Professor John Sprent (1915-2010), parasitologist
Professor John Sprent was born in 1915, in Mill Hill, England. He received an MRCVS diploma from the Royal Veterinary College in London in 1939. In 1942 he was awarded a BSc in zoology with first class honours from the University of London. After receiving his degree, Sprent went to work at the Vom Veterinary Station in Nigeria. His work there, on Bunostomum phlebotomum (hookworms) in cattle, resulted in a PhD (1945) from the University of London, where he also received a DSc in 1953. In 1946 he went to the University of Chicago researching the parasitic nematode Ascaris suum. His studies of Ascaridoidea (nematode worms) continued while he was a senior research fellow at the Ontario Research Foundation in Toronto, Canada, where he worked from 1948 to 1952. Professor Sprent moved to the University of Queensland in 1952 as a lecturer in veterinary parasitology. He remained at the university for the rest of his career. In 1954 he became research professor of parasitology in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and Parasitology and was professor of parasitology from 1956 to 1983. In 1961 a separate Department of Parasitology was established at the university.
Interviewed by Julie Campbell in 2008.
Contents
- Family and early life
- Opportunities: university and a future wife
- A single failure opens up a great future
- The place of worms in the life pyramid
- The move to Australia
- Broadening the parasitology scope
- Valued help in a great scientific achievement
- Personal achievements
- The next generation
Family and early life
John, firstly can you tell us where you were born, and a little of your family and your early life?
I was born in Mill Hill, which was then a small village north of London but is now, of course, an extension of London itself. And, well, my boyhood was just a normal sort of boyhood. We used to collect tadpoles and watch them change into frogs, and we used to sometimes go off to the seaside, where I liked to go to the fish shop and get a fish head – free – and attach it to a piece of string. You would then go out to one of the breakwaters and drop the fish head into the water, and when you pulled it up you had the most beautiful crabs attached to it. I think that, biologically speaking, those were my first experiences of animals.
My father was a keeper of ancient maps at the British Museum, in London. He died at a rather early age in 1931, when I was about 16, so I don't really remember terribly much about him. My mother and father were separated: he lived in London and my mother lived down in Sussex, which was the earliest home that I can remember.
I had a brother and a sister. My dear sister is still alive, the only member of my family that is left, because my brother died about five years ago and my mother died about 10 years ago at the ripe old age of 101. She was a remarkable woman.
At school, were you a good student?
Well, the answer to that question is no. I think I was a great disappointment to my father. Although he sacrificed quite a lot to send me to Shrewsbury, I didn't perform well at all. In fact, I remember that there were always three people at the bottom of the class when the marks were read out, and I was always two from the bottom, one from the bottom, or the bottom. But I enjoyed being at school, because I was keen on sport and I made a lot of friends.
And there were some famous people that went to the school.
[laugh] Yes. Charles Darwin was one, but too long before me. I wouldn't have appreciated him, I'm afraid. Another one that you might know about is Michael Palin, who was there a bit after I was. But I enjoyed school, again, for the friends I made.
Opportunities: university and a future wife
After school, what was your first job, and were you good at it?
I'm terribly sorry to say this, but I wasn't good there either. My father died in the time of the Great Depression and I had to find a job. I became an office-boy with WD & HO Wills, the cigarette people, and my job was to put invoices into envelopes so the address appeared in the right place. And even that I didn't seem to do terribly well, because I'd get letters sent back where it was all illegible. But again I made some very good friends. In particular I made one special friend who made a lot of difference to me.
He changed your life, didn't he? Just what happened?
I was feeling that I really didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't have any motivation at all. Then one day we were walking across the Thames, across Hungerford Bridge, which is by Westminster Bridge, and as we leant over the parapet he said that he wished he could have gone to university but he wasn't in the right class. (There was a lot of class distinction in England in those days.) He said, 'I'm just not in the right class. I haven't got the right background to do this. But I think you could do it.' And he made a proposal to me: 'If I paid for you to go to university for your first year, would you accept that?' I was quite overwhelmed that anybody could think that I was able to do it, because I didn't have very much in the way of good credentials.
I told my family about this. My mother was particularly keen on dogs and cats and animals of all kinds – guinea pigs, goodness knows what, you name it, she had 'em – and during the Depression she used to have boarding kennels. And she said, 'Why don't you become a vet?' I thought about that, and I thought, 'Why not?' So I left my job and went to Liverpool as an undergraduate veterinary student at the University of Liverpool. It was my mother who really had made that decision for me.
Then the whole tide seemed to change, because I had the motivation. As soon as I started the subjects in the first-year course, I was very keen on the course and study, and so I progressed well.
Another person who had a great influence on your life was your first wife, Muriel, to whom I believe you were married for 61 years, until her death. Can you tell us a little bit about Muriel?
Muriel I met when I was an office-boy and she was a telephone operator. We got together and we seemed to be 'an item', as they say these days. When I went off to Liverpool she stayed in London, but she was always very enthusiastic and immensely loyal, and wanted to participate in anything that I did. She had a great influence on me, because she spurred me on.
I only had to be in Liverpool for one year, and then I was able to transfer to London and it wasn't very long before we got married. That was in 1937.
A single failure opens up a great future
What job did you get after gaining your veterinary degree from the University of London, and where did it take you?
Well, I have to explain that around 1938, before the war, I was awarded a Colonial Service veterinary scholarship. I hadn't actually finished my veterinary course at that point, but I received my diploma (as it was in those days) in 1939.
Although I did pretty well in the course, there was one subject in which I failed. That was practical animal husbandry, a subject I didn't know anything about, I had to admit. But it did have a tremendous effect on my life, because I had to do that subject again. In other words, it was July when I took the final degree and it was December when I was supposed to take that extra subject.
Because it was wartime I had to do what I was told, and I was scheduled to go to Kenya to work on cattle ticks there. But a month after the end of my course, the war started. It was now impossible to go to Kenya, and I was told that when I'd finished my degree in zoology I must go to Nigeria. So I went to Nigeria because I'd failed in that one subject. And if I'd gone to Kenya, I would have been working on an entirely different subject from that which I pursued in Nigeria.
