave me again a wide base that meant I could go in a number of directions later on. That was great fun but very hard work, because engineering maths was not easy.

That was when you decided not to do more medicine but to stay wide-based in your second year.

That's right. I did chemistry and maths, even though in first year I'd done best in biology. Then, because I wasn't good enough at mathematics to do that and I only liked parts of chemistry – I liked physical chemistry but I found organic rather boring – it was physics for final year. In those days you did honours in science after a three-year course. I graduated at the end of 1951.

Who were the people who made an impact, Mollie, in those undergraduate years? You must have been packed in with many other students.

Well, there wasn't an enormous number of people doing physics by the time we reached third year, probably only 20 or 30 of us. There was just one other girl, and she and I were partners in doing our experiments. Sadly, there were no tutors to parallel the chemistry teacher I'd had at school.

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Frog skin and membrane potentials

Did you go on right away to do an MSc?

I got a 2A – by the skin of my teeth, I'm sure, because of my maths – so I could go on and do a Masters degree. I had a Melbourne University scholarship and I thought about physics, but I felt it would have been rather boring to do the experiments that were going on in the Physics Department at that time. My father was a great friend of the Professor of Physiology, Roy Douglas Wright, otherwise known as Panzy Wright. Whether through Dad's influence or Panzy's, I was allowed to take my scholarship with the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, and to go ahead with research in biophysics, as we called it.

This interest in biophysics had a little bit of fatherly influence as well, I think: he had introduced you to some of Schroedinger's writing. Did that have real impact?

It did, although at that time I didn't know enough about biology to grasp precisely what he was getting at.

But that was what precipitated the move?

Yes, the idea that physics would have an enormous amount of input into biology – and Dad probably planted the idea in my mind.

Panzy Wright handed you on to Frank Shaw. That was an interesting encounter.

Frank was interested in experiments which you would think of more as biophysics than some of the straight physiology work going on at that time. He was looking at why the ionic environment – the ions that are present in the solution inside cells – is so utterly different from the composition of the fluid in the body in which those cells live (the extracellular environment). Frank's real interest was in what forces there were inside living cells to give them this extraordinary difference in ionic content from the solution bathing the outside of the cells.

So in those early days he was looking at the cell membrane mechanism?

Yes. And he was interested in how drugs might perhaps alter the ionic gradients.

What kind of investigative work was this? Was he actually taking cells apart, releasing their ionic contents? It would be difficult to manipulate the cells.

He was mostly trying to look at what the ionic content was, mainly in frog muscles.

And you joined him in this work?

Well no, because I knew very little about biology in those days, having only done first year medical biology. But in his reading he had come across a very interesting preparation of frog skin which had been worked on by Danish workers. It's very hard for frogs to get enough ions into their body to function normally without some active process to soak up any sodium that's around in their watery environment, so in their skins they have a sodium pump. Frank thought that would be a nice model for the same kind of pump that's in all other living cells, so I had to set up an arrangement to measure the voltage generated by this active transport of sodium across the frog skin.

By developing electrodes, and moving in and measuring cross-surface resistance?

That's right. That was quite my cup of tea. I learnt an awful lot about what you had to do to make measurements of membrane potentials – which were quite complicated. People knew about them from the old physical chemists, like Guggenheim, but there was a lot of work to be done.

It was a good place to start, but I think you were put out into a rather lonely room and left a lot to your own devices, making your own stuff away from the herd.

Yes. Later on, Frank asked me to set up an apparatus measuring the voltage across frog muscles, rather than frog skin, associated with these very large ionic gradients between the inside and the outside of the cell. It was not easy.

I think you have said, 'But I was a bit pig-headed and I just was going to do it anyway.' You certainly got some interesting results.

Other people had been doing it, but not so much in Australia at that time, I don't think. There was a lot of work going on in the UK, especially at University College, and of course we all knew and followed with great interest the work that Hodgkin and Huxley had been doing, and Katz, in relation to voltage clamping squid axons and learning a lot about what caused these voltage differences across the cell membrane.

Was there a high spot of that work with Frank Shaw?

I think the highest spot was when I finished my Masters thesis. That had dragged on and on, partly because after about a year on the scholarship I took on a university demonstratorship and was then part-time. It ended up as volume 1 and volume 2.

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Turning to neuromuscular transmission

Were both these massive parts of your thesis about looking at cross-membrane situations with a range of ionic exteriors?

That was what I was doing, but I decided to write my literature survey on something totally different – neuromuscular transmission – because I was very much interested in the work that had been going on in the UK. And that was why it went on and on. I wrote a review of the work that had been done by Sir Bernard Katz and his colleagues at University College, but I also read a lot about a different kind of neuromuscular transmission: the transmission that goes on at sites in the body other than in the brain and spinal cord, and from nerve to skeletal muscle. That's where I came to read about the autonomic nervous system and the innervation of smooth muscle and glands – in fact, the innervation of everything in the body other than skeletal striated muscles.

You were deeply immersed in it by then, and looking to do a PhD?

Yes. In those days people nearly always went overseas to do a PhD. I think one of the earliest PhDs in Australia was done in the Department of Physics at Melbourne University in 1948, but in general, and especially in biological sciences, to become involved in research mostly meant going overseas after a Masters degree.

Your first inclination was to go to Bernard Katz in University College but you were talked out of it by Jack Eccles. How did you come to be in touch with him?

Eccles came from Dunedin in New Zealand to head up the Department of Physiology at the Australian National University in the early '50s. He immediately had an influence on all the people working in Australia on neurosciences, as we'd call it now with hindsight, because he not only set up a wonderful department at ANU but also came along to scientific meetings and was a great encouragement to everyone. Whenever he had somebody important visiting ANU from overseas, he always arranged for that person to go to the provinces, as you might say, and give lectures to the medical students.

He was a great sponsor of information dispersal?

He was a great sponsor, and one way or another he looked after everybody.

Had physiology actually started at this time?

No, but we had a very active physiology segment within ANZAAS, which was like AAAS or the British Society for the Advancement of Science.

Did you get to know Eccles personally very well? He was supposed to be something of an ogre.

I got to know him but not very well. He wasn't an ogre at all, in my view. I think people who worked with him found him a bit dominating because he was so incredibly energetic and he was so hardworking.

Mollie, did you ever see him work at the bench?

I don't believe I did – not actually sitting over an animal and doing an experiment.

I've been told that his mind would work ahead, adapting experiments, and however many hours were required, he would just go on. The mind would still stay as bright as ever, perfectly adaptable.

Yes, that's absolutely right. He was very strong physically too. But a wonderful benchworker, undoubtedly. He had worked on smooth muscle when he was at Oxford, with Sherrington. He suggested that I should think about doing a DPhil at Oxford with Edith Bülbring, in this new area that nobody much was working in. Why not go and do something a bit new and different, rather than just go on with skeletal neuromuscular transmission as everybody was doing in those days?

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Deciding to study smooth muscle, not cardiac

Edith Bülbring had just started to research smooth muscle, hadn't she. She was a pharmacologist, and although the smooth muscle bath had become the great tool of the pharmacologists, they knew precious little about it.

