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Professor Bruce Holloway was interviewed in 2008 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 Holloway's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract discusses his decision to study the genetics of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Bruce Holloway was born in South Australia, in 1928. From an early age he was interested in growing things, particularly plants. He received a BSc (hons) from the University of Adelaide in 1948. He had done some of his honours year research at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute and after his graduation returned to the Waite as a lecturer in plant pathology from 1949 to 1950.
In 1950 he went to the USA and studied at the California Institute of Technology. Using the fungus Neurospora, his research investigated heterokaryosis (when the mycelium, ie the vegetative part, of a fungus contains two or more genetically different nuclei). In 1953 he was awarded a PhD for his work.
Holloway returned to Australia and worked as a research fellow in microbial genetics at the John Curtin School of Medical Research from 1953 to 1956. His initial work was setting up a genetic system for the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Pseudomonas is a common genus of bacteria, many of its species can cause diseases in humans, animals and plants). This work moved with him when he relocated to the University of Melbourne. He was there from 1957 to 1968 as senior lecturer in bacteriology (1957–60) and then reader in microbial genetics (1961–68). He was awarded a DSc from the University of Melbourne in 1966.
In 1968 Holloway became the foundation professor of genetics at Monash University, a position he held in addition to being head of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology until 1993. He was appointed as an emeritus professor at Monash University in 1994.
Over his career, Holloway has been a visiting scholar at numerous institutions worldwide including the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne (1977–78), University College London (1971–72), University of California at Berkeley (1966–67) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1962–63). He has also been influential in training agriculturists from developing countries in the management of agricultural biotechnology research, through his work with the ATSE Crawford Fund.
Holloway has received numerous international honours including the Kathleen Barton Wright Memorial (1998) of the Society for General Microbiology and Institute of Biology, UK. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1989 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001.
Holloway was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1979 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1990.
Between 1953 and 1968 you worked at the ANU and then at Melbourne University. Had your experience at Caltech influenced your research direction – for example, the area of biological science which would become of most interest to you?
Well, yes, it did. When I left the Waite for Caltech, I did have a plan. Although I didn't have a permanent position in plant pathology, David Adam said he would guarantee me a job when I had finished my PhD in genetics. I think he realised that genetics did have a role to play in plant pathology. Unfortunately, he died in 1951. So, when his successor was appointed, I wrote to him, said that I was doing this degree and I had this verbal arrangement with David Adam, and asked what the situation was. On the same piece of paper, however, this guy wrote back, 'I don't feel obliged to honour any of my predecessor's promises.' I then was out of a job. I didn't know of any other place in plant pathology I could go to, so it seemed to me that since I was learning a lot of genetics, I would be a geneticist. (In actual fact, about nearly 35 to 40 years later, I came back and did some plant pathology work using the genetics that I had learnt in the meantime. So I went full circle.)
As I was realising I had to get a job now in genetics, somebody from the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research visited Caltech during a world trip on laboratories. I think he was the laboratory manager, rather than a scientist. I got to meet him and I told him about myself, saying that I would like to come back to the ANU, if possible, doing microbial genetics. He duly reported this to Frank Fenner, who had been appointed as the professor of microbiology. Later on, I was sent a copy of an advertisement for a research fellow in microbial genetics, which to some extent was targeted at me, and I applied. I don't know whether there were any other applicants, but I got the job.
So, at the beginning of 1953, I went to Canberra to see Frank Fenner. Because the laboratories weren't ready, I had to spend some time working at Fairfield Hospital, in Melbourne, but eventually I got a lab in Canberra. Frank had said, 'Now, you can do anything you like, provided it's not Neurospora genetics,' and I had to think of another topic. He suggested one for me to start with, which I did, but at the same time I worked on a longterm project.
At Caltech I had been impressed with the bacterial and bacteriophage genetics work that was going on there. I'd also been impressed by the fact that every day these guys would ring up people all over the States and talk about their current experiments – there was this network of instant information being passed from laboratory to laboratory. Realising that if I was working in Canberra I would be outside that network, I decided that I really had to get another topic in bacterial genetics. So I went through Topley and Wilson, the classic microbial textbook of the day, to work out another bacterium in which it would be good to establish genetic systems, and I settled on Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
I would have been less confident of starting that if I'd known two things. The first was that in about 1948 or 1949 an extremely famous French scientist, François Jacob, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize, had been faced with a similar situation to do his doctoral work at the Pasteur in Paris. He had started with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to work out a genetic system of exchange, but had been unable to get it to work, so he went on to study the bacteriophages of aeruginosa. (Pseudomonas aeruginosa was very rich in bacteriophages, and that was one of the things that attracted me to it.) So he published his thesis on phages, not genetics, of Pseudomonas. And somebody in Adelaide had also been unable to get it to work. If I had known that two people independently had had the same idea but hadn't got it to work, I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic. Ignorance was bliss, however. I got the experiments together and the first one worked, so I was very pleased. Only later did I find out that it wasn't an original thought – but I was the first to do it.
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.
bacteria
genetics
Pseudomonas
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