While you were not very academic during your childhood, in 1942 you were indeed awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology with first class honours from the University of London. Also you were awarded the Coleman Silver Medal in Veterinary Medicine and a Gold Medal in Pathology. So your academic expertise obviously picked up quite a lot once you went to university.
Oh, absolutely, yes. Then, just after I received my degree, I went to Nigeria.
The place of worms in the life pyramid
Your work in Nigeria led you to write a PhD. What was it about?
I became interested in anaemia in cattle. And the anaemia that I was investigating was caused by hookworms, which gradually increased in numbers in the small intestine of the cattle. I did quite a bit of research on the blood picture, and the other aspect was: how did they get the worms? The worms landed up in the intestine and sucked blood and caused anaemia, but how did they get there?
Well, I showed that actually the eggs pass out in the droppings, the eggs hatch into little tiny larvae, and the larvae climb up the grass blades and penetrate through the skin of the cattle. When they have got through the skin they pass to the lungs and then they're coughed up and swallowed, and that's where they reach their final destination.
So that's really what I was doing in Nigeria. And when I had finished my tour, while the war was still on, I came back home to England and submitted my work for my PhD at the University of London.
Where did you go next, and why?
When I was in Nigeria I was very much impressed with the work of Dr WH Taliaferro [pronounced Tolliver]. Actually, he spelt his name T-a-l-i-a-f-e-r-r-o, but for some reason he called himself Tolliver, and everybody else called him Dr Tolliver. He was a great figure in the subject of immunity in parasitic infections, and he wrote an important book on the subject. I had seen that in Nigeria, and I had decided I wanted to go and work with him. So that's where I went next, to the University of Chicago. I was there for two years.
And after that?
After that, actually, I was offered a professorship in the University of Chicago. In order to accept it, however, I had to renounce my British subject status, and I didn't really want to do that. But, at a meeting, I had met somebody from the University of Toronto, and I became interested in the animals of the north, of the Arctic. This was because the particular group of worms that I was interested in by this time have an interesting life history: they start off at the bottom of what I call a life pyramid, where there are a lot of lowly animals such as earthworms, wood lice and various things like that, which take up the eggs of the worm. Those animals then get eaten by rats, mice and so on, which form the centre part of the pyramid. And then, finally, at the top there are the dominant carnivores – in this particular case, the polar bears, the lynxes, the bobcats, the wolves. I thought I'd like to go and work with them.
So I did, and I worked at several places up on Hudsons Bay. Actually, as my particular job at that time, I was assigned to investigate why the beaver had been dying. I had to go and collect their frozen carcasses. We used to go in a plane with skis, and then we would meet an Indian who would tell us where he had put the various beaver carcasses – which he'd been told to keep because we had this investigation going. But what we had to do was to go on snowshoes and find these carcasses. This was very interesting, and I stayed there for four years.
At the end of that time, in about 1950, although I had amassed quite a deal of information about the worms in that life pyramid I thought I'd like to get back to straight veterinary work. And I happened to see a job advertised for a lecturer in veterinary parasitology in the University of Queensland. It then took about two years to organise transport and everything.
The move to Australia
You came to Australia in 1952. What did you do once you were here?
Well, I didn't yet have a department, of course – I was just a lecturer in the Veterinary School. But in Canada I had been corresponding for quite a long time with the dean, Professor TK Ewer, over this job and he was immensely encouraging. I had all sorts of problems that I wanted to solve, because I didn't want to just teach veterinary parasitology; I wanted to teach all the branches of parasitology. He was very helpful in this, but of course it was a long struggle. In the early days, you see, the vet school wanted to spend all the money that came to it on veterinary science, whereas I wanted to branch out into other things like marine parasitology and medical parasitology.
But at the same time I was doing some research, as an extension of the work I was doing in Canada. Two of the worms which I had been studying in Canada also occurred in Brisbane, in dogs. And I had found that when I gave mice the eggs from worms in dogs, these eggs would hatch and then migrate around the tissues of the mouse, and some of them would end up in the eye and the brain.
The interesting thing was that, in New Orleans, Dr Paul Beaver had been working on somewhat similar lines and he had discovered the occurrence of one of these larvae in the eye of a patient. I did more work on this and published several papers about it. Apparently a blood vessel associated with the retinal artery turns a fairly sharp corner somewhere in the eye, and when the larvae that are circulating around in the blood come to this sharp corner, they penetrate through and produce a granuloma in the back of the eye which is sometimes confused with a retinoblastoma. And so I was working with some of the eye specialists – particularly Dr Greer, down in Melbourne – on the occurrence of this granuloma of the eye. That took up quite a bit of time of, say, the first two or three years while I was at the vet school.
Broadening the parasitology scope
In 1956 you became professor of parasitology in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and Parasitology at the University of Queensland. And then you were appointed professor of parasitology, with a grant from the Reserve Bank. Can you tell us about those years in the late '50s and the early '60s, and how you came to establish a separate Department of Parasitology at the university?
This was all part of my original plan to produce teaching, and research, in parasitology in medicine and in marine and veterinary science. What I really wanted was to separate off my work from the veterinary science proper, so that I could find an individual, separate source of funds. On the invitation of the vice-chancellor I put up a scheme to the Reserve Bank for the endowment of a chair in parasitology, and I outlined what I wanted to do. Dr Nugget Coombs was the governor of the Reserve Bank then, and he was very supportive. He gave a grant to the university to endow the chair, a chair was formed and I was appointed to it.
That was the prelude. Whereas in the first place I was in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and Parasitology, I was able to change that round to Department of Parasitology and Anatomy, and finally I shed the anatomy part and it was just parasitology. As soon as a Department of Parasitology was formed, in about 1962, I started off in the medical, marine and agricultural parasitology.
At that time your research interests related very much to immunology with respect to parasitism. You published some very important works at that time, and were influenced by some very well-known Australians. What can you tell us about that?