Absolutely. Edith had dabbled in the biochemistry of smooth muscle, and people were working on mechanisms for contraction and so on, but she thought that to be able to record the membrane potentials in smooth muscle might just give another handle on how drugs worked. She herself said on many occasions that really she went into it blind, because being a medico she didn't know anything about physics or chemistry.

And you came in about 1955 to join her, pretty blind, but recommended by Jack.

Yes. I have found a letter I wrote to Edith, asking whether she could give me a place in the lab and saying, 'I would like to work on smooth muscle or cardiac muscle.'

There was cardiac muscle work going on at that time, with Miles Vaughan Williams, in the lab where you were to work, in effect.

Yes, next door. It was really only after I got to Oxford, or while I was corresponding with Edith, during 1955, that we homed in on the smooth muscle project.

Was Edith a demanding supervisor?

No, I wouldn't say she was a terribly demanding supervisor. I'd been working pretty much independently during my Masters period in Melbourne, and by the time I got to Oxford I was able to build my own apparatus and I was fairly happy with the simple electronics as we knew it in those days.

She was not an easy lady at times. Did you form a good relationship with her?

Well, it was a bit dicey at times. We had our little arguments.

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Getting to Oxford

Before we talk more about your work with Edith Bülbring, let's look at your long journey to Oxford and what you found there.

I left Australia on the Strathnaver in, I think, April 1955, with five other females in a six-berth cabin. We had a wonderful time of course on the ship going to England. After we had settled down for a while in London, several of us went off on the usual round-the-Continent trip that everyone did in those days.

You'd already learnt to ski – another personal interest of some strength, I know. Then you went back to Oxford. Did you become one of the ladies of Lady Margaret Hall?

I didn't actually live in Lady Margaret Hall. I was very fortunate, actually. Stephen Toulmin, who was in History and Philosophy of Science, had been at Melbourne University as a visiting professor or on sabbatical, and I met him through mutual friends. He told me that his mother, in north Oxford, took in a boarder. So I lived in her house rather than in Lady Margaret Hall, but as it was very close I ate in hall quite frequently, for nothing.

The last of the Bloomsbury set?

Mmm, yes. Iris Murdoch used to eat there fairly regularly. Oxford pharmacology in those days was absolutely marvellous, like a mini United Nations. There were Germans and a man from Iceland, an Austrian – a great international community of people, most of whom had already done a PhD and were post-docs. It was a really international community, and although we were very poor and had no money we managed to have a wonderful time.

I think there was terrific collaboration within that unit. You all sparked each other, with lunchtime chats and so on.

Yes, indeed. The professor, Josh Burn, was very worried whether we all had enough to eat, so he employed a cook and we had a kitchen in the department. We had a proper sit-down lunch every day, with the whole department sitting round the table. That made for a lot of friendship between all the young people in the department.

Was Josh Burn an influential figure?

Not for me so much. Although I have worked so much in pharmacology departments, I never really became a card-carrying pharmacologist.

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Action potentials: something funny going on

You've always stayed a physiologist. In Oxford you applied that physiology very quickly to looking at the smooth muscle and got an astounding result, quite early on.

Oh yes. Techniques do change and improve, but Edith was quite right, she wasn't a physicist. In recording the membrane potentials in smooth muscles – such as muscles in the wall of your gastrointestinal tract – she found she was recording funny little signals. By comparison with the signals generated by skeletal muscles or even cardiac muscle these were very slow and sloppy, and very much smaller in magnitude. I thought, 'There's something very funny going on here,' but when I started I also got records of funny little signals coming from smooth muscles.

What were you actually recording with? What kind of electrodes were you using?

They evolved from traditional methods. We made a very micro-micro-micro-pipette: we would take capillary tubing, put it in the flame and get it all white hot and then yank it, so we got quite small pieces of capillary.

It sounds very imprecise. You did develop skill at it, and at drawing out the glass?

Yes. We had a very archaic kind of microelectrode puller, which had a spring attached to it. We had to take a little flame, move it up to heat one of the bits of glass, and when the glass got sufficiently molten the puller would automatically go boing! and hopefully we would pull a very, very fine tip, which was still patent. And then that had to be filled with potassium chloride as a conducting solution.

Did you look at the tips under the microscope to check the dimensions?

They're so small, if they're working properly, you can't even see them under an ordinary microscope. They're a fraction – probably a hundredth – of a micron, and you just suck and see. Anyway, I started off using Edith's electrodes and got these funny little recordings.

Weren't they about 10 millivolts?

Yes, or even less. They vary in amplitude.

Normal skeletal muscles produce about 70 to 100, but you weren't getting anywhere near that. So you made some more electrodes, some more apparatus?

We made some more electrodes but we were still recording only about 5 millivolts. Eventually one day I popped into a cell and instead of just getting a few millivolts I suddenly got something getting bigger and bigger, and then it turned out a little later on that they weren't 5 millivolts, 10 millivolts, they were 40, 50, 60 and so on. And in the second paper that I published on this from Oxford I think you'll find they're very much bigger.

I think you went to 100 millivolts, Mollie.

Not quite. But it was very gratifying: it meant that smooth muscle wasn't all that way out and peculiar – probably not much different from cardiac muscle, skeletal muscles.

With the same kind of dimension of action potential after all?

Yes. Logically, it had to be. That was fun, but there are still many puzzles.

You told me once that when you got this wonderful result, when suddenly there was a big action spike, Edith Bülbring wasn't all that delighted.

No!

Thwarted, more than delighted. Would it be fair to say that?

It's hard for me to put myself into her position and think what she must have felt like. Later she was pleased. And there were still some small ones that you'd get and sometimes quite weird shapes, so that really it took us a while to sort out exactly what was the basis of the action potentials in smooth muscle.

So, very early on, smooth muscle – intestinal pieces – set a lot of questions for you.

Yes, such as what mechanisms generate these spikes or action potentials, these very fast changes in membrane potential, that occur spontaneously in some smooth muscles but can be generated by an electrical stimulus in other smooth muscles. I wondered what exactly were the ions that were moving to make that very rapid change in membrane potential which we call an action potential.

I think you went back to the Frank Shaw methods, changing the ionic background.

Exactly. I did quite a lot of experiments that nudged me in the direction of discovering what was going on, but I was not the first person to say, 'These action potentials are associated with a change in membrane resistance for calcium ions' – not sodium ions, which until then had been studied as the cause of action potentials. I should have had enough sense to realise it, and I was very close, but it didn't dawn on me at that stage because I was so much influenced by the importance of the established sodium model.

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The practicalities of research

During those Oxford years, you took only two years to write quite a significant thesis.

Writing my Masters thesis had dragged on and on. I got the message, and was able to write this thesis up pretty quickly. It was entitled something like The effects of changes in ionic environment on the electrical activity of smooth muscle.

Your performance must have been incredibly focused, once the European travel was out of the way. You spent a lot of time at the bench – and did quite a lot of night work.

