The atomic bomb is deployed more often as a symbol than a weapon. No discussion of the ‘dangers’ of science is complete without it. But the accompanying stereotype of scientists blinkered to the consequences of their work is hardly accurate. Even before the destruction of Hiroshima, there have been scientists prepared to enter the political fray to ensure that the technology was adequately controlled.

Related recognition of these efforts came last year when the physicist Joseph Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his involvement in the Pugwash Movement ­ an international organisation of scientists, established in 1957 to provide leadership on the nuclear question. This is a global issue, and Australian scientists have been as active as their overseas counterparts in addressing the threat of annihilation posed by nuclear weapons.

Three Australian-born physicists worked on the development of the atomic bomb – Mark Oliphant, Eric Burhop and Harrie Massey. Ernest Titterton, a British-born physicist who came to Australia after the war to found the ANU Department of Nuclear Physics, also played a significant role in the Manhattan Project. The experience was to affect their lives in dramatically different ways.

Mark Oliphant was sickened by the reports from Hiroshima, and immediately became an outspoken opponent of the use of nuclear weapons. He was one of the twenty-two scientists who attended the first Pugwash meeting in 1957, and helped to establish Pugwash committees in Australia.

Oliphant also acted as a scientific adviser to Australia’s Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, at the initial meetings of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. The UNAEC was an attempt to head off the looming nuclear arms race by establishing some international system for the control of atomic energy, Evatt and Oliphant were accompanied by George Briggs, head of the Physics Section of the CSIR’s National Standards Laboratory.

Briggs was a highly-skilled experimental physicist, whose work Oliphant described as being ‘of a different order of precision than any other’. At the UNAEC, Briggs worked tirelessly in a strange and frustrating environment, bringing his dedication to precision to bear on the sloppy thinking that characterised many of the discussions. Indeed, the scientists were the only ones to make significant progress at the UNAEC meetings, preparing a summary of the technical requirements of a control system. Unfortunately it was all in vain.

Unlike Briggs and Oliphant, Eric Burhop had a life-long concern with the social impact of science, and was involved in political activities from his student days. Burhop sought to organise his scientific colleagues into effective lobby groups, becoming a leading figure in the Australian Association of Scientific Workers (in the UK), the Association of Scientific Workers and the World Federation of Scientific Workers. Between 1945 and 1954 he addressed more than 500 meetings on the nuclear issue. Burhop’s efforts to organise an international conference of scientists for the WFSW led ultimately to the first Pugwash meeting, and he worked with Joseph Rotblat on the organising committee.

In the climate of fear generated by the Cold War, these scientists paid a price for their activities. Burhop was unable to find employment in Australia as a result of his political views, and spent the rest of his scientific career in the UK. Oliphant was refused a visa to travel to the USA, having been smeared as a communist sympathiser. Even George Briggs found himself called before the Royal Commission on Espionage, established after the defection of Vladimir Petrov, to investigate the activities of Soviet spies in Australia.

The relationship between science and politics is an uneasy one. One can easily sympathise with George Briggs who became increasingly frustrated with the dominance of power politics at the UNAEC. He wrote to his wife that the time was coming when ‘a physicist would be best out of it’. But science and politics cannot be separated, and when leadership is required, scientists, or any of us, cannot afford to leave the job to politicians alone.

In January 1945, a small Australian Army reconnaissance unit pushed through the jungles of New Guinea, narrowly avoiding the enemy Japanese forces. With the assistance of the local inhabitants, the unit gathered vital information on Japanese movements, relaying it back to headquarters using carrier pigeons. This was “Jockforce”, named after its commander, zoologist Jock Marshall.

Jock was familiar with the harsh New Guinea terrain, having spent nearly a year exploring it in preparation for a large-scale scientific expedition. His first taste of field work in the tropics had been ten years earlier in the New Hebrides, where for seven months he collected data on the breeding cycles of local animals. Jock had been bored by school and never matriculated, but through these expeditions he developed a passion for science. It was a passion that was to lead him into many battles.