Well, I can tell you about the people I was influenced by. In particular, when I first came Dr Ian Mackerras was director of the Queensland Institute for Medical Research. He was a great influence on me. I admired him greatly. He was doing just the sort of things I would like to do. He was very encouraging, and it was through him that I became a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
The other person who was very influential – not so much in person but by his writing – was Sir Macfarlane Burnet. I set out to try to apply his speculations and his ideas on clonal selection et cetera to parasitology, and I produced a paper called 'Parasitism, immunity and evolution', which did evidently arouse some comment.
But it was all a long time ago, 40-odd years, and really I forget the niceties of the situation.
Valued help in a great scientific achievement
Among your many achievements in science, what do you think is the greatest?
I don't think I achieved any particular things. What I did do was to accumulate. And I did accumulate an enormous amount of information about a particular group of nematode parasitic worms known as the Ascaridoidea, of which the best known is the human Ascaris lumbricoides. There are an enormous number of species in this group, and they occur in different countries, different parts of the world. I wanted simply to accumulate a knowledge on that particular group of parasites – how they got into their hosts and what they did when they got there, their public health importance.
It was a gradual accumulation of knowledge about a particular group, and I think that is really what I would say was my greatest scientific achievement, because it took me to all sorts of countries. It took me to all the countries in South America, collecting specimens, and then to south east Asia and Africa. So I had an enormous collection, thousands of specimens, which I gave to the Queensland Museum.
You could not have done all your work without some help from other people. Can you tell us who they were, and how they helped?
I'm glad you asked me that question, because I do feel that in any scientific achievement one is dependent on technical assistance from people, and throughout my time in the University of Queensland I have received an enormous amount of help, of different kinds, from various people.
First of all there's my second wife, who was my assistant for about 40 years. She accumulated all the knowledge, all the reference work, all the reprints, all the literature necessary for me to study these things, and I simply couldn't have done it without her.
And then there was Ann McKeown. All the specimens that I collected, she collated them, labelled them and kept them, and these were the ones that were handed over to the Queensland Museum. Also John Mines gave a lot of time to sectioning specimens for me, and that kind of thing.
Personal achievements
Apart from your scientific achievements, you've had a number of personal achievements, haven't you?
Well, yes. My greatest personal achievement, I feel, was the building up of the Department of Parasitology in the University of Queensland. It was a great source of pride to me, and I have a photograph to show you that it is quite a sizeable department. We had students, and visitors, from all over the world. Although now, unfortunately, it doesn't exist any more, it is something that I feel proud of.
Also, going back a long way, when I was in Nigeria I had occasion not only to work with a number of African helpers but to be with quite a number of Africans. But there was a tendency in those days for whites and blacks to keep separate. The Europeans, as they were called, had a club where they all used to foregather, and I felt that it was important that the blacks had a club too. So I established the Vom African Club. I've got a letter which was written to me, dated 31st of August, 1945. Would it be appropriate for me to read something from that letter?
Certainly. Go ahead.
This is why I feel proud about it. The letter says: 'I was directed by the committee and the entire members of the club to express their deep appreciation and gratitude for your philanthropic spirit which has brought our club into existence. You are assured that as long as we remain to enjoy the fruits of universal brotherhood of man which you practically demonstrated in your activities among the African staff of this station, your memory as the founder of the Vom African Club will never be forgotten in the history of our progress.' I felt very pleased to get that letter.
John, I believe there are some other things that you are personally very proud of. What are they?
Firstly, I was for 20 years editor of the International Journal for Parasitology, and this was a source of pride to me – particularly to get the volume of the journal which I was presented with when I retired, when people said some nice things about the publication and so on.
The other thing that I feel proud about is the development of this property. When I first came in 1954, it was a dairy farm. I think I can say that the number of trees on this property you could count on your hand. It was just a mass of ring-barked gum trees, and I set about building a band of what they call dry rainforest, going across. That is still in existence, and next August there is going to be a special meeting here to mark the 10th anniversary of the launch of Land for Wildlife, of which this property 10 years ago was named number one.
There are also slightly less than a thousand hoop pines in a fairly advanced state of maturity, and I feel proud when I walk around amongst all those things. I feel pleased.
You have here 60 acres in Moggill, an outer suburb of Brisbane. Suburbia is at your doorstep now, but this is an oasis.
Yes, that's quite true.
The next generation
Finally, would you tell us about your children, and what they do for a living and how they've impacted on your life?
I have had three children. Unfortunately, my dear daughter – who had a property up in the Atherton Tableland – died about 10 years ago. But I have also two boys. (Well, I call them boys, but they're both over 65 now, I believe.)
The eldest, Jonathan, has done extremely well. He was a medical student in the University of Queensland, and then he went off to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, where he did his PhD. Next he went off to Basel, then to the University of London and after that the University of Pennsylvania, and then to the Scripps Clinic, in California. Now he's just come back to Australia as a holder of the Macfarlane Burnet Fellowship. I feel very proud of him. He is not only a fellow of the Australian Academy [of Science] but also a fellow of the Royal Society.
The other is Antony, who is remarkably energetic, innovative – quite brilliant, in many ways. He is at the University of Tasmania, where he is in surveying, which has been his work until he just recently retired. I feel very proud of both of them.
Thank you very much, Professor Sprent, for telling us about your interesting and very productive life.
It's a pleasure and a privilege.
Professor Charles Birch, ecologist
Professor Charles Birch
Louis Charles Birch was born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1918. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1939 with a BAgrSc. Birch then began his entomology research career at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, University of Adelaide. For his work on the spread of the Australian plague grasshopper, Birch was awarded a DSc (1948) from the University of Adelaide.
In 1948 Birch moved to the University of Sydney where he began as a senior lecturer (1948-53), then reader (1954-60), Professor of Zoology (1960-63) and finally Professor of Biology (1963-83). In 1983 Birch was made emeritus professor of the University of Sydney. Birch made major contributions to the understanding of the effect of weather disturbances on the population and distribution of animals. In addition he wrote widely on theological topics including the idea that all life has intrinsic value, for which he won the Templeton Prize for Religion (1990). Professor Birch passed away in December 2009.