One of the problems about being able to put a microelectrode inside a cell, especially a very small cell like a smooth muscle cell, is vibrations. These very fine-tipped electrodes are very subject to wobbling about if there's any sort of vibration in the system. Nowadays people use most sophisticated anti-vibration tables but in Oxford it was a big problem, and when a car or a lorry would go by in Parks Road that would often be the end of it. So I did a lot of work at night when things were quiet, with nobody else around in the lab. I remember clearly that when I was writing my thesis, I used to work from about 11 o'clock in the morning until about 3 o'clock the following night, have just a few hours' sleep and then get back to writing the thesis. And I tell my current lot of PhD students that's the way to do it. You don't want to waste too much time writing a PhD thesis: you're only going to write one in your life and the best thing is to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

Was it in the Oxford years that you found how focused you could be?

Oh, I think I was fairly focused for most of the time after I settled down in my last year at school. I really enjoy studying. It wasn't a bad chore for me.

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New opportunities and wonderful collaboration

This whole field that was opening up was an immense joy to you.

Yes, very gratifying. But I felt that I couldn't really go much further on the particular muscle I'd been using, which Edith had developed: a strip of smooth muscle where the cells are in a longitudinal direction. These strips of muscle, called taeniae coli, go along the caecum, the large intestine, and they're very spontaneously active. They wriggle about all over the place and it was very difficult to keep a microelectrode in. It was very difficult to understand what was causing the spontaneous activity. In fact, we still really don't know the cause. So I thought that, given the opportunity, I would like to work on a smooth muscle that wasn't spontaneously active.

Why didn't you stay on in Oxford? You would have been asked to.

Well, I did have a Wellcome Trust scholarship for the last few months I was in Oxford. But at the same time I was offered a job as a lecturer back in Melbourne, in Physiology again.

You loved home and you must have missed your family while you were in Oxford.

Yes, although my parents did visit me there, for a wonderful time. Anyway, partly because I had family in Australia and lots of ties and friends, I decided to come back to Australia, to Panzy Wright's department in Melbourne. I wanted to understand what caused the action potentials, why they sometimes cropped up spontaneously, to look at the whole question of excitation of smooth muscle. There are so many different kinds of smooth muscle in the body; there's quite a lot of work to be done.

When you got back to Melbourne, the dignity of the Oxford years was to some extent submerged. You were put into rather limited circumstances.

Yes. My laboratory was the university paint store. Although the paint tins had actually gone, it wasn't much of a place. There was a sink, which you'd normally have in a paint store, and some power points. But I had to mount my own table – hopefully, more or less vibration-free, because the paint store was right next door to one of the main thoroughfares, Swanston Street. Melbourne University is full of vibrations.

With some help from David Dewhurst, who was in the Physiology Department, and with funding from somewhere, I put together some apparatus. In those days we recorded signals from living cells on a cathode-ray oscilloscope, but I had to borrow one when I got back to Melbourne because we couldn't have afforded it at that stage. It took a year before I got a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council to buy more sophisticated stuff.

Mollie, you came from a golden Oxford laboratory back to an impoverished start. Was that a culture shock?

Well, it wasn't that golden at Oxford. Just after the war there wasn't a lot of money round for medical research. But I did have a cathode-ray oscilloscope in Oxford and my laboratory wasn't a paint store! Among other things, the paint store leaked. I had some wonderful collaboration during that time at Melbourne University, particularly with people like Geoff Burnstock and Mike Rand.

Wasn't it Michael White who recommended that Geoff Burnstock come out?

Michael White, who was the chairman of Zoology at that time, was looking for new staff. Geoff had done his PhD with J Z Young, so he really was a zoologist by background, and had gone to the States on a Rockefeller fellowship from Oxford. Geoff and I first met up in Oxford, where we worked together and published a paper.

Were you part of the invitation deal for him to come to Melbourne?

To Zoology, yes. We both were looking forward to further collaboration, I must admit, because it had been very good for that short period in Oxford.

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Just what was being stimulated: cells or nerves?

Let's talk now about your collaboration with Geoff Burnstock in Melbourne in the late 1950s and the early '60s. Those golden years produced an enormous output.

We did have a lot of fun, yes.

Geoff arrived in about 1959 to join you in the paint store, and your commitment was now to looking at a non-spontaneously mobile smooth muscle.

That's right. I'd tried several. I'd started off on the ureter, the tubes that carry the urine from the kidneys to the bladder.

With nice peristaltic waves.

Yes, a very nice large action with an interesting shape. But they didn't behave very well in response to electrical stimulation. You could only stimulate them electrically if you waited a long time between individual stimuli. We did publish a bit of work on the ureters, but another tube among the pelvic viscera which was clearly not spontaneously active did give a nice twitch in response to an electrical stimulus. That was the vas deferens.

In the guinea pig the vas deferens was not spontaneously active at all, but gave a very reliable twitch response to a brief electrical stimulus. We thought at first that we were probably stimulating the smooth muscle cells directly with our electrical stimulus, but we found out we were wrong. One day we had a visit in the lab from Michael Rand, who had been at Oxford at the same time as Geoff and I, working with Professor Burn, and was visiting Australia. He asked me what preparation I was working on and then said that a researcher in Oxford had just developed a very nice, isolated nerve, smooth muscle preparation of the guinea pig vas deferens, which meant that you could put your stimulating electrodes on the nerve rather than muscle itself and get a nice twitch response.

Very soon we found out that when we were stimulating the vas deferens with an electrical stimulus we were in fact stimulating the nerves to the vas deferens, not the smooth muscle directly. So we now had a chance to study transmission from an autonomic nerve to smooth muscle of the vas deferens. We had a nice innervated smooth muscle preparation in the bath.

This was the hypogastric nerve. Did Michael Rand help you with the early dissection?

He showed us how to dissect a hypogastric nerve!

So he, a present from Oxford, really got you moving.

Yes. That was great fun.

Vas deferens tissue was to go on to prove a major model.

That turned out to be one of the most densely innervated smooth muscles anywhere in the body. There were masses of nerves mingling with the smooth muscle cells. When you stimulate those nerves you get a little signal, a change in membrane potential once again. Unlike the action potential, these are very much smaller signals, which have to sum together to reach the threshold for generating an action potential. So we had a model very much like the skeletal neuromuscular junction – and it turned out to be a model for quite a number of other situations in the body as well.

So there was a summation sequence?

Yes. We looked at the signals we got in the smooth muscle when we stimulated the hypogastric nerve, and we saw the small movements of the membrane, in the same direction as action potential but very much smaller – you could grade them with the strength of stimulation. You had electrodes on the hypogastric nerve and you'd stimulate: at first nothing happened and then you increased the strength. Gradually you would come up to a point where you saw a very small change in membrane potential; with a stronger stimulus it would get bigger and bigger, and then you would get an action potential. So we now had a nice handle on what was going on in neuromuscular transmission in smooth muscle. That was good.

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Wondering about neurotransmitters

Eventually you got onto transmitters, didn't you?

Yes. Perhaps I should explain a bit about the nerves that go to smooth muscle and the other tissues in the body. The skeletal muscles are innervated by nerves whose cell bodies lie in the brain or the spinal cord and send out what we call an axon. That goes out to the skeletal muscle fibre, and at its terminal in the skeletal muscle it releases a substance called acetylcholine, which causes a change in membrane potential similar to but much larger than I described for the vas.

