Medical research and Ormond

Parkville is home to one of the great medical clusters in the world.

Within a short walk are the Royal Melbourne, Royal Children’s, Royal Women’s and Dental hospitals. Some of these hospitals are recognised as among the world’s best and all have doctors who are at the forefront of medicine. These hospitals will be joined by the Comprehensive Cancer Centre, which opens in 2016.

Alongside the hospitals are world-leading medical research institutes including the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
and the new Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, in addition to the University’s Medical School and Science Faculty.

In this remarkable cluster, around 10,000 scientists are pursuing biomedical research supported by $1.5 billion per year in funding.

Ormond’s connections with this precinct run deep and it is important to our future that we continue to nurture them. From the College’s earliest days, medical students have been a de ning part of Ormond. In the 19th century, when there were no medical schools in Western Australia, Queensland or Tasmania, many students came to Melbourne and found their home at Ormond. In the rst 100 years just on a quarter of all Ormond students were medical students and in the earlier years they comprised around one-third of the College.

With a significant number of medical students in those early years, the College saw the opportunity to add to their education. At that time the University’s teaching was done entirely by lecturers, with no practical work or tutorials. With an enthusiasm for modern subjects and modern teaching, Ormond built laboratories and ran practical classes and tutorials to ll the void. These were so valuable that they were very nearly recognised as credit towards a medical degree.

The teaching in those early years was commonly provided by Ormond medical graduates. The standard for this teaching was set by Thomas Peel Dunhill, who graduated with three rst-class honours and exhibitions, and became famous for his development of world-leading techniques in thyroid surgery. Later he earned a distinguished war record and became well known in Britain, where he was knighted and served as surgeon to four British monarchs, from George V to the current Queen.

There were other tutors like Dunhill who were also deeply interested in medical research. They began the tradition that connected the College with medical research and the institutes of the precinct. The first of these was Gordon Clunes Mathison, a much-loved tutor whom the College counts among its war dead, who was appointed the first Director of Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and whose full story is told in this edition.

He was followed by Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who came to the College from country Victoria on a scholarship. He recalled what a difference the College made to him as a shy country boy. His wealthier friends invited him to additional private tutorials that they had paid for and when he went to London, it was through the Ormond network of doctors there that he found rooms.

As is well known, Macfarlane went on to do ground-breaking research in virology and then immunology which won him a Nobel Prize. Among his many contributions, the techniques we still use today to mass-produce influenza vaccines are the result of his work. Like Mathison before him, Macfarlane went on to become the Director of the Institute. Later in life, after the death of his first wife, he returned to live in the College at Davis McCaughey’s invitation.

The importance of medical research and the role the College could play in supporting it have been understood by generations of doctors, but none more so than in the mid-20th century when Dr Alexander Hopkins Thwaites and Dr Kaye Scott endowed medical fellowships. The Alexander H. Thwaites and Richard C. Gutch Endowment supports medical research, being for a Research Fellowship in Physiology.

Over the years, the College has continued to produce an extraordinary range of medical researchers. The connections with the precinct remain strong, with two of the Parkville medical research institutes currently headed by people with Ormond connections. The Director of the Florey Institute is Professor Geoffrey Donnan, an alumnus who still returns to inspire the next generation of Ormond medical and science students. The other is Professor Doug Hilton, Director of Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, who lived in residence as a tutor.

The College’s links with the precinct are important. Medical research, including its interface with engineering and the commercial products it produces, will be a very important part of Victoria’s and Australia’s future. Retaining and strengthening our connections with this work will enable our students to contribute to that future and to bene t from it.

Our first step to is to strengthen our relationship with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, with which we have had so many links during its 100-year history. Ormond is joining with the Institute to associate the Thwaites and Gutch Research Fellowship in Physiology with the Institute so that the next Thwaites and Gutch Fellow will also be one of the Institute’s Centenary Fellows. Given that we do not have research labs anymore, we need a place where this Fellow can do their work while still being a part of the College. They will be in residence as a tutor so that they can support students interested in biomedical research to pursue research careers.

It is vital to the success of the precinct that it continues to attract the very best scientific talent from around the world. To support that mission and our links with the precinct, we want to create two scholarships for students pursuing PhD work in medical research at the Institute. We will name them after our first two Directors of the Institute, two of Australia’s greatest scientific talents: Gordon Clunes Mathison and Macfarlane Burnet.

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