Interviewed by Professor Rick Shine in 2008.
Charles, to begin at the beginning: where and when were you born?
I was born in Melbourne in 1918 and grew up there, going to Scotch College for most of my school career. I left Melbourne when I was about 21 and went to the Waite Institute, in Adelaide.
As a child, did you have an interest in nature?
I became interested in collecting beetles, probably because I had a schoolboy friend who collected beetles and I thought I ought to do the same. Then my mother became interested in what I was interested in and she bought me a book, The Insects of Australia and New Zealand, by R J Tillyard. I was now able to identify many insects, at least down to families if not further, and that got me intrigued by biology.
My interest in biology was further stimulated by the fact that I did biology at school, I suppose in the fifth and sixth years. We had a wonderful teacher named Mrs a'Beckett. She was very popular, partly because she was the mother of a top-flight Victorian cricketer at the time! She was an extremely good teacher and I thought, 'I just want to be like Mrs a'Beckett.'
Although I had become interested in science during my early years, however, instead of going on to a science degree I went into agriculture. I initially wanted to do medicine as a part of biology, and perhaps to do medical research, but my parents were pretty much against that. I then became interested in other alternatives and the one that appealed to me most was agriculture, partly because I had a friend who had done the degree in agriculture and had ended up in the Colonial Service in Trinidad. I thought, 'Life in the Colonial Service is what I want' – this is a long time ago – and so I did agriculture instead of science. I'm glad about that, because there were lots of subjects that I studied at that time, such as soil science and climatology, which I never would have studied in science but which gave me a pretty good background for an ultimate interest in ecology.
So your interest in ecology came through agriculture and not through conventional pure science?
I think so, yes, because agriculture covered such an enormous field. I thought, 'Oh, this is great; it's chemistry, physics, physiology, ecology – the whole lot.'
Where did you do your agriculture studies?
I did my course in agriculture in the University of Melbourne. When I graduated from there, I wanted very much to stay in biology. It was a problem in those Depression years that there were not too many jobs available. In fact, there was only one job available that I wanted – at the Waite Institute – and my friend from Melbourne who had collected beetles was also after it so we competed for it. I got the job, which meant that I went into entomology at the Waite Institute and he had to be happy with plant pathology in the Department of Agriculture of Victoria. So it was a bit of a chance business which led me into the area I wanted really to go into. From his point of view, it was a chance that was unfortunate for him!
What was the subject of your PhD studies?
Well, PhDs didn't exist in those days, at least in this part of the world, and so for six years I did full-time research in the entomology department at the Waite Institute, on the ecology of insects. Eventually that led to a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Adelaide, but that hadn't been my objective, which was to study the ecology of insects.
I was working with a colleague, H G Andrewartha, who was really my supervisor. He worked on a number of insects, including spending about 20 years on thrips, a tiny little insect which lives in roses, and I was put onto the job of trying to work out the spread of the Australian plague grasshopper. It had become very dominant in the wheat belt in South Australia, partly because there was plenty of food for it there. The problem was: how do you stop plagues of the Australian plague grasshopper? It was ruining the peripheral areas of the wheat belt.
The conclusion I eventually came to was that you needed to revert the whole thing to the original saltbush
country, which grasshoppers didn't eat. That, of course, was totally unacceptable to the farmers. [laugh] I find that many of the solutions that the scientist comes to aren't exactly approved by the farmers who have to put them into action! So that was never done. But I learned a lot about the ecology of the grasshopper in the six years I worked on it.
I worked on other things at the same time, because by then we were into the war years. One of the problems was how to save the annual wheat crops which normally would have been exported. Here we had these tonnes and tonnes of wheat which, in some way or another, had to be stored. The silos were all filled with wheat, so where could you put it now? People just made huge heaps of wheat, and over these great mounds they put coverings of some sort. My job was to find out how far the insects would spread themselves.
It was a fairly easy project because, actually, the insects produced enough heat to thrive on the surface, but then it became too hot for them and they didn't go through the rest of the pile of wheat. So it was reasonably satisfactory. But I had to try and work out whether the wheat's respiration itself or the insects were primarily responsible for the heating of the wheat. It was the insects.
How did you work out whether it was the insects or the respiration of the wheat?
By measuring the respiratory rates of the insects and that of the wheat plants themselves. It turned out that the insect, per gram, was far more contributory by its respiration than the wheat was. Bob Robertson worked on the wheat side and I worked on the insect side, so we had a sort of cooperative program.
It is interesting that you talk about the applied projects, because the science that I know you were involved with in Adelaide was really about the much more general questions and debates about density dependence and population regulation. How did the pure science come out of the applied?
Well, an attitude that Andrewartha and I had was that we wanted to work on animals that had some practical importance in terms of the economy, as far as that was possible, but to do it in such a way that at the same time we would be learning principles of ecology. Both of us came to the conclusion that the numbers of animals could be determined by almost any component of environment. One was sometimes more important than others but, in most of the cases that we studied, the numbers were determined very largely by the weather. If it was favourable, the insect population went up; if it was unfavourable, the population went down – a fairly simple proposition. We therefore didn't put emphasis where the central emphasis had been in ecology of the numbers of animals, on the so-called density-dependent factors.
There was a thesis, opposed to ours, that all animal populations were self-regulating. That meant that, as the numbers went up under favourable conditions, the animals would become so crowded that the birth rate would drop, the death rate would go up and the numbers would go down. And so, if you asked the question, 'What prevents the species from becoming extinct?' the answer was density regulation: the numbers wouldn't go right down because, as the animals got to a low density, the pressure on them was decreased.
We looked for density-regulating factors, however, and couldn't find them! We were told that was because we always worked with animals which were on the edge of their distribution. That isn't quite true, but it is true that we worked on animals where weather was a very controlling and important component.