But in the autonomic nervous system – the heart, blood vessels, guts, the whole lot – although the nerve cells send out an axon which releases acetylcholine at its terminal in exactly the same way, that acetylcholine is released onto another nerve cell. It does not go directly to the muscle fibre: instead, there's a relay in the system, with the synapse. And the cells which are activated by acetylcholine coming out of the preganglionic fibre can release different transmitters. Some of them release acetylcholine when they go out to the periphery; some release noradrenalin; some probably release other substances as well.

So the vas deferens is innervated by sympathetic nerves, and we thought we were looking there at responses to stimulating nerves that worked through the release of noradrenalin. But quite early on in the piece the pharmacology, the way drugs acted on that neurotransmission process, made us wonder whether it really was noradrenalin that was causing the change in membrane potential.

Are you saying that if you blocked noradrenalin, you still got a response?

That's exactly right. One of the traditional drugs used to block the actions of noradrenalin and adrenalin on smooth muscle was phenoxybenzamine, which actually made those sub-threshold responses, the ones which were not big enough to be an action potential, bigger than in the control. So it was a bit of a puzzle, something new.

At that stage very little was known about neurotransmission and transmitters. I remember studying the standard number of transmitters – acetylcholine and nora but not a big field at all. But all of a sudden you were saying, 'There's got to be more.' You were rewriting the texts.

Yes. I felt for a long time that it could be a question of the noradrenalin acting on a different kind of receptor from any of the receptors that were known to latch on to it. I think most people nowadays believe that it is a different transmitter, and this was Geoff's baby: a little bit later on, he had the idea that the transmitter might be ATP, adenosine triphosphate.

Why did he come to that conclusion?

As a result of bits and pieces in the literature. There was a suggestion by Sidney Hilton, I think, that ATP might be a vasodilator. Possibly Graham Campbell had the idea – he was another collaborator of Geoff's and mine, a great reader of literature who had an excellent memory. It's very hard to attribute an idea like that to an individual, but Geoff certainly persuaded a lot of people that it was the explanation and I think most people nowadays would feel it was well and truly established.

You're not one who presents it.

Well no, just because you cannot readily mimic the exact changes in membrane properties that are caused by applying ATP to the bath with the changes that occur when ATP comes out of nerves. But it's an interesting story and I think most people would nowadays agree that ATP is a neurotransmitter.

As Geoff called it, purenergic. So you were then into purenergic transmission. Was this about the stage when Max Bennett also got involved?

Oh yes. Max had helped me quite early on in the piece, in setting up my lab at Melbourne. Then he came and finished this part-time while he was finishing his engineering course, after which he decided to do a PhD with Geoff Burnstock.

And you got involved with him in all kinds of electrode work, such as gastrointestinal tract work?

Yes. As well, he did some nice work on the ureter in my lab, because Geoff didn't have what he needed for that. At that stage of the game, I think, Max put together an intracellular set-up in Zoology, but when he first came into my lab it was the only place that was set up to do intracellular recording.

Let's sum up this idea of dual transmission, that there might be two transmitters.

There is no doubt that noradrenalin comes out of those nerve terminals in the vas deferens and in blood vessels, and elsewhere in the body where there's something a little odd about the transmission process. I think Geoff must take credit for promoting the idea of dual transmission, but it is very hard to know where the idea came from in the first place.

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Inhibitory junction potentials

You and Geoff were talking to each other all the time while the idea of dual transmission was in gestation. You must have felt on top of a cloud, being so far into a subject that had been so neglected.

Well, by then we'd got onto other situations in the body where you get transmission from autonomic nerves to smooth muscle. In fact, Max's PhD was to do not with the excitation of smooth muscle we've talked about up till now, but with the other thing that autonomic nerves can do: inhibit smooth muscle. He had been working on the electrical correlates, if you like, of what happens when you stimulate a nerve to gut muscle and it stops spontaneous activity, rather than excites it.

This suggests peristalsis, wavelike movements of constriction, pushing material down a tube such as the gastrointestinal tract. I had realised there must be a relaxation, in that everything goes back after a major activity, but here we have a positive process. Were you the first to investigate the relaxation that preceded a contraction?

Yes. The muscle couldn't move anything on if it didn't relax. We found a lovely little electrical correlate that went with the relaxation, and called it an inhibitory junction potential. Max did a lot of the basic work to establish that it really was so. And again we're not yet 100 per cent sure of what the neurotransmitter is. For a while people thought it might be ATP, but I don't think there's 100 per cent very good evidence. We can block the fast inhibition that you get from stimulating inhibitory nerves which are present in the gut wall with a substance called apamine, but that doesn't work on the receptor. It works on the ion channel that is affected when the receptor is activated.

That Burnstock–Holman period was wonderful. You were great collaborators, and you've stayed in contact over all the years – a great ongoing partnership, in a way.

Oh yes, indeed. And it was great fun, right from the work for our first paper on the vas, which we published in Nature in 1960.

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Sidestepping the sidelines

Geoff Burnstock was to go back to England in due course, and you were to go on to a new university. Had you found it difficult to follow your science career? You talked earlier of Edith Bülbring, but it wasn't a wild arena for women researchers. Sometimes you must have felt slightly sidelined.

At the time I would have said probably it wasn't really very difficult, but looking back, I think it was perhaps a little difficult at times. I was probably patronised a bit, and certainly most of the graduate students that were around in those days were male and didn't really particularly like the idea of being supervised by a woman. I think that's part of the Australian way. On the other hand, there were benefits, because people were very nice to me and polite and so on. I think I've been very lucky.

Was Panzy Wright kind to you? Was he a great supporter?

He was a great supporter, although we fell out a little bit towards the end, in the 1960s. Panzy was very much involved with the setting up of the Florey Institute in Melbourne with Derek Denton. Because the Florey people were very much into salivary excretion I did a bit of work with them, measuring potentials from salivary glands, but I didn't want to give up smooth muscle just to work on salivary glands. I wanted to do my own thing rather than be part of the Florey scheme of things.

You were again kept to a sideline whilst that major development was preoccupying people?

That's right, yes.

You needed to sidestep and move somewhere else, so in 1963 you went to the new Monash University – 15 miles from the centre of Melbourne.

Yes. It had been set up in 1961, in the spot where people were predicting the most rapidly increasing population in Melbourne. Demographically that's still an area where Melbourne's growing fastest. The first Professor of Physiology, Archie McIntyre, was actually a colleague of Eccles, also from Dunedin. He was very well known in neuroscience, whereas there really wasn't any neuroscience going on in physiology. And there were many other advantages in going to Monash: money, for instance, to buy apparatus and to get a good lab set-up.

So you got a decent deal. You were going to a job of similar rank, as a senior lecturer, and with money to set up laboratories! I think you were getting more and more into vas deferens work.

Well, we still were doing a bit on the vas deferens, but I was still working on the inhibitory side of things. It took me a while to get my lab set up, and I did this simple-minded pharmacology at the time.

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The great orchestra of the ganglia

After I'd been at Monash about a year, in 1964, I was very lucky – and probably Archie helped – in that I got a Chafer lectureship to go to Otago, in New Zealand, to work with Gary Blackman. He had done some work earlier, I think as a post-doc, on recording from the ganglion cells we talked about earlier. But he had done work on frog ganglia and there was enough around to suggest that mammalian ganglia were probably very different from amphibian. I knew about the nice little clumps of ganglion cells innervating the vas deferens in the pelvis, so I went with the main purpose of using Gary's expertise and mine to do some recordings from the ganglia of the hypogastric nerve.

