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Dr Moira O'Bryan was interviewed in 2001 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. 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 O'Bryan's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers how she became ‘hooked’ on science and her current research. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Moira O'Bryan was born in 1966 in Berriwillock, Victoria. In 1989 she received a BSc (Hons) in pathology and in 1994 was awarded a PhD in medicine both from the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis was the result of work done at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital on the characterisation of clusterin, a protein found in seminal plasma, and how it affects male fertility.
Awarded a Mellon Foundation fellowship, O'Bryan worked at the Population Council at Rockefeller University in New York during 1993-95. While there she investigated the endocrinology of male fertility.
In 1996 O'Bryan was awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Peter Doherty Fellowship and took up a position at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development (MIRD) at Monash University. She is currently senior scientist and NHMRC R D Wright Fellow at MIRD and heads a team investigating components of the mammalian sperm tail, identifying their function and determining if they are associated with human male infertility.
O'Bryan received an NHMRC Career Development Award in 2001. She is a member of several research societies, including the Endocrine Society of Australia and the Australian Fertility Society, and is the secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Society for Medical Research.
PhD project: clusterin, male fertility and highly motivated patients
What did you work on for your PhD?
My PhD was again on clusterin [a protein found in seminal plasma], characterising where it was made in the body – specifically in the male reproductive tract – and just how it was involved in normal male fertility and how it was changed with different types of infertility. That involved a mixture of pure biochemistry, where I was purifying things, using big columns and what not, and quite a lot of clinical work. I had to go and see the patients of my other supervisor, Gordon Baker, talk to them about what had gone wrong with their fertility, get samples and then go back to them and say, ‘This is what I think is wrong,’ or ‘This is the information I’ve found out.’ I hoped that would help them, but I don’t know if it did. They were always very appreciative, though.
To have such face-to-face contact with patients was a very satisfying part of that project. They were a very highly motivated group of people, who did the most amazing things to try and achieve having children.
At about the end of 1993 you were awarded a postdoctoral fellowship.
Yes. It was a fellowship from a United States foundation supporting research into population control. So I went to the Population Council, at Rockefeller University, on Manhattan in New York – a fabulous place to work. My project was to purify a cell type from the testis, grow it and then look at what these cells were making. Again it involved a lot of biochemistry and a lot of growing cells and so on. It was a great time. I loved being there.
Mentors and a mind-blowing place to work
Did you have any mentors during your university years, or in New York?
My two supervisors, Gordon Baker and Brendan Murphy, were excellent mentors, in that they were very kind men who really went out of their way to help me. They cleared a lot of paths and put me in contact with the right people. Perhaps they saw abilities in me that I hadn’t realised I had.
In New York I don’t think I had a mentor, but Rockefeller was a very inspirational place to work. It is quite an amazing university – no undergraduate research but perhaps a thousand postdoctoral scientists, mostly from outside of America. At that time there were six Nobel Laureates on staff. It was absolutely mind-blowing to be in an environment of scientists working at such a pace, in such a well-respected place with so much money. It was a very contagious place to work: you wanted to work harder, to achieve more. I think that’s when I got hooked on science!
Enjoying collaboration
In 1996 you were awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council Peter Doherty Fellowship to return to Australia. Where did you take that up?
I came back to Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development, specifically to the group headed by Professor David de Kretser at Monash University, in Clayton. The Institute has grown in its 10 years from maybe 30 people to over 200, and it continues to grow. I may be a bit too close to the Institute to judge, but I think it’s a rising research centre that is becoming more and more important in Australia. Like Rockefeller, it is a very vibrant place to work – a lot of energy to get things done, a lot of collaborations between people, and a real pride in actually producing things at the end of the day.
I love collaborating with people. There are several scientists I work with constantly, and I think it’s true that two minds are better than one for a lot of things, particularly when you have students involved. Students can take up a lot of time and they do need – and deserve – a lot of attention, so if you have two supervisors or two people collaborating on a project, that is certainly better than one.
In just five years since returning, you have been promoted to senior scientist within the Institute, and I believe you now head a large research group of your own.
Yes. It certainly keeps me very busy. I currently have four PhD students, two research assistants, a postdoctoral fellow and a visiting clinician. Most of them are working on areas involving how sperm tails develop and how they move, but there is a spread of interests across reproductive biology. The PhD students are not as much work as they might have been, because they are very clever, they work very hard and they help each other – which is great for me.
Research projects, teaching and student assistance
What types of projects are you working on, and what do they involve?
I decided to divide the research into two main areas. Most of my students and staff work on rodent models of infertility, trying to find the genes that are important to enable sperm to be made. We will look for mutations in these genes and see how they affect sperm movement, for example, or sperm number. As a natural progression, we want to find out whether those proteins we have identified in the rat or mouse are important within human males. The clinical fellow and I spend a lot of time screening infertile men for mutations, to see if we can actually tie the rodent work with the human work for a story that fits together nicely. It happens sometimes that it does.
An edited transcript of the full interview can be found at http://www.science.org.au/scientists/interviews/mo.
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.
biochemistry
clusterin
male infertility
reproductive biology
rodent models
testis
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