| Home | ||
| Background | ||
 |
List of interviews | |
| Alphabetical | ||
| Speciality | ||
| Sponsors | ||
| Order form | ||
| Contacts | ||
|
Teachers notes – Professor Elspeth McLachlan
|
 |
|
|
||
|
Professor Elspeth McLachlan was interviewed in 2000 for the Australian Academy of Science's '100 Years of Australian Science' project funded by the National Council for 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 McLachlan's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers McLachlan's early career when she first began working on the autonomic nervous system. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students. |
Funded by 100 Years of Australian Science |
|
Elspeth McLachlan was born in Bowral, NSW in 1942. She received a BSc Hons from the University of Sydney in 1963, then went to London. She worked as a test pharmacologist for Roche Products, screening anti-hypertensive drugs, before moving to the library of the British Museum.
She began teaching at the University of Sydney in 1970, and also became involved in neurophysiological research with Professor Max Bennett. The University of Sydney awarded her a PhD in 1973 for her analysis of transmitter release in ganglia, using electrophysiological techniques.
From 1974 to 1982, McLachlan worked at Monash University in the physiology department, where she started to look at both the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system.
In 1984 McLachlan moved to the Baker Medical Research Institute in Melbourne where she remained until 1988. She then became professor and head of the department of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Queensland. In 1993 she moved to Sydney as Conjoint Professor, Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute. Since 1999 she has also been the director of the Centre for Research Management, National Health and Medical Research Council.
McLachlan's research has increased understanding of how neural control is exerted by the autonomic nervous system. Her work has involved analyses of transmission in autonomic ganglia, the organisation of autonomic nervous pathways and their changes during pathological events. Her recent studies of the consequences of nerve damage hold promise for establishing the basis for a new approach to pain management.
McLachan was awarded a DSc by the University of Sydney in 1994 and became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1997. In 1998 she received the Ramaciotti Medal for excellence in Australian Medical Research for her position as the world authority on neural pathways within the autonomic nervous system.
| A much-needed trigger
Who was the right person, then? Max Bennett, believe it or not. He showed me what the world of doing professional science is like. Previously I had been working mostly in university and hospital laboratories as somebody’s research assistant, and although the questions were very important and the experiments we did were very good, we didn’t have much output. It wasn’t very well directed. Instead of answering very important questions or intermingling with the world, it was all done as if in a back room. Max gave me the view that you could actually become part of the science community, in which case you had to be professional and do things the way that real scientists did them. What I said I wanted to do at that time was the thing that you ended up doing: looking at the control of the cardiac pacemaker by the vagus and the sympathetic nerves. I spent six months mucking about, with absolutely no skill, trying to do the dissection of the pacemaker with the vagus nerve and the sympathetic nerves and everything, and they always died. You know about that, don’t you? Yes, I do. I was lucky, I had a very good trained hand – Graham Campbell used to do all the dissections for me. Well, I’d never done a dissection. I could do that now, I’m sure, even without your people showing me, but I had no training in skills or experience at all in doing that kind of thing. Max persuaded you to do experiments on ganglia. You were given a very good problem and you solved it incredibly well. Max was very good, letting me muck about with these stupid dissections for a while, and then he said, ‘Okay, that’s enough of that. Now you’re going to start poking these ganglia.’ The first year was very difficult for me, I must admit, because I had no electrophysiological training either. He just showed me mechanically what to do, but I didn’t understand very much until I had been doing it for about a year and gradually things started to fall into place. I don’t know if it was Max who put me onto the thing that most turned me on at that time. It might have been because I knew Steve Redman that I got very interested in trying to work out how sympathetic neurons integrated information along their dendritic trees (in the same way that Steve was working at that time on motor neurons in the spinal cord). It seemed to me we should be able to use the same principles, and, as it turns out, we can. But I’ve only just now, after 30 years, got to the stage where we have some model of how we might begin. One can do much more elegant things in motor neurons – simply because the neurons are much larger and you can do more with them than with sympathetic ones. So I never really solved that problem, and integration still has a number of very interesting questions for me. An attraction to the autonomic nervous system I came to Australia because of its great strength in the autonomic nervous system in the early ’70s. That must have been about when you started work on it. I started in 1970, but I had been working on cardiovascular innervation for some time. The cardiovascular control side of autonomic physiology was already in existence; it has been quite strong in this country for a long time. But you are referring to the burgeoning of Geoff Burnstock, Mollie Holman and Mike Rand in Melbourne, and the offshoot of their students – Max was one – who became the seeds of groups all over the country working in autonomic physiology.
Focus questions
|
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.
- McLachlan did some work on the cardiac pacemaker. Find out more about the this pacemaker and how it controls contractions of the heart.
- McLachlan's work has primarily been in the area of the autonomic nervous system. Find out more about the nervous system and write a short essay about how it works.
- Write a definition of a ganglion (plural ganglia).
- Access Excellence (USA)
-
The effect of math anxiety on cardiovascular homeostasis
The heart is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Students measure changes in heart rate during an arithmetic test. -
Signal transmission in the nervous system
Students time how long it takes for a hand squeeze to travel around a circle of people.
-
The effect of math anxiety on cardiovascular homeostasis
-
Investigating the nervous system (Illinois Institute of Technology Smile Program, USA)
Students determine which end of an earthworm is more sensitive to odours, sound and light. -
Interactive word search puzzle – autonomic nervous system (Neuroscience for Kids, University of Washington, USA)
Using the computer mouse, students find and circle hidden words.
autonomic nervous system
cardiac pacemaker
ganglia
neurons