Ganglia are like little connective tissue capsules, full of a whole range of inter-networking nerve cells. They are absolutely fascinating, but not enough work had been done on any ganglion structure.

That's right. Eccles' daughter Rose had done a little bit of work but not recording intracellularly, not actually recording membrane potential directly. Gary and I were successful: it turned out to be a very nice little preparation. When I came back to Australia I was very keen to continue working on the peripheral nerve cells or ganglion cells.

So those four months generated the real beginnings of ganglion work. Just give me the germ of that. Did you actually see transmitter situations?

We saw a transmission process very similar to what goes on from these cholinergic nerves to the skeletal muscle, but there were other interesting things in ganglia. They have a great orchestra: there are slow changes in membrane potential which modify their excitability; some of the inputs are very strong and it's almost just like a direct relay; other ganglia have weaker synaptic inputs – a lot of interesting things.

We're talking about the synapsing, the linking together of nerves and the very delicate interrelationships at the ends of axons. Looking at the transmitters in these very fine areas, were you finding dual transmission in ganglia?

No, not in those early times. But important dual transmission is more likely in the nerve cells in the wall of the gut, another place where you find these nerve cells outside the central nervous system. Towards the end of the '60s and in the early '70s, I was very keen to make records from those nerve cells that are in the gut wall, because I thought that if you could record from ganglia you should be able to record from those enteric neurones.

You've got to get electrodes into enteric neurones, impale them?

That was the ambition. It was a very interesting period, because by then I had a bit of a reputation and I had quite a few post-docs and other people coming through the lab. One of the interesting sidelines that we got onto was to look at some very strange reflexes mediated through some of those hypogastric ganglia and other ganglia, like the inferior mesenteric ganglion. To make a long story short: we found evidence that if you take a preparation of the inferior mesenteric ganglion and put it in an isolated organ bath with a bit of the large bowel, there's continuous synaptic input coming from the large bowel backwards towards the central nervous system. We had a great bit of fun investigating that for a while, because we felt that it might give us a window into what those enteric neurones in the wall of the gut were doing, by simply recording in the ganglion cell that they were connected to. People are still working on those reflexes through some of the sympathetic ganglia in the pelvic area.

There's a vast amount of ganglionic transmission in the intestine to be charted.

Yes. Sorting out what goes on in the enteric nervous system is another vast area. In Australia we're ahead of anywhere in the world, I'd say, in that exercise, and in the early '70s I was lucky enough to be in on the very early stages of that too.

We're talking about a wonderful kind of longitudinal muscle, circular muscle, and two incredible networks that have a lot of independence from the rest of the nervous system but have outside influence imposed on them as well.

That's right, from the sympathetic nerves and the cholinergic nerves.

And the nerves coming in actually have a big effect on secretion and on absorption?

Yes, and on motility. The enteric nervous system itself does very complicated things without being connected to the central nervous system at all, like that peristaltic reflex that you mentioned, and coordinates motility with secretion and absorption.

Did you find more than dual transmission situations in that work?

First of all, the enteric neurones have to be sensory neurones, otherwise you couldn't have a nervously regulated motility or secretion. So there are classes of sensory neurones, there are classes of what we call inter-neurones, that connect the sensory neurones to other neurones, and then there are excitatory nerves and inhibitory nerves. And they're polarised: some go up, some go down, some go round. It looks as though every different class of those nerves has its own special chemistry or neurochemistry, a different cocktail of neuropeptides and more classical transmitters, and they do seem to be chemically coded. If you see one that you've made visible using histo-fluorescence – fluorescent histochemistry – you can pretty much predict what that neurone might be going to do. A lot of work in this area is still going on in Australia.

And you got into looking at this incredible array of transmitter opportunities, with all kinds of subtle divisions and outcrops.

It's still a very exciting field – and it's a very nice model of the neural network, so people who work on neural network theory are also very interested in the gut plexuses.

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Links and inspiration

Your work has covered so much: in our talk we've only just reached the 1970s. The excitement with this intestinal network system went through the '80s and I believe you're still involved in it.

Yes, I am. We're still going strong. A student who worked with one of my colleagues, Bob Bywater, has just done a lovely PhD on some of the complexities of the patterns of activity in segments of mouse large bowel. We've still got an awful lot to learn.

From 1970, when you got the chair, all through the '70s and '80s, you had many PhD students joining you in that field.

Yes, but not an enormous number. I've always worked with a small group. I've never really enjoyed working with a large group, just one or two colleagues.

You became the hub of quite an interest in Australia. You'd started off almost as an individual, in virtually a new field, and suddenly, by the '80s, Australia had become a central region for autonomic nervous system, smooth muscle research.

Yes. We had the first meeting of the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience in Cairns, Queensland in late 1997. It was great fun.

In 1970, also, you became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. And you became a member of the Biological Sciences Panel.

Yes. I was on Council for a while. I've been a pretty regular attendant at Academy functions.

And became the Vice-President. You also developed a lot of international collaboration, partly through Geoff going back to the UK but also because in the 1970s you went to London and worked with Bernard Katz – with whom you might have worked a good deal earlier, but for Jack Eccles.

Yes. But one of the really nice things about science, as I'm sure you will have heard often, is that you make lots of friends right round the world. On average, since I came back to Australia, probably more than once every two years I've been able to attend some kind of a conference somewhere in Europe or North America.

Perhaps we could take in 1971–72 in London with Katz, at University College.

It was just a few months, actually, over the summer. It was a very exciting time. He had some wonderful people working in his lab then. Ricardo Miledi was still there, Bert Sakmann was there, and a number of people who've made a big difference to neurosciences – a really inspiring lot. It was wonderful meeting these people.

Swapping ideas and being able to move ahead technologically?

Yes, although from my point of view of science, it wasn't much good. Katz's people wanted to make records with a very low noise level, so all their work required the use of electrodes that had a very low resistance, whereas I wanted high resistance electrodes. It was a bit frustrating, in that I had to wander all over University College trying to find a puller that would make a high resistance microelectrode.

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Tidying up loose ends

Just to return to the years at Monash and your work on intestinal plexuses: you had a chance early on to start teaching medical students. That played a big part, and you did some work then on blood vessels. I think you looked at the portal vessel.

Yes. The transmission situation in the portal vein is very different from the one I talked about in the vas deferens.

Every new territory has its new subtleties. It's an enormous excitement, isn't it? It's like finding new constellations of transmission, just astronomical.

Yes, yes, especially when you get to the enteric nervous system.

You can't let your mind come away from it – it's still so full of questions. But in the early '90s you did let your mind wander to the adrenal gland. That's a big trip.

Oh yes. When I think about what I've done, I like to think I've tried quite a lot to tidy up loose ends, to solve problems that were sitting there waiting to be looked at. The medulla, the central part of the adrenal gland, is made up of cells which are rather similar in their development to ganglion cells. But nobody had ever made very satisfactory records from neurotransmission to these chromatin cells or knew much at all about the way they functioned. In the last few years I've had quite a bit to do with looking at neurotransmission and some of the other cellular mechanisms important for the release of noradrenalin and adrenalin from these cells into the blood stream.