Despite his experience in the tropics, Jock had a difficult time convincing the military authorities that he should see active service in New Guinea. His impatience with military procedures didn’t help, but the main concern was physical – Jock had shot his left arm off when he was 16!

Jock’s attitude to this accident was indicative of the way he approached life – he always willing to take on a fight. He refused to wear an artificial limb, and instead taught himself to ride and shoot one-armed. Later he amazed colleagues with his ability to dissect birds with one hand and an assortment of pins. Jock later said that the accident was the best thing that had ever happened to him, he was forced to focus on the future, to make something of his life. A natural bushman, Jock began collecting bird specimens for the Australian Museum, earning the respect of Alec Chisholm, the museum’s renowned ornithologist. It was the museum staff who recommended Jock for the New Hebrides expedition.

While in the New Hebrides, Jock became fascinated with the breeding cycles of birds, and this was to remain one of his major research interests. But to pursue his research he had to undertake formal study, first at the University of Sydney and later at Oxford. To bring in extra money, he often worked as a journalist, indeed, his passion for science was perhaps matched by his love of language. He wrote many books, some chronicling his expeditions, others attacking the short-sightedness and hypocrisy he saw in Australian society. One of these books, The Great Extermination, was an early attempt to draw attention to our devastating loss of native species.

After some years in England, Jock was drawn back to Australia by the prospect of helping to establish a new university – Monash, where Jock was appointed Foundation Professor of Zoology. He sallied forth into battle once more, fighting for standards of research excellence, fighting for the use of native trees within the university grounds. When it was planned to build over a piece of remnant bushland, Jock moved in under cover of darkness and simply removed all the builder’s survey pegs. The area remains a nature reserve today.

The one battle Jock could not win was against cancer, and he died in 1967 at the age of 56. But Jock Marshall’s life remains a lesson in determination. He wrote to a friend in 1937: “I’ve come to believe that you can do pretty near anything in this world with a moderate amount of brain, gut & personality – & Christ knows I’ve tried to develop all three”.

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Dorothy Hill’s fascination for corals was sparked not by the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, but by a visit to the small Queensland town of Mundubbera, about 160 km inland. There, in the late 1920s, the young Australian geologist discovered a rich deposit of fossil corals from the Palaeozoic era. It was the beginning of a distinguished scientific career that established Dorothy Hill as a world authority on fossil corals, and one of Australia’s foremost geologists.

A collection of the Mundubbera fossils travelled with Hill all the way from the Queensland bush to Cambridge University, where Hill continued her research for a number of years in the 1930s. It seems odd to go all that way to work on Australian corals, but it was very common for scientists of her era to further their studies in Britain. In any case, Hill was able to compare her fossils with British ones of the same age, discovering that descriptions of these were badly in need of revision. She took on this demanding task herself, but still found time to gain a pilot’s licence and to indulge in the odd (very odd) game of ‘bicycle polo’. Sport had always been an important part of her life. While studying at the University of Queensland she had represented both the University and her state in hockey!

Hill returned to her old university in 1937 as a research fellow, and has remained part of the institution ever since – as lecturer, professor, and professor emeritus. While she may have turned to palaeontology originally because it seemed ‘suitable’ for a woman of the 1920s, Dorothy Hill has not been afraid to take the lead in many areas, and has accumulated a wide range of distinctions and awards. These include the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, ANZAAS’s Mueller Medal, and a CBE for ‘services to geology and palaeontology’. In 1956 she became the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 1970 was the first (and still the only!) woman to serve as its president.

Even though administrative and organisational duties took up much of her time, research remained Hill’s passion. She has published over a hundred scientific papers, mostly on invertebrate palaeontology (such as the fossil corals), but also on stratigraphy and the geology of Queensland. Her work on long-dead corals led her to puzzle over the mechanisms of coral growth, and she played an active part in establishing the research program of the Great Barrier Reef Committee in the 1940s and ’50s. Through her research, her teaching and her leadership, Dorothy Hill has played a major role in establishing the field of palaeontology in Australia. This was recognised upon her retirement, when the University of Queensland founded the ‘Dorothy Hill Chair in Palaeontology and Stratigraphy’.

