Home > Media releases > 2001

AUSTRALIA HAS LOST ONE OF ITS MOST INFLUENTIAL AND POPULAR SCIENTIFIC LEADERS
6 March 2001

Sir Rutherford (Bob) Robertson, who died yesterday, was a plant physiologist, science administrator and former President of the Australian Academy of Science.

The President of the Academy, Brian Anderson, said today ‘on behalf of the Australian Academy of Science, I express the sadness we all feel at the loss of a most distinguished colleague and friend. He played a leading role in the development of Australian science in the post-war period, through his research and personal leadership. He was an inspiring leader and colleague and will be greatly missed.’

Rutherford Ness Robertson was born in Melbourne on 29 September 1913. His father was a Baptist minister and his mother was a person with natural curiosity and an interest in science.

After suffering from polio in childhood, Robertson attended school in Melbourne and Christchurch. In 1930, he went to Sydney University, where he studied chemistry and botany. After graduating he received a Science Research Scholarship and a Linnean Macleay Fellowship which allowed him to continue doing research at the university for three years. He studied the stomata (leaf pores) of plants of the Sydney district, building his own apparatus.

An 1851 Exhibition scholarship allowed him to go to Cambridge University. Under the guidance of G E Briggs, Robertson studied the transport of nutrients around plant cells. Thus began a long interest in the energy cycle and respiration in plants. He gained a PhD in 1939.

While at Cambridge he joined anti-war groups, where he met some influential communists, without becoming one himself. He married Mary Rogerson in Cambridge in 1937.

Back at Sydney University, he became an assistant lecturer in botany. After the start of World War II, which restricted shipping, he collaborated with CSIR (the precursor of CSIRO) on experiments to find better ways of storing apples, pears and wheat.

In 1946 he was invited to head the plant physiology and fruit storage section of CSIR, which then had laboratories in the Homebush abattoirs. There he combined basic research in plant physiology with practical applications relating to the development and ripening of fruit. He negotiated with the botany department of Sydney University to pool resources for a joint plant physiology unit, which started in 1952.

During the 1950s he continued to explore the link between plant respiration, which produced energy, and the active transport of charged particles in cells, which consumed energy. The biochemistry of this process was one of the frontiers of science at the time, occupying future Nobel Prize winners and other leading scientists in the USA, Britain and Sweden. In 1958 and 1959 he was visiting professor in horticulture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Robertson’s research was interrupted when the new Chairman of CSIRO, Sir Frederick White, invited him to join the Executive of that body. Of this position he has said, ‘You do well at administrative jobs if you take on somebody else’s problem and make it yours while you solve it. I found I could do it, but it took a great deal out of me.’

In 1962 he decided to return to his own research problems as Professor of Botany at the University of Adelaide. His spare time for research lasted only until 1965, when he became part-time Chairman of the Australian Research Grants Committee, which allocated research funds.

In 1969 the Australian National University offered Robertson the position of Master of University House, which gave him the opportunity to pursue his research interests. In 1970 he became President of the Academy of Science, having been elected to the Fellowship soon after the Academy’s formation in 1954.

While President he led an Academy group which discussed with French scientists the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. They disagreed on the likely effects.

He became Director of the Australian National University’s Research School of Biological Sciences in 1973. As well as running the school, he did research into the movement of energy across membranes. He retired in 1978.

Robertson was knighted in 1972 and became a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1980.

After his retirement he continued as Deputy Chairman of the Australian Science and Technology Council and Pro-Chancellor of the Australian National University. He continued research at the University of Sydney and CSIRO until 1986.

He made lasting contributions to Australian science through his own research, his leadership of other researchers, and by the influence he was able to exert within university and government administration.

He is survived by his wife, Lady Robertson, and a son, Robert.