So the adrenal medulla is still a focus of great interest to you. You have written of the cells being in rather elegant clusters anatomically, histologically, and numbers of nerve roots coming into clusters. Is there a whole range, then, of subtle possibilities for transmission?

Well, probably not a great deal, because most of the cells that we've looked at so far in rats and in guinea pigs have at least one synaptic input coming onto them, which releases wads and wads of acetylcholine. So if you stimulate that nerve you can be sure that you're going to get that chromatin cell to undergo an action potential and release a packet or several packets of catecholamine. There is probably not very much by way of subtle modifications of transmitter release in the adrenal chromatin cells.

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Into retirement a bit

You're supposed to be into retirement a bit now, Mollie, since the end of 1995, yet you're still deeply involved. But you can enjoy the luxury of networking worldwide with the many people you've formed close associations with, and travel a bit. What other excitements do you have planned?

I do enjoy travelling. Also, I'm having great fun at the moment: I've been lucky enough throughout my life to have had a secretary, so I've never actually had to learn to type. I decided that I really would have to find out something about computers, so I've just completed a very elementary computer course, with word processing – except my typing's appalling. I'm just at the point now of going out and spending a large amount of money setting myself up with a personal computer. Perhaps it will make me a better correspondent!

Mollie, for sharing so much of your career with me and giving me so much detail, my immense gratitude.

Thank you. I've very much enjoyed it, in fact.

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Peter Rathjen studied as an undergraduate in the Department of Biochemistry at Adelaide University, working in part as a member of the team that discovered RNA self-processing in viroids. As a 1985 Rhodes Scholar he undertook a DPhil at Oxford University, studying mobile genetic elements in yeast and mammals. He began investigating the molecular regulation of embryonic stem (ES) cell differentiation during a two-year postdoctoral position at Oxford.

He returned to the Department of Biochemistry at Adelaide University in 1990 as a lecturer. In 1995 he was promoted to the chair of this department and in 2000 he became head of the new Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University. His research interests include the molecular basis of mammalian development, the differentiation of ES cells, and the use of genetic and ES cell technologies for human therapy. His work has proven to be commercially valuable and forms a basis for the cell reprogramming division of BresaGen Ltd, an Adelaide-based biotechnology company.

Interviewed by Ms Marian Heard in 2001.

Contents

• Gaining a broad interest base
• The genes that make up the organism: a moment of revelation
• A significant Honours project in viroid replication
• Investigating jumping genes for a rewarding Oxford PhD
• Oxford transitions: marriage and an enduring new field of research
• The beauty of embryonic stem cells
• Returning to do something in Australia for Australia
• Understanding embryonic stem cells
• An interesting game: international competition in biochemistry
• Juggling multiple roles while maximising teamwork
• Wanted: excited, hard-working, analytical, creative scientists
• Stimulation and satisfactions in a science career
• Keeping things in perspective: an ongoing range of interests
• The really exciting days of biochemistry continue to dawn
• Taking the future as it comes

Gaining a broad interest base

Peter, where and when were you born?

I was born in the UK. My family had taken part in the Lutheran migration from Germany to Australia in the early 19th century. Afterwards, my father was the first to leave the family farm, getting a PhD scholarship to Cambridge. His stipend there was marginally less than his yearly living expenses and so I suspect the last thing my parents wanted was a child, but I was born in the very cold winter of 1964. We stayed in Cambridge for a year before returning to Australia for my father to take up a position at Adelaide University.

My early childhood memories are of a fairly suburban kind of a childhood, a lot of time fighting with the girl next door, and time spent (with my four brothers and sisters) on that family farm during most of our vacations and weekends.

You were good at most subjects in primary and secondary school?

That's correct. I had a very broad spectrum of interests and I don't recall any preference for science in the early years. I was not at all like some of the young people I now teach, who are set from an early age on wanting to be scientific, and who even at school may be undertaking quite sophisticated experiments. As late as matriculation I was still at least as interested in English as I was in maths or science. But I was particularly bad at art.

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The genes that make up the organism: a moment of revelation

You met a defining moment in your first year of science at the University of Adelaide. Tell us about it.

I had not really planned to enrol in science. That was almost a spontaneous decision because I was a bit young to settle into university and I thought a year of science would give me some value and I could then move on to something else if I wanted to. I selected maths and chemistry because I had done them at school and had enjoyed them, and then biology and geology because I had never studied them before and wondered whether they might be interesting.

A relatively short time into the year, however, Professor Elliott taught us about the early days of molecular biology. That was an epiphany for me, and set up what I would do for the rest of my life, because as of that single lecture – specifically, as of one single slide that was shown – I knew this was what I wanted to explore.

I was utterly fascinated that you could explain the properties of an organism in terms of the genes that made up the organism. The slide itself was very simple: a virus that infects bacteria had been damaged so that the DNA had come out, and you could just see this long strand of DNA floating around. Professor Elliott then showed the sequence of that DNA and said, 'That's all there is to it. That's what makes that organism.' I'm very proud that when he retired I got that slide from him – it's a very archaic, metal slide which weighs a ton – and was able to show it last year in a talk of my own at the Shine Dome, making the point that this was what had got me so interested in the area.

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A significant Honours project in viroid replication

You majored in biochemistry and genetics, and went on to do your Honours. What work did you do for that?

I was working with Professor Bob Symons, a member of this Academy, on a group of quite fascinating plant pathogens called viroids. They were not much understood at the time, and probably still aren't. They are tiny, they are made of RNA and they do not, as far as we can tell, encode any proteins. So it wasn't clear how these small infectious parasites could cause disease in plants, which they do, or even how they managed to replicate themselves when they infected plants. We were trying to determine how that replication takes place.

I was very fortunate, because after my Honours year I spent another year in Bob's lab before going overseas to do a PhD. In that time the work had moved on, and we fell over something which turned out to be very exciting: one of the reasons these pathogens don't need proteins is that the RNA itself can act as an enzyme and help to replicate the viroid. In those days that was, to some extent, still heretical. In fact, when we submitted a paper to Nature we got a caustic set of comments from one of the referees who did not really believe what we thought was going on.

It turned out to be very important, providing the intellectual underpinning of what later became the gene shears technology. And in a nice historical accident, the intellectual leap from our basic research to the gene shears that CSIRO eventually commercialised was made by Jim Haseloff, an ex-student of Bob Symons who had kept working in the same area.

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Investigating jumping genes for a rewarding Oxford PhD

After your Honours you went to Oxford?

Yes. During my Honours year I applied for overseas scholarships, and I was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship. There is a bit of a story to that. I had to go to Government House to hear which of the eight finalists had won the Scholarship in South Australia. But that was the day of a very exciting test match. So there I was in Hindley Street, standing by a shop window where the match was being shown on television, when suddenly I realised that I was about 10 minutes late for the announcement. I went tearing through the gates of Government House – luckily, the policeman on the gates was an old school friend who recognised me and let me in – only to find I wasn't too late after all, because they'd had trouble reaching a decision. And straight after the announcement I was back in the department producing the photographs for my Honours thesis.

What work did you do in Oxford for your PhD?