Summarising such an outstanding career, it’s easy to lapse into cliches and describe Dorothy Hill as a ‘role model’, ‘a quiet achiever’, or ‘a great Australian’. While there’s some truth in all of these, they don’t really capture the spirit of a life so consumed by dedicated inquiry, observation and reflection. Fifty years after that visit to Mundubbera, Dorothy Hill still found her fossil corals ‘absorbingly interesting’.

Amidst the carnage of Gallipoli, a young stretcher-bearer named Esmond Keogh struggled under enemy fire to drag his comrades to medical aid. Twenty-five years and another war later, Keogh was again far from home, serving with the Australian armed forces in the Middle East. However, Bill Keogh (as he was known by then) was neither a stretcher-bearer nor soldier, he was still saving lives, but now as a medical scientist.

Bullets, shells and bombs are not the only bringers of death in war, disease also takes a terrible toll. The work of medical scientists, like Keogh, dramatically reduced Australian casualties in World War 2, helping to ensure victory by the Allied forces.

Keogh started the war as a pathologist attached to the 2/2 Australian General Hospital, stationed at Gaza and then Kantara, near the Suez Canal, but within a few years was the Director of Hygiene and Pathology for the whole Australian Army. While in the Middle East he investigated diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and malaria, and set up a blood transfusion service. Keogh was surrounded by a talented team of medical personnel, including his assistant Mavis Freeman, who was present as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). By war’s end she was a Captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps.

Freeman was a biochemist and bacteriologist – an accomplished scientist in her own right. She had worked closely with Macfarlane Burnet for over ten years at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Perhaps her most notable achievement came in 1937, when she and Burnet succeeded in identifying the microbe responsible for Q fever, a disease found over most of the world. It was the first time that the cause of a human disease had been identified and isolated in Australia.

In the Middle East, Freeman made a particular study of the cause of ‘desert sores’, severe skin lesions that had hospitalised a considerable number of soldiers. It had been assumed that the sores were the result of vitamin deficiency, but Freeman showed that they were bacterial infections that could be prevented by a range of simple hygiene measures. At that time there was no Army issue soap!

With the onset of the Pacific War the 2/2 Australian General Hospital returned to Australia, and with it Keogh and Freeman. In the years that followed both scientists were involved in what was certainly the most important medical research undertaken by Australia in World War Two – the fight against malaria.

The danger of malaria was revealed in late 1942, when Australian forces were defending Milne Bay in New Guinea. In one week alone, 1,083 soldiers out of a 12,000 strong contingent were admitted to hospital with the disease. Such losses could not be allowed to continue. Keogh and others set about the establishment of a Medical Research Unit in Cairns, where antimalarial drugs were tested. Eventually the drug atrebin was shown to be effective, and prescribed for the armed forces. Freeman, meanwhile, was undertaking research into safe methods for blood transfusion in malarial regions. The combined scientific effort was successful, the number of cases of malaria dropped dramatically, and the Pacific campaign was saved from disaster.

The Pacific War ended with the horror of the atomic bomb, and it’s easy to forget that science was used in the war to save lives as well as to devise new means of killing. It’s ironic that this time of destruction accelerated medical research in a number of areas, including in the production of the ‘wonder drug’ penicillin. But, of course, no amount of research could restore life to the fallen.

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Early this century in the Victorian country town of Terang, the young son of a local bank manager was often seen wandering alone through the countryside, on the look-out for beetles to add to his collection. One of his treasured possessions was a book on Australian insects, in which he carefully recorded his own observations and sketches. Today that book is preserved at the University of Melbourne along with a large collection of notes, papers and photographs that tell the story of one of Australia’s greatest scientists, Macfarlane Burnet.

Macfarlane Burnet never lost his fascination with the natural world, and inspired by the hero of his childhood, Charles Darwin, he sought for the rest of his life to throw some light on its underlying mechanisms. His curiousity carried him from beetle-hunting to a Nobel Prize!