In fact, Andrewartha and I didn't persuade our colleagues that any component of environment can be important. That led us to study as many populations as we could find, and we wrote a book called The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. It contained mainly case histories, and we reckoned that there was no need to postulate density-regulating factors in any of these case histories. We tried to investigate studies which had been going on for a long time – thrips for about 20 years, grasshoppers for about 10 years – and we put them, and all those by other people that we studied, together into The Distribution and Abundance of Animals.
I think that had some influence, but we were always in a minority with our ideas of the controlling influences in ecology – and we still are. This is a dispute in ecology which to some extent has lost its kick, but it still goes on. The biggest exponent of the Andrewartha–Birch idea is a chap in the Waite Institute now, Tom White, who has written a couple of books on it. He is a very enthusiastic follower of Andrewartha and draws his inspiration from him.
It must have been pretty amazing for a couple of Australians, at the end of the world, to be major players in a major scientific controversy about paradigms in ecology.
Well, in a sense, Dr Nicholson, who was the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Entomology in Canberra, was a very potent exponent of the density-regulating school of thought. He worked on blowflies and regarded them as a sort of model. Of course, when you work on blowflies in the laboratory and give them a fixed amount of food every day, they do become density regulating. But we never saw a laboratory population as a model for what happens in nature. The important thing is that, if we ask the question, 'What do your populations do in nature? Why don't they become extinct?' then the answer is that some populations do become extinct. For example, under very severe conditions of weather the whole population will indeed die out.
We introduced the concept of dispersion of a population, which are its spatial arrangements. One subpopulation of the species may be in a favourable environment while another is in an unfavourable environment and becomes extinct. But that area can be recolonised, because there always will be some parts of the dispersion of the animal that can help in repopulation. So extinction is not a problem for us. In fact, we realised that it is extremely difficult [laugh] to make any species extinct – which is what you want to do with a pest species, but who has ever been successful in doing that?
So what comes next in the career? Did the applied work lead into broader questions about population regulation?
When I eventually went to the University of Sydney, I kept up my studies but I changed the animal to the Queensland fruit fly, which had become very abundant in places where fleshy fruits were grown. Otherwise it is rare, because there are not many fleshy fruits in native trees and shrubs. But, with the planting of fruit trees, this 'fruit fly' became a pest. (It is not a Drosophila but another species altogether.)
What I became interested in was not just what caused the distribution and abundance in any particular area but the fact that the Queensland fruit fly was spreading south –populations, even if small ones, began to establish themselves in southern Victoria. So I made a study of the birth rates and death rates under different conditions, and I found that the populations that managed to get south were changed populations; they had evolved to suit that environment better.
So I became interested in the relationship of evolution to ecology. This is very important because with fast-growing populations like insects, particularly, you can get through many generations in a relatively short period of time, and opportunities for evolutionary change are significant. Well, having demonstrated that there was evolutionary change, I became interested in relating evolution to ecology.
My interest in this was developed partly by my friendship with Dobzhansky, who was a Russian geneticist and is now an American. I said, 'I want to learn more about evolution, so I want to come and spend a year with you,' and he said that would be fine. Not only did I spend a year with him but we went down to Brazil and spent a year there also, studying evolutionary changes. After I had worked those two years with Dobzhansky, he said to me, 'Well, you've learned evolution from me. Now I want to learn some ecology from you. Why do you ecologists not agree on what are the main important components of determining the numbers of animals? We'd better get them together.'
So he organised the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on population ecology, hoping that some consensus would emerge from this, but he was amazed to find that there was no consensus at all. Instead, there were centres of great interest. One centre he recognised was Nicholson's group in Canberra, who were all very density-regulating people, and another was the Andrewartha group, more in Adelaide and Sydney. That disappointed him a bit, and he said, 'You ought to get together more.' We didn't need to get together more, because we'd had plenty of relationships. But they had become a bit hostile at one stage [laugh] because whereas Nicholson seemed to argue from the point of view that you start off with basic principles and then look for them in nature, our view was that you look at nature to see what is going on there and then try and work out some principles. It is a matter of one approach being deductive and the other being inductive.
When did you first become interested in the relationship between science and religion that played such a major role in your later research career?
This had nothing much to do with Queensland fruit fly; it was an independent sort of problem that I became interested in. Early on in my career I was a pretty fundamentalist religious person, but my understanding of science seemed to indicate that that was all haywire and didn't get you anywhere. Well, was there anything in the religious position which was valid? I pretty quickly learned that fundamentalism was out, and I was no longer interested in that. I discovered that there are alternatives to the fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity, and I became interested in the alternatives – which I think a lot of people didn't know about.
So my religious position became a very liberal one. Some would say it was not a Christian position, but I would argue against that.
As a professional scientist you must have found that trying to incorporate a broader perspective on some of these issues was immensely challenging
Well, it is very important. I found that there was a good deal of interest but not much understanding on the part of scientists. Dobzhansky was very interested, but I wouldn't say he had much understanding. He had a Russian Orthodox background which he kept in one place while the sciences were in another. And that applied to quite a lot of scientists, I think. Scientists tend to be a bit narrow-minded about things because they become experts, and yet a real understanding of science involves an understanding of philosophy, ethics, religion – a whole lot of different things.
Did you get antagonism from professional scientists who said, 'What you're talking about isn't science. You should stay with fruit flies,' or did scientific thought welcome the attempts you were making to broaden the debate?
Oh, I think the attitude of, 'Cobbler, stick to your last and don't get involved in anything outside making boots,' is pretty widespread. And it's a good excuse for not thinking about a subject. I got a lot of opposition, that's true, but it didn't worry me too much because I was convinced at two levels: the total validity of the science approach; and the fact that people have religious experiences, which is part of the facts of existence. I end up with a position that, firstly, science is primarily concerned with the objective world that you can weigh and measure. You get information that way and it becomes very important information. Some say this is the only road to truth, but I would say there is a second set of experiences that people have – feelings, which are not objective but subjective. What about feelings of courage and patience, for example? Science doesn't help us to understand much about that side of things.