I changed tack completely, away from working on plants to combining what I had always thought of as my two great loves – genetics and biochemistry, which I didn't think were very easy to combine in Adelaide at the time. I was particularly attracted to yeast, the organism on which you could best do biochemistry and genetics. Luckily, a lab in Oxford was working on the molecular genetics of yeast, and so I joined that.

The lab was working on a question which had sparked my curiosity as an undergraduate. We had known for some time that in the DNA of an organism there were 'jumping genes', small bits of DNA which could actually jump out of the chromosome and reinsert themselves at another place in it. They had been described genetically, and by the mid-1980s people were really starting to work out what they looked like – their DNA sequence – and how it was that they jumped out and what they did when they jumped out, what damage they caused to the organism.

We worked on these jumping genes in yeast, and in particular I worked on how they turn on genes when they jump next to them, which turns out to be very important as a mechanism which can cause cancer in cells. Then, in the last year of my PhD, we turned from yeast work to the first reported mammalian jumping genes (retro-transposons was the class I was working in) and characterised and sequenced some of them, showing that in fact they had very similar properties. It was quite rewarding.

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Oxford transitions: marriage and an enduring new field of research

While at Oxford you got married. Did this influence what you would do when you finished your PhD?

I think marriage always influences what a scientist is going to do! In those days, as a Rhodes Scholar you were not allowed to be married, but you were allowed to at least propose at the end of your first year's tenure. In fact, when I proposed to my wife, Joy, I didn't have to ask my parents or hers for permission to marry her (I did ask hers, though) but I had to ask official permission from the Warden of Rhodes House to get married. My wife was a year behind me, and had studied with me as an undergraduate and then as an Honours student in the Department of Biochemistry in Adelaide. She started a PhD one year behind me, working for a different supervisor but in the same laboratory, so when I finished my PhD – and in Oxford they are very rigorous about kicking you out after 3 years – I had a year to kill.

I had little idea of what I wanted to do with that year. I had found the PhD tough and wasn't even certain that I wanted to continue with science, and when John Heath, in the Department of Zoology, heard that I needed a position for a year and asked me to join his lab, I agreed without really understanding what he worked on. Within two or three months I decided that in fact I did not want to do the project he wanted to run. The work on embryonic stem cells that the guy on the next bench was doing, however, was quite fascinating. So I became personally friendly with that guy, Austin Smith, who is now a Professor in Edinburgh. We worked very closely together for the year, the work went exceptionally well so I stayed for a further year, and I have worked in that field ever since.

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The beauty of embryonic stem cells

Tell us about that postdoctoral work.

Embryonic stem cells are really quite fascinating. Perhaps the best way to describe them is to put them in their true biological context.

We start life as a single cell, a fertilised egg. And nothing much happens for a little while. Yet our bodies consist of several trillion cells, of several hundred different kinds, and all of those cells are organised into a structure that looks human. Where they came from in the first place is a very small group of about 10 to 20 cells called embryonic stem cells, which existed in the embryo at about the time it implanted into the mother's uterus. The whole story of embryogenesis is of how those 10 cells turned into trillions of cells, how that one kind of cell turned into several hundred kinds of cells. The beauty of embryonic stem cells is that they are the true founder cells of the entire mammal. Those cells can turn into any other kind of cell.

When I was in Oxford we were working on how we might stop that, how we might keep them as embryonic stem cells and stop them from differentiating, from turning into any other kind of cell.

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Returning to do something in Australia for Australia

After those postdoc years in Oxford, you had a number of options. What made you choose to return and take up a lectureship at the University of Adelaide?

The reasons were entirely personal. My family was in Adelaide but I had never ever expected to be able to return there. I have always had a very deep sense of being an Australian, though, and never intended at all to stay overseas for any protracted period. Returning to try and do something of importance in Australia for Australia has always been a deep philosophy of mine. Probably, I spent about 2 years longer in Oxford than I would have by choice; by 3 years I had had about enough and could have gone somewhere else with profit.

Actually, careerwise I doubt that it was the right thing to return at that stage. I would have been better off staying overseas and working as a postdoc for another 2 to 3 years, building scientific networks and building a track record before I undertook the very pressurised job of starting off as a young lecturer. But the opportunity to work in a university, which had always attracted me, and to come back to Australia – in particular, to come back to a really strong department – was just overwhelmingly attractive to me.

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Understanding embryonic stem cells

You mentioned that since Oxford you have continued with embryonic stem cells. What specifically are you working on now?

When we came back here I decided to start working on how to control the differentiation of those cells. What signals – and they are usually protein signals – do you have to give to the cells to instruct them to become a new kind of cell? How do you tell them to become blood, or skin, or bone?

We undertook that work for the specific reason that no-one knows just how the embryo itself does that. We know that this one kind of cell turns into several hundred kinds of cells, but not really why or how it does so, or even why, for example, the cells in one part of your body become brain cells and the cells elsewhere in your body don't. What controls it all? We wanted to understand that basic science.

We reasoned that if we could take our embryonic stem cells and tell them to become newer cells, we would probably be copying what goes on in the embryo. And our first 10 years' work suggests that that is the case. We are starting to learn very valuable things about how the embryo itself came into being.

Secondly, we recognised very early on that if we could learn to produce particular kinds of cells there might be commercial opportunities – and more importantly, I suspect, therapeutic opportunities. If you can make cells, you can transplant them into people who need them for some reason. For example, a stroke results in death of neural cells, and there is already evidence to suggest that if you could transplant replacement neural cells, you could alleviate stroke. Again, many diseases result in damage of bone marrow. If you could learn how to produce bone marrow in the laboratory by differentiating these stem cells, perhaps that could give you a therapeutic intervention for treatment of bone marrow disease.

The particular advantage of using these stem cells is that they are immortal. You can quite easily grow as many of them as you like, and you can also differentiate them into as many cells as you like, producing an unlimited number of any kind of cell to transplant. In addition, it turns out to be possible to modify the genes in embryonic stem cells better than in just about any other kind of cell we know. So you can start with an embryonic stem cell population and, through knowing what you are doing, turn it into any kind of cell, in any kind of number, with any kind of gene in it. What a formidable opportunity to then start trying to correct disease!

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An interesting game: international competition in biochemistry

Where does your group stand internationally in this research?

I think we are up with the game. It has been an interesting time for us, because for the first 6 or 7 years we were almost the only group thinking along these lines. Our world changed almost overnight when America reported the isolation of human embryonic stem cells, which suddenly made people aware that experiments in the mouse might be transferable to the human. That prompted enormous worldwide interest: what are these cells, how do you grow them, how do you control their differentiation? I would say that intellectually we had got a long way ahead of the rest of the world during those years when other people weren't thinking much about these things, but in the last few years the rest of the world has substantially caught up.

And that of course is the problem we always deal with in Australia. We are quite good at taking the early steps in research, but when the Americans and the Europeans really start to build the huge teams and move fast, when they throw in the big funding schemes, we struggle to compete.

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Juggling multiple roles while maximising teamwork

You were appointed to the Chair of Biochemistry at Adelaide University in 1995, and as head of the newly merged Department of Molecular Biosciences in 2000. Are there challenges in juggling your research, teaching and administrative roles?