Australia’s international reputation for medical research is founded on the work of institutions like the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Burnet was Director of the Institute from 1944 to 1965, at a time of crucial developments in the fields of virology and immunology. He was a “hands-on” Director who always enjoyed work at the laboratory bench. From the 1930s, through the ’40s and 50s he studied a range of viral diseases such as psittacosis, “Q fever”, poliomyelitis and influenza. Burnet’s life-long interest in ecology encouraged him to concentrate not just on the body’s response to viral attack, but on the way in which these parasites survived in the natural world.

Throughout his research career, Burnet used an experimental technique he had learnt while working at the National Institute of Medical Research in London in the 1930s. An opening was made in the shell of an egg, and a sample of the virus being studied was injected into the membrane that surrounded the chick embryo. In these conditions, most viruses multiplied, allowing closer study. While modern labs are crammed with sophisticated apparatus, Burnet’s main research tools were the egg and the microscope.

Burnet was a lateral thinker, inspired not just by his experimental work, but also by his wide-reading in many related fields of biology. In the 1950s, his interest shifted towards immunology and the way in which antibodies are produced. In mulling over the relevant literature he predicted that an organism would not produce antibodies to fight a “foreign” cell (or antigen) if it had been exposed to the antigen while the organism was in its embryo phase. The organism would not recognize the introduced cells as “foreign”. This concept of “immunological tolerance” was confirmed by experiments conducted by Peter Medawar in England, and in 1960, Burnet and Medawar shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. This insight has been of vital importance in the field of organ transplantation.

But the work that Burnet regarded as his most important contribution to biology was his development of the clonal selection theory of acquired immunity. This theory, which sought to explain how animals could produce such a wide variety of antibodies, opened up vast new areas of research.

Typically, Burnet published his first account of the clonal selection theory in an Australian scientific journal. He strongly believed in encouraging scientific research in this country, and was not afraid to apply his scientific knowledge to broader social and political questions. The boy with the beetles became an example to all Australians – scientific greatness did not just come from overseas, it could be born here, even in a small country town like Terang.

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A relief map is a three-dimensional model that shows the features of a particular region, like mountains and valleys, to scale. You’ve probably all seen one at some stage, perhaps you’ve even built one. However, I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought that a relief map might provide a starting point for scientific research. But thanks to one influential Australian geologist, that’s just what happened.

During the Second World War, military planners were concerned about the lack of detailed maps of Northern Australia. Acting on the advice of the professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne, Edwin Sherbon Hills, they decided to construct a relief model of the area. Once completed, data from the model was to be used to draw up the required maps.

Hills was seconded to the Army, and for three months travelled with an Observer Unit across Northern Australia collecting data for the model. The journals of explorers and early settlers provided additional information, and soon construction was underway. Hills was so impressed by the possibilities of the relief model that he continued and extended the project after the war. By the 1950s, he had completed a model of the entire continent of Australia (with Papua New Guinea thrown in for good measure). When assembled, the model was some eight metres across!

While working on the model Hills had noticed some interesting regularities. Most striking was the way that many features of the landscape — such as rivers, basins and mountain ranges – seemed to form geometric patterns made up of linked or intersecting straight lines. Hills suggested that these lines (called lineaments) gave important clues about the underlying geological structure of the continent. This insight has proved to be extremely valuable, especially in identifying ore deposits, and many geologists have built upon Hills’ pioneering work in the field he described as “morphotectonics”.

This episode also provides a good example of Hills’s gift for lateral thinking. Unlike many modern scientists, he did not confine his researches to a narrow area of specialisation. His interests varied widely across geology — including palaeontology, coastal features, arid lands, hydrology and economic geology – enabling him to take a broad view of any problem and to make connections that might otherwise have been missed.

This breadth of vision was evident even in the late 1920s when, as a young geology student, Hills was set the task of investigating the geology of the Cathedral Ranges, near Melbourne. The field work was difficult, perhaps even dangerous, but his efforts were rewarded by the discovery of fossil remains of fish from the Devonian period (about 400 million years ago). This find was highly significant from a palaentological point of view, but Hills also recognised that the fossils provided him with a useful means of dating other geological features in the area.