One day it may. In the meantime, those of us who think that there is a subjective world as well as an objective world spend some time trying to relate the two. And I think the main current problem is the relationship between the objective understanding of the world through science and the subjective understanding via a concentration on our non-objective aspects such as feelings.
This becomes important ethically, I think, in that you've got to look at animals as having not only an instrumental value in the world – a usefulness to human beings or to other animals – but also an intrinsic value in themselves. What on earth would give intrinsic value, a value quite independent of any usefulness to other creatures? The answer I have come to is that only feeling gives intrinsic value. In other words, you recognise some degree of feeling or of mentality, if you like, which is very high in human beings and reaches a level of consciousness, but fades off as you go down the evolutionary scheme of things. And yet I would say it is still there.
A philosophy that becomes very important for me at this stage is expounded by A N Whitehead, a philosopher and also mathematician who wrote extensively in this area. Whitehead sees the subjective side of life going all the way down to the most fundamental bits and pieces of the world, which then is to be seen as a collection not of substances but of experiences. In other words, the most fundamental thing in the Universe will be the experience of atoms and things like that. In a sense, a substance does not have an experience, but the experience itself somehow or other becomes important in existence itself. It is like talking about the dance without the dancer. It's a bit difficult to get at, but Whitehead has worked on that idea and sees the subjective world as fundamentally important to understanding the real world around us.
Now, most scientists who make an attempt to understand Whitehead reject him if they do understand him; if they don't understand him, they go on to something else [laugh] because his work is very difficult to read. I got onto Whitehead by being persuaded to read Science and the Modern World – the first book he ever wrote, I think – in which he relates the subjective to the objective. But then he gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and they were published as a book called Process and Reality, arguing that reality is a process, a process of experience. So I am trying to pursue that one (with some difficulty, I might say).
Who were your mentors, the major influences, in your scientific career?
I don't think I am original; I think my ideas all come from other people! My ideas from the scientific point of view come primarily from Andrewartha, whom I worked with in Adelaide for six years (and subsequently also, but when we were in different cities.) From a philosophical and an evolutionary point of view, Dobzhansky was very central in my understanding of things.
Even more so was another geneticist of equal distinction, Sewall Wright, of Chicago. To me, the nice thing about him was that he went all the way with Whitehead in many respects – in other words, he saw experience as the fundamental thing that had to be understood, the experience being far more widespread in existence than we tend to imagine. By experience, we are not just talking about conscious experience, which is very characteristic of human beings and perhaps of no other creatures, but about mentality, some non-objective aspects of things. Sewall Wright was a very important influence.
The other influential person from a philosophical point of view was Charles Hartshorne, a professor of philosophy in Chicago who was my friend and also Sewall Wright's. He was a thoroughgoing Whiteheadian and so I had lots of discussions with him, spent many hours in his home. Even after he left Chicago, I followed him to different places he lived. (He ended up in Texas.) He was enthusiastic about biology as well about Whiteheadian philosophy.
There have been some very key people in my understanding of things. In particular, Sewall Wright was an incredibly bright person, one of the brightest I've ever met, and it gave me great confidence that I was on the right track when I found that Sewall, who was accepted as a first-rate biologist, was on a similar track.
What do you see as the greatest achievements in your career?
The first important thing was strictly ecological: a particular way of looking at the relationships of animals to their environment.
The second was the more philosophical side of things, that you shouldn't look at any entities, be they atoms or human beings, as substances but as being, in many respects, what they are by virtue of their relationship to other entities: 'I am what I am by virtue of the family that I was brought up in,' and so on. Then you go into great detail in that. There is a very big difference between the view that we are like lumps of material and that's the most we can say about ourselves, and the view that 'I am what I am by virtue of my relationships' – a very big difference. The latter view leads to a philosophy of life, as far as I am concerned, and I think my second contribution is my understanding of experiences as being much wider than just belonging to human beings.
In a more subsidiary role, I suppose, a third contribution that I think I've made is on the relationship between science and religion, putting a great emphasis on the tremendous role of science in objective understanding of the world and the importance of recognising also the non-subjective aspect of things.
Do you have any advice for a young Australian scientist starting a career today?
What I would like to hope might become more common is that our understanding of the world is absolutely dependent upon a scientific approach. Without that, we would be lost, as we were lost before science got into the picture.
But that leads to the broader, more difficult area of feelings, the subjective area. You can adopt the attitude that feelings are just a side effect, something that is not fundamentally important but just happens to be carried along in the stream of thought, or you can regard them as fundamental in just the same way as substances used to be regarded as fundamental. I would hope that, in future, science might be able to get beyond its purely objective analysis to include the subjective – which involves thinking along the same lines as people like A N Whitehead.
We haven't got there yet. In fact, we've hardly got anywhere on that area, because it's extremely difficult. But we shouldn't exclude it from possibilities.
So I think my advice to the young scientist would be, 'Pursue the objective world as hard as you can – and that's what I have tried to do – but see if you cannot also include, as a part of the whole experience, the subjective, feeling side of things. That will lead to a greater understanding of the world around us.'
That is a superb answer. Charles, thank you so much for allowing me to interview you today. It has been wonderful to catch up and to hear you talk about your life and your career.
It's very nice to be interviewed by you [laugh], when I have known you for a long time and appreciated your approach to science as well as the rest of the world of experience. Thank you.
© Australian Academy of Science
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Scientist Award
Award highlights
- Up to $20,000 is available to support outstanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander PhD students and early- to mid-career scientists.
- The award funds research activities and international visits to expand networks and knowledge exchange.
- Applications must demonstrate cultural connectedness and benefit to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
The award recognises research in the physical and biological sciences, allowing interdisciplinary and sociocultural research that could straddle the social sciences and humanities, by outstanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander PhD students and early- and mid-career scientists. It aims to support their research and/or the expansion and growth of their research networks and international knowledge exchange through visits to relevant international centres of research. Awards will be for up to $20,000, with additional support provided to attend the Academy's annual Science at the Shine Dome event.