It is an extremely difficult job, the only job I know where you are expected to perform with excellence at so many levels. As a head of department you are like a CEO: you must have a strategic vision for where your discipline is going and you must be able to manage people. Our budget is probably about $15 million a year and we have about 270 people in the building.

At the same time, you must deliver excellent quality courses to your undergraduate students and you must be able to talk to your postgraduates with conviction – they need to respect you, which means you need to be close enough to the research that you can talk to them day to day about the experiments that they're doing. And you are going to be judged in international terms on your research output, so you must perform at an internationally excellent level in research.

So in a single job you are moving from the big-picture stuff right through to the highly scrutinised detail. It's very difficult to do that, and in my case I am quite sure it would not have been possible except that the senior postdoc within my group has been my wife. Because we have managed to some extent to live the science and live the job together, she has been able to take a lot of the load, particularly on the purely scientific side, from me.

Is science no longer an individual pursuit, but one that requires a group, a team?

My team is essential; it is critically important to acknowledge that. We tend to see scientists as individuals who make discoveries that are personal in some way. Even if that was true 50 or 100 years ago, science now is done by often quite large teams of very dedicated people. In South Australia I have been extraordinarily fortunate with, particularly, the group of PhD students I have managed to work with. Starting at probably five or six people, at different times over the past 10 years or so the group has been as large as 35. My role in that is very much to set broad direction. I am utterly dependent on their ability to work hard, to assimilate scientific information I can't necessarily provide them with, and to produce scientific information as well as people do anywhere else in the world.

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Wanted: excited, hard-working, analytical, creative scientists

Besides the ability to work as a team, what skills are needed in science today?

It is vital to have curiosity, together with a genuine excitement when you see the result. I can tell usually within about three months of someone commencing Honours whether they are going to be a scientist, because that is when they get their first result. Normally that result is not very spectacular and doesn't matter much, but if they have a sense of excitement when they see it, they will succeed. If you have that sense of excitement, you almost can't help yourself from doing the rest of it right. You're going to get stimulated; you're going to think about it; you're going to work hard.

Indeed, you must have a capacity for very hard work. This is an international game. You are competing with the best people in the world, who all work very hard, and you've got to be prepared to do that as well.

Most of all, you need the ability to analyse data crisply, accurately and with rigour – for which a scientific degree prepares people extremely well – and you also need something which is much rarer in good scientists, I think: a genuine creative flair. That is not just doing what other people have done and tweaking it slightly, but having the insight and the courage to try something new, to see if you can't create something that is really a bit different.

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Stimulation and satisfactions in a science career

What are the most rewarding or exciting aspects of a career in science?

For me it is the sheer excitement of seeing new information, seeing the result of an experiment that tells you either that you are right about something and your predictions are borne out, or, just as often, that you are wrong about what you were thinking and there is a new model to explain what you are trying to investigate. There is almost a moment of epiphany when you hold in your hand a piece of information that no-one has seen before, when you have thoughts that other people haven't thought before. Intellectually, I find it enormously stimulating.

Last night I needed to get a paper draft from some PhD students who were working late in the lab, and when the email came through – at about 11 o'clock – I saw that it had a quick note appended, 'By the way, we got an exciting result tonight.' So there was a great sense of satisfaction: 'In this case, we're right. What we thought was going on, is going on.'

It's even better than that, because the experiment which showed that we're right – and which for 2 years we've had trouble doing – turns out to have been very clever, and it was done by a new PhD student who had the strength of her convictions to go about doing it in a different way. It has taken her probably a year to show that her way is better than the way I suggested or the way we tried to do it before. For me it was doubly rewarding. Firstly, I had the excitement of knowing the result was there, and secondly, I could see that a young student who was prepared to take a scientific risk was validated in her approach.

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Keeping things in perspective: an ongoing range of interests

Peter, what have been your main interests besides science?

Sport has always been a dominant theme in my life. At university I was an orienteer, competing at national and international level for a long time. I backed out of it a little bit, though, when I got to the truly elite competition. To perform at elite level in orienteering, as with anything else, you need to be more or less full-time, and that is not consistent with being a very serious scientist. But I spent a lot of time in the Australian bush producing maps, and racing.

I also played a lot of soccer, and captained the university soccer team for a while. That I found extremely rewarding. I have continued in soccer, but the lesson I learnt this year is that I am just about becoming too old to play serious soccer. I am still playing in the 1st Division amateur competition in South Australia, though.

In summer I used to play tennis, but although I had always thought I was all right at tennis I gave it up when I went to Oxford. I happened to attend a very small university college where the tennis team contained six men of whom two had played at international standard (in fact, one of them supported himself through university by competing in tournaments) and another had been selected as the only junior from America for an exhibition match against Björn Borg. So I went out and played against the sixth best man, who I assumed would be about my standard. It turned out that he played No. 1 for his county, and he beat me 6-0. That was the last serious tennis I ever played. I converted to cricket at that stage.

I have a great love of classical music, and when I was younger I was fortunate enough to learn piano from the Conservatorium at Adelaide University. That has stayed with me; although I had 5 years off when we were in England and couldn't afford a piano, I got back to it when we came back here and still play a great deal.

And the interests at the top of my list are my family and my love for Australia. I have recently taken up bushwalking as something I can share with the family and the children, and we walk quite a lot. In Adelaide we are very lucky in having the Flinders Ranges so close. They are stupendously beautiful. They are also, in some ways, like science. Just as you feel humble when you see great experimental results and read about great scientists, when you're up in that timeless, ancient landscape you realise how small is your own place in the grand scheme of things.

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The really exciting days of biochemistry continue to dawn

I believe that at one stage you were advised not to pursue biochemistry, as it had 'had its day'. You appear to have proved that advice wrong.

It is a matter of personal perception. When I was tossing up between chemical engineering and biology at university, one of South Australia's most prominent biochemists advised me that while this might be a good career for a young man to pursue, I needed to understand that the really exciting days of biochemistry were over. He was referring to the discovery of DNA, of genes and working out how proteins are made, when it must have been an extraordinarily exhilarating time to be a biochemist.

To my mind, though, it can't have been more fascinating than my 20 years of research, and I can't believe that the future could look any more exciting. To me personally, the relatively chemical side of working out that DNA was the important molecule has been less interesting than working out how human biology works at a molecular level. In my lifetime already we have gone a long way towards understanding why cells become cancerous, and in clinical trials we are seeing the first generations of drugs that ought to be able to tackle the defects that we have identified. We are starting to understand how you bolt an organism together, starting with one cell and finishing up with enormous numbers of cells and complex kinds of structures. In the future we are probably going to understand things like the biochemistry of memory – and even get at the biochemistry of imagination. To understand that would be extraordinary indeed.

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Taking the future as it comes

Where, then, do you see yourself in 10 years' time?

Actually, I don't. I have never had a life plan or a career plan, and I've very rarely applied for jobs. I've normally been offered positions and then had a look and taken them if they looked exciting or challenging at the time.

Within the next 5 years I really want to get to grips with the research and see if the things we've been doing in the past 10 years are as important as we expect. I want to see whether we can turn these basic ideas about science into things that matter for human medical outcomes. That would be immensely exciting to me. Within 5 years it should be apparent either that we're right or that we have done something which is valuable but not as important as it might be in those contexts. But 5 years beyond that – I have absolutely no idea.

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