Jonathan Ashmore
Department of Physiology, University College London

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.51.25

The whole trip almost unravelled before it started. Nobody seemed to want a visit from a pommie lecturer. The Physiological Society had invited me to be the Australasian lecturer and carry out a tour of a few laboratories in Australia in 2001. It had been over two years since David Cook from Sydney had done the reciprocal lecture tour in the UK. Now it was my turn. When I wrote to one or two of my contacts in Australia they said bluntly that they would not be there. They would be in New Zealand for the IUPS Congress. Try again next year. And by the way, there will be a monster meeting of all medical and health societies in Melbourne so why not come and give a talk at that as well? Great, I said, are you on for a visit in 2002?

So that is how I came to be touring Australia in November last year, just at the end of the antipodean academic year. Had I thought more about the consequence of setting off from a dank and cold London I would have realised that this would be just when most university inhabitants would be focussed on the examiners’ meetings and dodging students complaining about their abysmal exam marks. With summer holidays beckoning, who wants to think too seriously about a lecturer wished on them from the other side of the world? Or even about the more arcane features of the ear? I did try for a catchy little title for the lecture, all about designing the cochlea to do a hard job using soft parts. Someone commented that it needed a lot more sex and violence to really bring the punters in.

Our first stop is Perth. This seems a logical start, not quite so many time zones away and with time to break the long flight in a very hot Singapore. The arrival at the airport is novel. We are met by the head of Department who reverses noisily and expensively into something in the parking lot. I never drive, he explains. I spend the first few days in Australia wondering whether a missing tooth filling spells the end of any enjoyment. A walk-in dentist solves that problem with impressive speed: ‘See you later’ says the receptionist as she relieves me of 60 dollars. I am tempted to say that I hope she will not, until I realise that this is the standard goodbye. As an introduction to the world of Australian physiologists, the University of Western Australia has a large and well-known hearing research laboratory which has made major contributions to understanding how the ear works. The auditory laboratories look well supplied. UWA prides itself on being one of the top research universities. The first hint of changes that all is not a complete breeze may have been there to see: physiology itself seems to be in a slightly less than upbeat mood and has suffered from not embracing human physiology early. The result is that the classes for human biology are bursting at the seams whereas traditional physiology suffers – it is considered too hard by students paying for their degrees. This is to be one of the recurrent themes of many of the departments I visit. It is particularly important in a university system which has already embraced student fees (Australian students were amongst the first to accept pay­back-later schemes): restructure, sell the degree or pay the price to your uncompromising vice chancellor. At UWA I give a talk about our work on two photon imaging, not on hair cells: we already know about that, they say.

After a weekend down at Margaret River, home to Western Australia’s expanding wine industry and to so many boutique wineries that some of them clearly double more as sites for fashion shoots than as vineyards, we fly into Sydney. As the flight descends into the city, the cabin fills with a slightly pungent whiff of smoke from the bush fires burning around the city: nature is intruding at 10000m. But at the University of Sydney the end of term seems definitely to be uppermost in people’s minds. Mollified by a good reception and turn out for the lecture I try out the ‘sex’n’violence’ talk about hair cells. The talk, I hope, may improve with time.

Although built in the late 19th century as a sandstone medical school, the well equipped molecular biology and neuroscience laboratories at the University of Sydney are a testimony to strong, if selective, support for basic biomedicine. I think enviously that they make the UK university infrastructure look distinctly downtrodden. The campus looks oddly familiar for, although I have never seen it before, it looks like a solid civic university of the UK variety but without the battering of the weather. The well-known picture of Katz, Eccles and Kuffler walking to a lecture (and printed in From Neuron to Brain) was taken here in the great quad at the University of Sydney, as Max Bennett tells me. Later, across town, Simon Gandevia and Elspeth McLachlan show me around the Prince of Wales Medical Research Centre which thrives successfully as a self financing centre to study systems physiology. Sited next to the University of New South Wales, the centre is also expanding and, with the help of the Wellcome Trust, is about to install one of the first 3 T magnets for fMRI in Australia.