Key dates
Below are the key dates for the application process. While we aim to keep to this schedule, some dates may change depending on circumstances.
GUIDELINES
The following guidelines and FAQs provide important information about eligibility, submission requirements, and assessment processes. Please review them carefully before submitting an application.
Applicants must be Australian citizens or permanent residents* at the time of application. Applicants should also either be enrolled for a PhD or be within 15 years of obtaining a PhD.**
Where travel to international centres is proposed, it must be for a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of three months duration. Funded activities are normally expected to have been undertaken within two years from the date of award. Awardees may apply for extensions due to extenuating circumstances or to apply for variations to remove or adapt to barriers encountered to their planned research or travel.
Applicants must provide a letter from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community or Organisation where they identify and are accepted. This may come from one of, but not limited to, the following:
- Land Council
- Prescribed Body Corporate (PBC) or Native Title Group
- Natural Resources Management Board (NRM Board)
- Traditional Owner group
- Elders group
- A university's Indigenous department
* Includes the Special Category visa Subclass 444 for New Zealand citizens.
** The Australian Academy of Science is committed to ensuring that all eligible researchers can be considered for awards and collects career interruption information to assess their opportunity to demonstrate scientific excellence. Accordingly, extensions to the post PhD eligibility requirements for Early and Mid-Career awards will be provided for qualifying career disruptions.
A career disruption involves prolonged interruption to a nominee’s capacity to conduct Full Time Equivalent (FTE) high-level research, either due to part-time employment or absence (for periods of one month or greater) and/or long-term partial return to work, to accommodate carer’s responsibilities, illness or other interruption.
The career disruptions here must have occurred post the date of the letter advising that the PhD thesis was passed and resulted in significantly reduced research productivity or nil research output. Career disruption periods will be taken into account for those who would otherwise be beyond the Post PhD Career Eligibility requirements.
Up to $20,000 is available for research and related travel. Funding may be used towards of fieldwork, equipment, consumables and other research costs not covered from other sources.
Where proposals are for visits to relevant international centres of research, the budget for this should not exceed $5,500 of the total being requested. Attendance at relevant conferences is welcomed but must be in addition to a 14 day minimum visit.
If the research proposal includes collaboration with First Nations Knowledge Holders, remuneration for their time is a compulsory budget item. The source of the remuneration funding can be entirely derived from the Award, shared between the Award and applicant’s host institution or entirely from the host institution. For an example, see the Arts Law ICIP information sheet.
Funding may not cover bench fees, managerial costs, insurance or visa costs or primary researcher salaries. The award may be used to fund conference/webinar access support or costs involved in researching and developing digital tools that allow researchers to adapt their research to challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Applications must include the following:
- Letter indicating acceptance by the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Community.
- Research proposal structured under the following headings: aims and background, significance of the research, methodology, management implications of the project. Maximum of 1,000 words.
- Where projects involve collaborations with First Nations Knowledge Holders, provide a brief statement (max. 200 words) explaining how intellectual property ownership will be addressed. If relevant, see AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research and/or Our Knowledge, Our Way Guidelines – CSIRO.
- One referee report. Applicants should choose referees (domestic or overseas) based on their standing in the relevant scientific field. The referee report should comment on your ability to undertake the proposed award and comment briefly on the potential benefits of any proposed visit.
- Itemised budget with brief justification for each item, the names and details of any research funding already received (project title, funding body, amount).
- Support from your department/division head supporting both your research and this application.
- Brief CV including qualifications, summary of professional/research experience and publications/presentations. A full publications list is not required. Maximum of three pages using size 12 font.
- (If applicable) Career disruption information.
- (If applicable) Host researcher correspondence of support for international travel.
- (Optional) Supporting letter/document for cultural connectedness of proposed research.
Applications are assessed based on the assessed competitiveness of the proposal by a committee of scientists with diverse expertise. The Academy is not able to enter into discussion or correspondence regarding the reasons why an application is successful or not.
Criteria used to assess applications include:
- Applicants' research track record relative to opportunity.
- Referees’ reports.
- Budget suitability and justification.
- Cultural connectedness of the project with the communities involved.
- Potential for proposed research to benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The last two criteria will be judged via statements within the research proposal:
- One explaining how the proposed research aligns with the cultural interests of the communities involved. There is also the option to upload a supporting document for this criterion (e.g. a letter from the Traditional Owners of the Country on which the research will take place).
- One explaining how the proposed research will benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples e.g. through a direct benefit to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (fiscal, health, environmental, cultural…) or indirectly through advocacy by the Awardee in encouraging First Nations youth to consider a STEM career and/or develop research capacity.
Applicants can only receive funding from the same research or travelling research award once in a three calendar year period.
Applicants may apply for more than one award but can only receive one Academy travelling or research award per calendar year.
Grants are offered to successful applicants in early November each year for projects/travel to be carried out in the following year.
Funded activities are normally expected to have been undertaken within two years from the date of award. Awardees can apply for project variations if their award proposals are impacted by extenuating circumstance.
An annual report is required on the progress of the research project. The report should detail progress on the research goals outlined in the grant-holder’s proposal, and expected vs. actual expenditure to date.
If the Grant is held for two years, a report is also required at the end of the second year.
Applications are to be completed through an online form found by clicking on the Apply button on the top right of this web page when the round is open.
- Can awarded funds pay for salary expenses?
- The Thomas Davies Research Grant funds can cover research assistant salaries, but not primary researcher salary expenses. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Scientist Award, the Margaret Middleton Fund and Max Day Fellowship Awards are not able to cover any salary expenses, for either primary researchers or research assistants.
- Can I apply for more than one research award?
- Yes – however, you can only receive one research award per calendar year. If you are ranked highly for multiple research awards, the assessment committee Chairs will decide which award is most appropriate for the project and applicant.
- Can I receive the same research award for a different project in subsequent years?