In a similar way, Hills always appreciated the importance of strong links between research and teaching, and between science and the community. Former students remember him as an exciting lecturer, highly skilled with blackboard and chalk! His text-books on structural geology were published in several editions, including Russian, Spanish and Indian. He served on many national and international committees, and worked as a consultant to Unesco, helping countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka develop their geological training facilities.

Many scientists are remembered for their breakthroughs or their discoveries, but perhaps Edwin Hills will be best remembered for the way he approached his science – for his curiosity, his insight and his enthusiasm.

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Funnily, much of what we call ‘big science’ is concerned with observing very small entities. Large, expensive machines are built to harness the unimaginable forces necessary to open the sub-atomic world to scrutiny.

In this fascinating, perhaps frightening, area of research, one Australian woman found an outlet for her curiosity, and made an important contribution to nuclear physics. Joan Freeman was born in Perth in 1918. When she was four, her family moved to Sydney where Joan was educated at the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School and the University of Sydney. Throughout her childhood she was interested in finding out how things worked, often roping in her friends to help her perform simple scientific experiments. However, it was the news, in 1932, that Cockroft and Walton had succeeded in ‘splitting the atom’ that particularly inspired her to consider a career in scientific research.

First though, she had to face the fact that her school offered neither physics nor chemistry at Leaving Certificate level. How was she to prepare herself for a university science course? Showing some of the determination that served her well throughout her career, she attended evening classes at the Sydney Technical College. ‘Sydney Tech’ was intended to educate apprentices and engineers, not schoolgirls – Joan’s attendance was never formally authorized and on one occasion she had to hide behind some shelves while an inspector visited the class!

At university Joan found herself drawn more and more towards physics, even though she was warned that employment prospects were not good for women. She completed her honours degree in physics, undertaking research in ultra-high frequency electrical discharges in gases. By this time the Second World War had begun, and Joan’s research provided her with the perfect background to join a ‘Top Secret’ project that had just been established within the University.

This was the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Radiophysics Laboratory, where a team of physicists were working on the development of radar systems for use in Australia. Joan joined the laboratory and was set to work on the production of a 10cm microwave radar set. At the war’s end, Joan was awarded a Senior Studentship by the CSIR to undertake higher-degree research overseas, and so, in 1946, she sailed for England.

Joan had decided to pursue nuclear physics in the footsteps of such great scientists as J.J. Thomson, Chadwick, Cockroft, Oliphant and, of course, Rutherford, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Here she obtained her PhD through research into short-range alpha-particles, but instead of returning to Australia, she accepted an appointment to the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Joan remained at Harwell for the remainder of her career, leading a research group using the massive tandem accelerator, built in the late 1950s. In 1976 she became the first woman to be awarded the British Institute of Physics’ prestigious Rutherford Medal.

Joan Freeman tells the story of these remarkable achievements in her autobiography A Passion for Physics – The Story of a Woman Physicist. Reading the book, you can’t help but be caught up by her ‘passion’ or enthusiasm for exploring the nature of matter – the world of ‘big science’ becomes much more human.

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‘Australian scientists are wimps. They spend all their time working away in the background, investigating some topic that nobody else in the world understands. They might make a contribution to our knowledge of the world, but they don’t really make things happen, do they?’

Perhaps we should start a list of common myths about Australian science – the paragraph above could go right at the top, followed by: ‘Australian scientists are all more than five foot tall, and of course they never, ever wear funny hats’. Jean Macnamara, who was rather short and certainly did have a collection of odd-looking hats, was one Australian scientist who was determined to be of use to society and to make things happen, even though this sometimes brought her into conflict with her scientific colleagues.

Jean Macnamara graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne in the 1920s. Shortly afterwards she was appointed to the Children’s Hospital, even though the hospital authorities had at first been reluctant to employ her on the grounds that it had no toilet facilities for women doctors! In those days, polio was still a much feared disease, causing paralysis and sometimes death in children. Those who survived might well be crippled for life. With no effective treatments, doctors could do little to help. Jean Macnamara could not bear to stand by watching her patients suffer, so she decided to dedicate her life to the research and treatment of polio.