To Brisbane where the talk is part of a two-hander with Gary Housley, a former colleague now in Auckland who is passing through the University of Queensland en route for London. A sense of just parachuting into cities is beginning to grow. The talk is well attended by members of the Vision, Touch Hearing Research Centre (or VTHRC as my ability to handle acronyms grows). UQ is also restructuring. It now has a three tier system of faculties containing schools which have combined traditional departments. Physiology , pharmacology and anatomy find themselves combined. This has not just been a paper exercise, for although it has happened with astonishing speed over the past two years, it has also been matched by laboratory rebuilding. The people I meet are very positive about it all. Perhaps I do not meet the malcontents. David Adams now runs the School of Biomedical Sciences. I am also shown a brand new building – the Institute for Molecular Biomedicine – which is planned to house 800 people when it is full, a sort of equivalent of the Wolfson Institute at UCL, and intended to jump start a strong biotech industry in Queensland. We celebrate that evening on hearing that the merger between Imperial College and UCL has been called off: even as an ex-IC alumnus I have a sense of relief. I read this news first in the Singapore Straits Times, so it must be true. News spreads.

We have supper with Jim Pickles to the deafening sound of possums jumping about on the tin roof of his house. This reminds me that I have yet to see a kangaroo jumping – the ones we see are by the side of the road, have their legs sticking up in the air and are definitely not hopping. Later that weekend I visit a lost cousin, unseen for 25 years, and who now owns a farm two hours north of Brisbane. Although the farm is surviving it is clear that the drought in parts of Queensland and New South Wales is getting very serious. The news says that Australia’s harvest is threatened and livestock values are expected to be the worst since 1982. There are stories of the price of sheep being down to below AUS$1 (=35p) a head now that they cannot be fed. Although living in cities may be comfortable nature is still very much in evidence.

Two days later we find ourselves in Melbourne. We are invited to stay, no objections entertained, in an elegant house near the river Yarra and where, in the garden, parrots crash around in the trees. The Talk has now matured fully and is probably at its best. I give it an airing at a seminar at the Bionic Ear Institute. Despite the name (which started as a laboratory joke but stuck) this is a semi-autonomous institute of the University of Melbourne. It is independent because it is also a collaboration between the University, the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and Cochlear, the Australian spinout company which developed one of the most successful cochlear implants. Cochlear, started by Graham Clark in the late 1970s, now makes over 70 per cent of the world’s cochlear implants. Is this marriage between industry and university a pattern which we shall all face for new Institutes? In this instance Bionic Ear seems to be thriving.

The second talk in Melbourne takes at place at the Big Meeting in Melbourne. The Australian Health and Medical Research Council has, for the first time, organised a single big conference to take in all the separate biomedical research societies and charities. The meeting has been wildly successful and attracted 2000 delegates from all over Australia. It has done this by emulating the FASEB meetings in the USA. APPS, the Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society, which by itself might only muster 200-300 people, now forms part of a much larger meeting. The Australian Neuroscience Society, however, still stands outside this arrangement and meets in February. In Melbourne everyone is very enthusiastic about the meeting and its networking potential. There is the hope that it has reversed declining numbers attending APPS. The downside is that the meeting has to be professionally organised and the higher registration fees deter the younger students and postdocs. There are some exceptionally good communications on ion channels. To be broadminded, I also go to some sessions on tissue engineering.

I am introduced for the British Physiological Society Lecture by Peter Gage, the current president of APPS. He reminds the audience of the history of the visiting lecturer scheme. The next visiting lecturer is up to APPS to nominate. I am left hoping that I may not quite have dealt a death-blow to the exchange visits and that we can expect a nominated lecturer from Australia next year. This view is reinforced, I am glad to hear, by conversations I have that night at the conference dinner. It is held at a very bechromed and flash Melbourne Crown Casino. No physiologists are spotted gambling and I hope this is due to their advanced knowledge of probability theory. There are circulating magicians at the dinner and speeches by politicians. Both demonstrate admirable sleight of hand (could this be a way to test residual critical capacity at Phys Soc dinners?).

The last stop on the tour is Hobart. Nobody is an electrophysiologist here. My host is an authority on the platypus and the echidna and so in Tasmania is placed ideally for his work. The department of physiology has just recruited a zebra fish molecular biologist so even the most southerly Australian physiology department is joining international developmental biology. The last talk of the visit, now well honed, merges gracefully into the beer hour. I am let loose to look after myself in Tassie for several days. This is not too difficult. The white beaches border blue seas and stretch as far as the eye can see and, barring a few wallabies, are virtually deserted. I spend the time walking along a stretch of the most astonishing and empty coastline.

This was a trip which was undoubtedly too short. Despite my best intentions to give talks in the outback, the tour has skirted around the huge spaces of the Australian interior. To the first time visitor to Australia the distances are daunting. My hosts were enthusiastic, open and hospitable. There were experiments in social engineering being carried out to explore the future of physiology, possible given the much smaller populations of scientists. The Physiological Society itself might learn from these. But I am left thinking already that I should engineer another trip. And next time I shall make sure that any visit does not coincide with the complete collapse of the touring English cricket team.