- No – once you have received a research award, you are not eligible to receive the same award for 3 calendar years.
- Can I use the funds to attend a conference?
- The Margaret Middleton Fund does not support conference expenses.
- The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Scientist Award and the Max Day Fellowship funds can be used to cover the cost of travel to undertake research or attend relevant conferences/workshops.
- Thomas Davies Research Fund can support conference expenses if it can be demonstrated that it is relevant for the project, however, this is not the primary objective of the award.
- Can I use the funds to cover overhead expenses?
- No – each award notes the specific exclusions for use of funding; however, no award allows funds to be used towards bench fees, managerial, visa, insurance or infrastructure costs.
- Can I request feedback on my application assessment?
- No - applications are assessed based on the competitiveness of the proposal by a committee of scientists with diverse expertise. The Academy is not able to enter into discussion or correspondence regarding the reasons why an application is successful or not.
- Can I apply for the Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship if my PhD has not yet been through the confirmation process?
- No. If you are a PhD student applying for a Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship you must have completed the PhD confirmation process with your institution. Please note that specific confirmation process requirements may vary between institutions. Candidates are strongly encouraged to clarify the requirements with their institution prior to submitting the fellowship application.
PAST RECIPIENTS
- Dr Mitchell Gibbs – Global Collaborations between First Nations people for habitat restoration.
- Associate Professor Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch – Utilisation of Indigenous knowledges behind tree resin to repair micro cracks in concrete structures.
- Dr Justine Clark – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander precision cancer research.
- Dr Joe Greet – Healing Water Country: developing a Traditional Owner-led billabong health assessment framework.
- Ms Stephanie Beaupark – to study the colour chemistry of natural dyes from Australian native trees and using an Indigenist methodology involving yarning with other Indigenous natural dye artists and weavers.
- Ms Michelle Hobbs – to provide new insights into the management of Australian freshwater ecosystems and freshwater mussels.
- Dr Jordan Pitt – to look at the interaction between sea ice and ocean waves, in order to improve future climate models.
- Ms Tamara Riley – to understand how the human–animal–environment relationship impacts on Aboriginal communities’ health, and then to develop ‘One Health’ models for use in Aboriginal communities.
- Ms Vanessa Sewell – to address the problem of vaccinating against drench-resistant sheep parasites.
- Dr Keane Wheeler – to undertake research to redress inequalities in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s health and development.
- Mr Luke Williams – to evaluate the dietary safety of Australian native foods.
- Mr Frank Loban – to visit New Zealand to discuss and learn from fisheries management organisations how they are managing their fisheries, governance framework and indigenous interests.
- Dr Michael-Shawn Fletcher – to visit Udayana University in Bali to establish a research collaboration and to collect paleoclimatic data that will act as pilot data for another larger research grant proposal in 2020.
Image of the Shine Dome in the above video by Stuart Lindenmayer, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Mr Tui Nolan, University of Technology Sydney – to visit the Alan Turing Institute in London to study computational methods that have applications in public health and education.
- Ms Amy Searle, Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute – to attend the Science at the Shine Dome Event in 2019, the annual signature event of the Australian Academy of Science.
- Mr Bradley Moggridge, University of Canberra – to visit New Zealand to learn how Maori culture has incorporated Indigenous knowledge and values into their water management practice.
Conversations with Australian scientists
Fellows' biographical memoirs
Submission—Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill 2024
In the submission, the Academy noted:
- the provisions of the Bill are measured, and elements like HELP adjustments and the Prac Payment will benefit science students at universities
- the Bill fails to address urgent issues for university science, such as the systematic underfunding of undergraduate science and fixing Australia’s broken university science research funding systems
- the Bill begins implementing the recommendations of the University Accord’s final report. However, the response to date has not addressed two broad themes that were key to the Accord’s final report: funding for undergraduate science and the state of university science and research. This Bill makes no attempt to fix the egregious elements of the Job Ready Graduates scheme passed by the Australian Parliament, which cut funding for undergraduate science.
Submission—Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024 [Provisions] and related bills
The Academy recommends:
• adopting a stronger definition of ‘Nature Positive’ aligned with international definitions and Australia’s own targets and ambitions.
• establishing EPA and EIA as statutory bodies with independent governance boards.
• legislating expert advisory committees with clear functions for both EPA and EIA.
• progressing stage 3 of the Nature Positive reforms package including National Environmental Standards before end of 2024.
Submission—Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces
On 5 July 2024, the Academy made a submission to the House Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces.
The submission recommends upskilling the Australian scientific workforce to ensure skills in the fundamentals of AI research and responsible use of AI, establishing guidelines that address the risks AI brings to the research sector, and improve diversity in the AI workforce.
In line with the Academy's previous submissions, the Academy also emphasises the importance of a sovereign high-performance computing capability in Australia, as computing power and software is essential for development and adoption of AI tools.
Submission—Green Metals Consultation Paper
Decarbonisation and the transition to net-zero emissions demand technological shifts that are underpinned by scientific capability. The Future Made in Australia policy framework needs to draw on a strong science foundation to inform investments in promising applied science and technology to deliver the required capabilities for Australia. Advancing science capability not only enables innovation in green metals to deliver economic growth but also enhances sustainability.
The Academy advises that:
- Australia needs a multi-faceted approach to stimulate investment in enabling renewable energy infrastructure for green metals, including private sector engagement and investment.
- Green metals industry must examine the true sustainability of green metals by:
- implementing lifecycle assessments of green metal materials or products to quantify the environmental impacts of green metals production
- developing policies that consider the entire green metals supply chain, from mine to end-use products to recycling, addressing every step as a ‘green’ process.
- Including copper in policy considerations is crucial due to its essential role in electric vehicles, renewable energy systems and storage batteries. However, production of copper lags behind.
Submission—Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024
On 1 July 2024, the Academy made a submission to the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024.
The submission emphasises that as part of the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) reform package, the Government must outline a comprehensive plan to fix the broken funding model of university research.
It also recommends higher degree research student load be exempt from measures to control university admissions.