Teachers notes

Dr Shirley Jeffrey
Marine biologist

Contents

Introduction
Summary of career
Extract from interview and focus questions
Activities
Keywords

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Introduction

Dr Shirley Jeffrey was interviewed in 2000 for the Australian Academy of Science's '100 Years of Australian Science' project funded by the National Council of the Centenary of Federation. This project is part of the Interviews with Australian scientists program. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge. The following summary of Jeffrey's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers Jeffrey's transition from research on aspirin and carbohydrate metabolism to her interest in marine algae. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.

Summary of career

Shirley Jeffrey was born in Townsville, Queensland in 1930. She received a BSc from the University of Sydney in 1952 and an MSc in 1954. For her PhD, she went to King's College Hospital Medical School in London and worked on the effect of aspirin on carbohydrate metabolism. She returned to Sydney in 1951 to work with Dr George Humphrey at CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography. This was the beginning of her lifelong career in marine science. Her work involved finding a chemical method for measuring microscopic algae in the ocean. Her approach was to separate the pigments in microalgae and to purify the major marine chlorophylls. From 1962 to 1964, Jeffrey was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a research fellow funded by the Kaiser Foundation. Here she learned new photosynthetic techniques and became aware of new methods that allowed the discovery of two new chlorophyll c pigments. In 1965 she was invited to join the maiden voyage of the Alpha Helix, the research vessel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, which was coming to Australia to study the ecology of the Great Barrier Reef. On this trip she investigated the pigments in the microalgae that are symbiotic in tropical reef animals. Jeffrey was a principal research scientist at CSIRO's marine biochemistry unit between 1971 and 1977. From 1977 to 1981 she was a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography and then acting chief of CSIRO Division of Fisheries Research (1981-84). In 1991 she became a chief research scientist. From 1978 to 1995 Jeffrey was in charge of developing the CSIRO Collection of Living Microalgae (also known as the Algal Culture Collection), a valuable resource for both research and industry, and helped design the facilities that now house the collection. In 1996 UNESCO published Phytoplankton Pigments in Oceanography which Jeffrey co-edited. Jeffrey received the inaugural Jubilee Award of the Australian Marine Science Association in 1988. She became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1991. In 2000 she became a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences, and received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal for research in algae. Jeffrey became a Member of the Order of Australia in 1993. Back to top

Extract from interview

Exploring microbiology and biochemistry, at home and abroad

So you did a first degree and a Master’s degree at Sydney University?

Yes. After majoring in microbiology and biochemistry for the BSc in 1952, I was offered a chance to do a Master’s (MSc) with Dr George Humphrey, in the Biochemistry Department. The topic of my thesis (completed in 1954), the metabolism of oyster sperm cells, was one aspect of a number of studies he was doing for the oyster industry in Sydney. Dr Humphrey was really my early mentor. He was marvellous in teaching me the fundamentals of experimental design and how to conduct experiments in the laboratory – I used to set out each day’s experiments and tidy up at the end of the day. He taught me to think.

After your Master’s degree you went to King’s College, in London. How did that come about?

In those days it was the done thing for young women to go overseas when they had finished the first stage of their studies or they had earned enough money. So I went off with a friend to see the world, and while I was in London I had the opportunity to join a small research group at King’s College Hospital Medical School, with the opportunity to do a PhD if the work turned out well. Although there had been a lot of applicants for the job, I was told later that it was my Australian accent that got me in, and the fact that I had done some rather ‘sexy’ things in my early Master’s research – related to oysters, of course.

My study and thesis at King’s College (completed in 1958) with Dr M J H Smith were in biochemical pharmacology, on the effect of aspirin on carbohydrate metabolism. In those days aspirin was used to treat diabetes but it had some hazardous side effects, and we were studying the bad side of aspirin treatment.

Entering the CSIRO world: a fateful encounter with microalgae

After your PhD, what led you back to Sydney, into a job at CSIRO at Cronulla?

I wanted to get back to Australia, but there weren’t very many jobs on offer. It was Dr George Humphrey, who had moved from Sydney University to become Chief of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography, who offered me a job.

He had become interested in biological oceanography, a worldwide trend in marine science at the time. We were looking for a simple chemical method for measuring the biomass of microalgae (the floating plants of the ocean) in seawater. The approach suggested was to harvest the microalgae, extract the pigments – the green chlorophyll – and measure, by a chemical spectrophotometric technique, the absorption of the chlorophyll at different wavelengths. This method could be carried out quite quickly and you could do masses of samples, provided you knew quantitatively the characteristics of the pigments in the marine algae. To find out those characteristics, my task was to develop a micro-method for separating all the pigments (up to one hundred) in the microalgae – of which there are tens of thousands of species, though conveniently grouped in 14 algal classes – and to purify the major marine chlorophylls found in many of the groups.

I came to this job (in 1958) from biochemistry and pharmacology, and when I told Dr Humphrey I didn’t know anything about algae he said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve been trained how to think, and how to carry out research, and you can always look things up in a book if you need to.’ I have never really studied this field formally, and I have been learning ever since those early days. I’m still learning.

An edited transcript of the full interview can be found at http://www.science.org.au/scientists/interviews/sj.

Focus questions

  • Jeffrey mentions that Dr Humphrey taught her the fundamentals of experimental design. What do you think these could be?

  • Jeffrey says that she was not trained in the field of algal studies, yet she has been very successful in this field. What aspects of her training might have contributed to her success?

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Activities

Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.

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Keywords

algae
chlorophyll
metabolism
spectrophotometry
pigments

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