Historical Records of Australian Science最新文献

Geoffrey Burnstock was a biomedical scientist who gained renown for his discovery that adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) functions as an extracellular signalling molecule. Born in London and educated at King’s and University Colleges, he did postdoctoral work at Mill Hill and Oxford. He moved in 1959 to the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne because he sensed there a greater freedom to challenge established thinking in physiology. His group found that transmission from sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nerves to smooth muscle was in some places not mediated by the accepted chemical messengers (noradrenaline and acetylcholine). He amassed evidence that ATP was this non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic (NANC) transmitter, using biochemical, histological and electrophysiological approaches: heretically, he styled this ‘purinergic transmission’. Geoff further upset dogma in the 1970s by proposing ‘co-transmission’ in which some nerves released ATP in addition to either noradrenaline or acetylcholine. He distinguished pharmacologically P1 receptors (activated best by adenosine and blocked by xanthines) and P2 receptors (activated best by purine nucleotides such as ATP) and he proposed in 1985 that the latter embraced P2X (ion channel) and P2Y (G protein-coupled) subtypes: about ten years later these categories were substantiated by cDNA cloning. From 1975 until his retirement in 1997, Geoff was head of Anatomy and Embryology at University College London (UCL), which he developed energetically into a large and strong research department. Later, as head of the Autonomic Research Institute at the Royal Free (part of UCL), he continued to collaborate extensively, and founded several journals and international professional societies. He widely sought clinical benefit for his discoveries, and both P2X and P2Y receptors have been developed as the targets of useful therapeutics (gefapixant, clopidogrel). Geoff was proud of his modest, rather humble, background and eschewed formality. He may have smiled when his early discoveries were met with cynicism, even ridicule (‘pure-imagine’ transmission noted one amusing critic), but this just reinforced his resolve and encouraged his encyclopaedic oeuvre.

By the late 1880s, the existence of alkyl derivatives of metals such as zinc and mercury was well established but diethyl magnesium had been poorly characterised and obtaining proof of its existence was a reasonable aim for chemists. Professor David Orme Masson and his student, Norman Wilsmore, at the university in the British colonial capital, Melbourne, accepted the challenge despite their distance from northern hemisphere centres of chemical research. The ‘tyranny of distance’ was tempered by their access to chemical journals and textbooks and by Masson’s connections at the ‘centre’, notably with William Ramsay. Wilsmore repeated the earlier experiments and also used methods that had been successful with other metals, but was unable to prepare diethyl magnesium. Masson rationalised this failure on the basis of the element’s position in the periodic classification of the elements that Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer had published, and on magnesium’s position on the atomic volume curve of Meyer, and concluded that diethyl magnesium could not exist. The weakness of these arguments was revealed when, near-coincidentally with Masson’s and Wilsmore’s publication of the results of their experiments, Philippe Löhr, working in Meyer’s laboratory, published successful syntheses of several alkyl magnesium derivatives by methods that had been unsuccessful in Wilsmore’s hands. Masson’s heuristic use of Meyer’s curve was unusual, and a notable feature of his approach to chemistry.

Hans Freeman was born in Germany and arrived in Australia with his parents in 1938. A brilliant student at the University of Sydney, he spent a seminal year at the California Institute of Technology before joining the staff at Sydney and initiating research on bioinorganic chemistry, studying metal ion complexes of compounds of biological significance such as amino acids, peptides and proteins. In his use of X-ray crystallography he was a pioneer in Australia, constructing his first crystallographic apparatus and mastering the necessary computing, at first by hand but soon with electronic computers. The culmination of his work with a series of collaborators was the structure of the blue, copper-containing metalloprotein, plastocyanin. Freeman also employed another advanced technique—X-ray spectroscopy and the study of X-ray absorption fine structure. He was a leading figure in Australia and internationally, and played an important role in gaining access for Australian scientists to international facilities such as synchrotron radiation sources at the dawning of the era of ‘Big Science’.

An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna. Unlike today’s field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach’s Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between science, birdwatching, recreation and conservation in early twentieth-century Australia. It shows how Leach’s heavy weighting on natural history was integral to his promotion of birdwatching as an edifying recreation that would lead people not merely to be able to name the birds they saw but also, more importantly, to understand, cherish and protect them.