View Sir Rutherford Robertson (1913-2001)'s photo gallery
You can order the DVD from the Academy for $15 (including GST and postage)
Sir Rutherford Robertson was interviewed in 1993 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 Robertson's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers Robertson's initial work on the relationship between aerobic respiration and salt uptake by plant cells. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Rutherford Robertson was born in Melbourne in 1913. He attended Carey Grammar School there and when his parents moved to New Zealand he attended St Andrew's College in Christchurch. In 1934 he received a BSc Hons from the University of Sydney.
In 1936 Robertson went to England to study for his PhD at Cambridge University where he worked on the relationship between cellular respiration and salt uptake by cells. He returned to the University of Sydney as an assistant lecturer in 1938 where he worked on apple and wheat storage.
Between 1946 and 1958 Robertson worked at CSIRO as the head of the section working on plant physiology and fruit storage. During this time he investigated the biochemical relationship between active transport and cellular respiration. He spent 1959 as a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and on his return to Australia joined the Executive of CSIRO. He received a DSc from the University of Sydney in 1961, and in 1962 was appointed professor of botany at Adelaide University, a position he held for 7 years.
Robertson moved to Canberra in 1969 to become master of University House at the Australian National University. He then became director of the School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University, a position he held from 1973 to 1978.
Robertson was active in the promotion of science in the national and international arenas. During 1965-69 he was chairman of the Australian Research Grants Committee, and in 1965 was president of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS). He was deputy chairman of the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) 1977-81, and president of the 13th International Botanical Congress in 1981
Robertson was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1954 and was president from 1970 to 1974. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1968 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1980.
Interviewer: So you went from Sydney to Downing Street and St John's College. What a botany school! When did you arrive there?
I arrived at the beginning of October 1936. I went in to see Briggs, of course, and gave him the work that I had been doing on stomates. He was not too uncomplimentary, but it was obvious that he had something that he really wanted his next research student to do. He suggested that I might put this stomate work aside and work on what was really interesting to him. That seemed to be good policy – to do what your supervisor wanted done – so I had no difficulty in doing that and was completely fascinated with the problem.
What work was that?
The best way to start is to say that all cells – plant and animal – take soluble constituents (nutrients and so forth) into them. They do it in such a way that quite often these constituents are being moved against their natural tendency, against the concentration gradient which makes them diffuse back out, but there is something that spends energy on taking these constituents into cells. Not at the time I started with Briggs, but later on, this came to be called active transport, meaning active in the sense of work having to be done to make these things move. We called it accumulation in those days, because it resulted in salts such as sodium chloride or potassium chloride accumulating in plant cells. If some work is being done in living organisms, the energy for that work comes from the process of respiration.
Briggs invited me to combine the measurement of the respiration with the measurement of the salt accumulation. We used slices of ordinary carrot roots, which were living cells. As the salt went into the tissue, the electrical conductivity of the solution that it had gone from would decrease because there was less salt in it. We had electrodes in the external solution, and we could measure the amount of salt that was going into the carrot discs.
The respiration resulted in carbon dioxide being given off, and we developed a technique for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide given off, which also depended on electrical conductivity of a solution. We bubbled air past the respiring tissue, and the carbon dioxide given off was taken into the air stream. We passed it through sodium hydroxide, in which the carbon dioxide combined to make sodium bicarbonate. The sodium bicarbonate has a lower conductivity than the sodium hydroxide, so we were able to get conductivity shift again. So it was a double conductivity shift that we were looking at.
Did it correlate the respiratory rate with salt uptake and accumulation?
Yes, it did. The system we were working with was very advantageous, because after we cut the tissue and put it in aerated water for 24 to 48 hours, the respiration rate dropped very low. When we put salt on it, it rose again and – to make a long story short – the increase in respiration was proportional to the amount of salt that was taken in. A good deal of my work went into establishing that close relationship with aerobic respiration.
And that was the core of your thesis?
Yes. I finished the thesis in December 1938, and I was examined orally by Maskell, who was a famous physiologist and my internal examiner in Cambridge; and Bennet-Clark, another physiologist who was the external examiner. They give me a viva, as it's called. Nobody told me whether I'd passed or not – nobody at all. There wasn't a hint. I was on the ship going to Australia, somewhere near Cape Town, when I got a telegram from my tutor in Cambridge saying that my PhD had been passed.
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.
These notes were developed from material supplied by Paul Parkinson.
© 2025 Australian Academy of Science
