by Heather Rossiter
WISENET member Frances Edwards has recently moved her research lab to London where she has taken up a Senior Lectureship in Physiology at University College. Moving with the lab were her two Post-doctoral Fellows. It was a productive and happy lab in Sydney, all six workers being women but that was a matter of serendipity not design.
Edwards is a Sydney Uni graduate. She did honours in Behavioural Pharmacology and started a PhD in that discipline but whole animal experiments were not sufficiently analytical for her satisfaction. She transferred, as a Scientific Officer, to St Vincent's Hospital Open Heart Surgery and Respiratory Unit where she was inducted into electrophysiology. Her Behavioural Pharmacology project was abbreviated to a thesis for a Masters degree.
Dr Peter Gage at ANU gave her a place in his Electro-physiology laboratory where she began a PhD anew in the area of brain cell communication. Techniques of intra-cellular recording used in his lab suited her need for direct analytical procedures. For personal reasons Edwards moved to Germany after two years, transferring her ANU scholarship for its remaining nine months to the laboratory of Professor Sakmann in Goettingen. In this city, not too far from Hanover and near the East German border, Frances had turned four when her father, Dr Tony Edwards, had been there as a post-doctoral Fellow. A few months after Edwards left the lab Professor Sakmann, together with Professor Erwin Neher, was recognised with the award of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for the patch clamp recording technique they had developed.
Patch-clamping is another way of measuring events on cell membranes but with higher resolution than other techniques: it is possible to measure the current, in picoamps (10-12 Amps), through a single membrane protein. In Goettingen Edwards had the opportunity to combine the skill of making brain slices, learned in Canberra, with the patch clamp technique. Together with Sakmann and two other researchers she succeeded in applying the combined techniques to neurones which retained their original synaptic connections. For the first time communication between cells in the brain could be measured using the high resolution of the patch clamp technique. Their paper, with Edwards as first author, gave her career a good nudge along. The patch-clamping technique is now used world wide but 'it was a case of classic timing' being in the lab at that stage and being able to marry the methodologies from her Canberra experience with the new German development.
Sakmann found German money to keep Edwards in his lab for four years. Edwards found working within the more hierarchical, but highly productive, German system very different from the Australian approach where she had been given more independence than her German peers. The satisfactory resolution of this conflict of expectations was a great learning experience with some difficult moments. The association with Sakmann continued when, as a Post-doctoral Fellow, she moved with the lab to Heidelberg when Sakmann took up a new position there. Professor David Colquhoun, doing allied work in London using the nicotinic synaptic technique, visited the Sakmann lab and was interested in Edwards' work on the mechanisms of communication between brain cells.
Eighteen months in London with Colquhoun followed, supported by a European Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. Frances describes Colquhoun as 'a wonderful mentor'. Her work in London was an attempt to find a brain synapse where the message was carried by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. She found instead ATP acting as a neurotransmitter in the brain. Her Nature paper describing this was another career 'jolt'.
Personal reasons brought her back to Australia in early '92. Edwards sees Australia as a wonderful place to live, she had received her education here, her family was here. Unable to get funding to work independently she entered Professor Graham Johnston's lab. Not knowing the protocol, she had transgressed the unwritten rules of Australian Grants procedure by applying 'too early' for independent funding and earned herself a description of arrogance. She was fortunate that Dr Johnston was prepared to set her up in her own lab on his NH&MRC Program Grant, giving her a great deal of independence. Tremendously grateful for Johnston's support during this difficult time, she was able to start work in Australia and to learn those unwritten rules. Two years later the Australian Research Council gave Edwards a QEII Fellowship and an associated grant, guaranteeing an independent research salary for five years. She relinquished the remainder of this grant when she left for London.
Edwards is critical of Australian funding bodies, saying that young scientists who have proved themselves abroad must, if they wish to come home, take several steps backwards down the career ladder: they will not be funded for equipment so cannot set up their own labs but must work as a subsidiary of an established scientist. Even though eventually granted $40,000 p.a. research money (to cover other salaries, drugs, animals etc), she says this does not compare well with overseas grants, being not enough for any substantial amount of equipment, nor for a full year of postdoc salary. By comparison her first British grant is almost three times this amount and will, she hopes, not be her only one.
Overseas experience, Edwards says, is of value in many ways including being exposed to other ways of thinking and meeting other scientists which is invaluable for future career connections. Career-wise, the NH&MRC 'penalises mobility and overseas experience, encouraging mediocrity and lack of ambition,' she adds. The grant-awarding principles are hierarchical; it is not open competition for grants. Australia is not hierarchical socially in science but it is professionally. 'It is moreover very easy and typical for senior scientists, with large grants and multiple grants, to be critical of the rate of publication of junior scientists working on their own with minimal support,' she says. This does not encourage young scientists to return. 'It is not the scientific environment that brings them back, rather it is family ties and personal reasons.'
Asked about gender in this context, Edwards replied that it had probably been an advantage to be a woman in electrophysiology simply because of the novelty. 'The only disadvantages came on returning to Australia where I had the feeling that young women scientists are expected to be patient and wait for offers of advancement, whereas a man is less-readily categorised as "arrogant" for pushing for grants and wanting to advance his research.' There are few women beyond the postdoc level in electrophysiology: its combination of maths, computers, physics, electronics, soldering irons comes up against a mental barrier, culturally imposed. 'When I was at school very few young girls learnt basic skills like using a soldering iron, which tend to be assumed in this sort of field.' The London department to which she has gone is also male dominated. 'Perhaps,' she adds, 'things are getting better. Five out of eight postdoc applicants to the lab in Sydney were women and most didn't know the difference between Francis and Frances.'
In the Physiology Department at University College, Edwards is sited in the Wellcome Wing where a strong tradition in neurophysiology prevails. Professor Sir Bernard Katz, often considered the 'father of the field', though now in his eighties, is still a member of the department. Between the different departments situated in the Anatomy and Darwin Buildings and the new Wellcome Molecular Biology Wing Edwards will have more potential collaborators than in the whole of Australia. The department is flexible about teaching loads using a points system of award for lectures, tutorials, administrative tasks and for each research dollar brought into the department. Expecting to earn most of her points via research money, Frances will have a lighter teaching load compared to an equivalent Australian position.
Her research in London will be directed along two lines: studying the mechanisms of communication between neurones in the brain and the importance and features of ATP-mediated synaptic transmission.
Fellow members of WISENET wish her good luck in this new career move. Long may the grants continue.