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Professor John Sprent 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 Sprent's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers’ notes. The extract covers aspects of how some parasitic worms move within ecosystems and individual animal hosts. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
John Sprent was born in 1915, in Mill Hill (now part of London), England. He received an MRCVS diploma from the Royal Veterinary College in London in 1939. In 1942 he was awarded a BSc in zoology with first class honours from the University of London. After receiving his degree, Sprent went to work at the Vom Veterinary Station in Nigeria. His work there, on Bunostomum phlebotomum (hookworms) in cattle, resulted in a PhD (1945) from the University of London. Sprent received a DSc in 1953, also from the University of London.
In 1946 Sprent went to the University of Chicago. His research there focused on the parasitic nematode Ascaris suum, in particular the immune response of the host – this focus became his lifelong interest. His studies of Ascaridoidea (nematode worms) continued while he was a senior research fellow at the Ontario Research Foundation in Toronto, Canada, where he worked from 1948 to 1952.
Sprent moved to the University of Queensland in 1952 as a lecturer in veterinary parasitology. He remained at the university for the rest of his career. In 1954 he became research professor of parasitology in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and Parasitology and was professor of parasitology from 1956 to 1983. In 1961 a separate Department of Parasitology was established at the university.
A large variety of host animals have been the subject of Sprent's work – including pigs, cattle, beavers, lynx, bears, dogs, cats, mice, humans, snakes and crocodiles. His research has helped us understand many things about Ascaridoidea nematode parasites – how they get into their hosts, what they do when they get there and the implications for the host's health.
Over his career, Sprent has received many honours including the Henry Baldwin Ward Award (American Society of Parasitologists, 1962) and the Mueller Medal (Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 1981). He received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001. In 1984 he was invested as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). He was the editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Parasitology from 1974 to 1993.
Sprent was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1964. He is foundation president (1964) and fellow (1973) of the Australian Society for Parasitology and a foundation fellow (1971) of the Australian College of Veterinary Scientists.
Your work in Nigeria led you to write a PhD. What was it about?
I became interested in anaemia in cattle. And the anaemia that I was investigating was caused by hookworms, which gradually increased in numbers in the small intestine of the cattle. I did quite a bit of research on the blood picture, and the other aspect was: how did they get the worms? The worms landed up in the intestine and sucked blood and caused anaemia, but how did they get there?
Well, I showed that actually the eggs pass out in the droppings, the eggs hatch into little tiny larvae, and the larvae climb up the grass blades and penetrate through the skin of the cattle. When they have got through the skin they pass to the lungs and then they're coughed up and swallowed, and that's where they reach their final destination.
So that's really what I was doing in Nigeria. And when I had finished my tour, while the war was still on, I came back home to England and submitted my work for my PhD at the University of London.
Where did you go next, and why?
When I was in Nigeria I was very much impressed with the work of Dr WH Taliaferro [pronounced Tolliver]. Actually, he spelt his name T-a-l-i-a-f-e-r-r-o, but for some reason he called himself Tolliver, and everybody else called him Dr Tolliver. He was a great figure in the subject of immunity in parasitic infections, and he wrote an important book on the subject. I had seen that in Nigeria, and I had decided I wanted to go and work with him. So that's where I went next, to the University of Chicago. I was there for two years.
And after that?
After that, actually, I was offered a professorship in the University of Chicago. In order to accept it, however, I had to renounce my British subject status, and I didn't really want to do that. But, at a meeting, I had met somebody from the University of Toronto, and I became interested in the animals of the north, of the Arctic. This was because the particular group of worms that I was interested in by this time have an interesting life history: they start off at the bottom of what I call a life pyramid, where there are a lot of lowly animals such as earthworms, wood lice and various things like that, which take up the eggs of the worm. Those animals then get eaten by rats, mice and so on, which form the centre part of the pyramid. And then, finally, at the top there are the dominant carnivores – in this particular case, the polar bears, the lynxes, the bobcats, the wolves. I thought I'd like to go and work with them.
So I did, and I worked at several places up on Hudsons Bay. Actually, as my particular job at that time, I was assigned to investigate why the beaver had been dying. I had to go and collect their frozen carcasses. We used to go in a plane with skis, and then we would meet an Indian who would tell us where he had put the various beaver carcasses – which he'd been told to keep because we had this investigation going. But what we had to do was to go on snowshoes and find these carcasses. This was very interesting, and I stayed there for four years.
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