When a polio epidemic struck Melbourne in 1925, Macnamara decided to test the effectiveness of a serum extracted from the blood of former polio sufferers. Although she was much encouraged by the results of her trials, later tests indicated that she was probably over-optimistic. However, this work led her into an important collaboration with Macfarlane Burnet, one of Australia’s greatest medical researchers. Together they discovered that there was more than one strain of the polio virus. This was a vital step towards the development of an effective vaccine.

Macnamara continued her studies of polio in the United States and Europe, visiting a wide range of clinics and research institutions. She became particularly interested in physical methods of treatment, developing them for use in her own practice. Splints and various other strange looking contraptions were used to immobilise limbs and protect muscles from damage. Years of corrective therapy followed with the patient’s whole family encouraged to play a part. Macnamara continued her work with polio sufferers for the rest of her life, forming close relationships with many of the families.

But it was not just children’s health that concerned Jean Macnamara, it was also their ‘inheritance’ – the land. While overseas in the 1930s, she was told about a virus, deadly to rabbits, that might be just what Australia needed to fight the rabbit plagues that were devastating the land. Macnamara told the Australian authorities about the myxoma virus, and encouraged them to begin research on its effects. This was done, with field trials being carried out in Australia in the 1930s and ’40s.

Unfortunately the trials were disappointing, and by the late 1940s it seemed perhaps time to give up on myxomatosis. But Jean Macnamara was determined that this would not happen. She mounted a public campaign to force CSIRO to continue the research, and gained the support of many farmers and politicians. As we all know, the trials continued and in 1951 mosquitoes provided the missing factor, spreading the disease rapidly through Australia’s rabbit population.

When there was an important job to be done, Jean Macnamara could not stand back and let it go undone. She was not always right, and she made many enemies, but to her science was not just about knowledge, it was about making things happen for the good of society.

We hear a lot about science communication these days. More and more, scientists are attempting to convey something of the fascination and wonder of their work to a general audience. But imagine for a moment a radio program, devoted solely to natural science, a radio program that ran for twenty years on commercial stations from 1938-1958. A quirk? An oddity? Imagine now that this radio programme reached more than 70% of the listening audience. Impossible? No — this was the achievement of pioneering science broadcaster Crosbie Morrison.

Philip Crosbie Morrison (1900-1958) was a naturalist and science journalist, whose life and work reflected a desire to help people gain an understanding of science as a part of their everyday lives. He encouraged his audience to observe and wonder at the natural world, confident that a desire to preserve the environment for the benefit of future generations would follow.

After completing his Master of Science at the University of Melbourne, Crosbie Morrison worked with the Melbourne Argus, at first as a general reporter, but later specialising in science. In 1938 he was appointed founding editor of Wild Life, a popular magazine devoted to natural history that became one of the best of its kind in the world. As a means of publicising the first issues of the magazine, Morrison gave a series of nature study broadcasts on the Melbourne radio station 3DB. These were so well received that the series continued, eventually reaching audiences across Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Morrison was flooded with questions from enthusiastic listeners, so enthusiastic that opening his mail could be a messy business – sometimes snakes or spiders were included for identification!

Many years before the rise of the modern environmental movement, Crosbie Morrison was using the media to raise awareness of the need to conserve our natural environment. His broadcasts and articles covered a wide range of issues, many of which are still of vital importance. These included soil and water conservation, the use of animals in sport and in scientific experiments, the illegal export of native birds, and the planting and preservation of trees. But there was need for action as well as words and Morrison’s concerns culminated in his vigorous lobbying for effective control of Victoria’s national parks. A National Parks Act was passed in 1956, and Crosbie Morrison became the first director of the new Victorian National Parks Authority in 1957.

Crosbie Morrison was a skilled communicator with a sincere and lasting commitment to the promotion of a scientific understanding of our natural world. If he had been alive today he would no doubt be carrying his message ever further afield, utilising modern communications technology. Imagine it — perhaps ‘Crosbie’s Backyard’?