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Video Histories of Australian Women Scientists
Marian
Heard
Development Officer Australian Academy of Science
Canberra
The Australian Academy of Science’s Video Histories of Australian Scientists project provides a valuable resource, including video interviews, online transcripts and teachers notes. The Academy established the project in 1993 to record interviews with outstanding Australian scientists for this and future generations. The scientists talk about their early life, development of interest in science, mentors, research work, and other aspects of their careers.
To date, 63 interviews have been completed, 22 of them with women. The website at www.science.org.au/scientists is becoming increasingly popular and now receives over 5,000 hits per month.
Dr Shirley Jeffrey, marine biologist and a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Science, was interviewed in 2000 by Dr Trevor McDougall.
Following is a summary of Dr Jeffrey’s career and an excerpt from the edited
transcript of the interview. The complete edited transcript of the interview
appears on the Academy's website at
www.science.org.au/scientists/sj.htm. Summary of Career Shirley Jeffrey was born in Townsville, Queensland in
1930. She received a BSc from the University of Sydney in 1952 and an MSc in
1954. For her PhD, she went to King's College Hospital Medical School in
London and worked on the effect of aspirin on carbohydrate metabolism. She
returned to Sydney in 1951 to work with Dr George Humphrey at CSIRO Division
of Fisheries and Oceanography. This was the beginning of her lifelong career
in marine science. Her work involved finding a chemical method for measuring
microscopic algae in the ocean. Her approach was to separate the pigments in
microalgae and to purify the major marine chlorophylls. From 1962 to 1964, Jeffrey was at the University of
California, Berkeley, as a research fellow funded by the Kaiser Foundation.
Here she learned new photosynthetic techniques and became aware of new methods
that allowed the discovery of two new chlorophyll c pigments. In 1965 she was
invited to join the maiden voyage of the Alpha Helix, the research
vessel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of
California, which was coming to Australia to study the ecology of the Great
Barrier Reef. On this trip she investigated the pigments in the microalgae
that are symbiotic in tropical reef animals. Jeffrey was a principal research scientist at CSIRO's
marine biochemistry unit between 1971 and 1977. From 1977 to 1981 she was a
senior principal research scientist at CSIRO Division of Fisheries and
Oceanography and then acting chief of CSIRO Division of Fisheries Research
(1981-84). In 1991 she became a chief research scientist. From 1978 to 1995 Jeffrey was in charge of developing
the CSIRO Collection of Living Microalgae (also known as the Algal Culture
Collection), a valuable resource for both research and industry, and helped
design the facilities that now house the collection. In 1996 UNESCO published
Phytoplankton Pigments in Oceanography which Jeffrey co-edited. Jeffrey received the inaugural Jubilee Award of the
Australian Marine Science Association in 1988. She became a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Science in 1991. In 2000 she became a Foreign Associate
of the American National Academy of Sciences, and received the Gilbert Morgan
Smith Medal for research in algae. Jeffrey became a Member of the Order of
Australia in 1993. Excerpt from interview "Beginning to
be inspired by science." Interviewer: What led you to study science? Was it
your school experience, perhaps? My father was an executive in an American oil company.
He was always being moved around Australia as he ‘climbed the ladder’, and so
I went to 14 different schools. The one which had the most positive effect on
me was the Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne, where I was for four years
(1942-46). That wonderful school developed all aspects of the children, from
the academic to music to sport, art, craft and business. At the age of about
15 I did a general science course there, with an absolutely marvellous teacher
who inspired me with the wonder of the natural world and how it worked. I
became interested in general biology and the function of the cell and how the
animal body worked. It was the functioning of the animal body that inspired me
– and the character of Miss Connie Glass, who was our science teacher. At this
time, too, I was inspired by reading a book on the life and work of Marie
Curie, who worked in a lab with her husband. I thought in my romantic, young
way how wonderful it would be to have such an experience myself. For several years in the 1970s, your group – while
remaining part of the CSIRO – was moved from Cronulla to the University of
Sydney. Would you tell us about that? The CSIRO Executive, reviewing the Division in the
1970s, decided that Dr Humphrey should set up a new Marine Biochemistry Unit.
We eventually settled in the Botany Department of Sydney University, where I
met Dr Maret Vesk, an expert electron microscopist who was looking for a new
field to study. Although our Algal Culture Collection was still only small,
about 30 strains, those cultures of microalgae and their unique cell
ultrastructure inspired her, and with her excellent techniques we were able to
do a lot of collaborative new work with microalgae. That allowed us to expand
into the field of microalgal taxonomy, where you need to have ultrastructural
details of the cell surface and internal structures to establish species
concepts. What caused your group to move back to Cronulla, in
1977? A new Chief, Dr K Radway Allen (a fisheries scientist)
had been appointed in the 1970s to revitalise the Division at Cronulla. There
was a gap in the food chain studies because all the algae work had been moved
to Sydney University, so we were reviewed again by CSIRO and they decided to
send me back with the Culture Collection, to Cronulla in 1977-78. To establish
microalgae work again in the Division, Dr Radway Allen gave me a lot of
resources, particularly money, to set up a good algal culture facility.
Instead of the usual air-conditioned room with a few lights, a few shelves and
no back-up, we designed new facilities to have three walk-in algae growth
rooms, six cabinets all temperature-controlled with duplicate compressors, and
back-up machinery in case anything went wrong. So the facility was much safer,
and being able to grow algae under any temperature, from 5ºC for polar
organisms to 30ºC for tropical organisms, allowed the scope of our work to
take off. That was a wonderful period – and a Dutch postdoctoral fellow, Dr
Gustaaf Hallegraeff, who came just for eight months to learn techniques, is
still here, now Professor of Plant Science in the University of Tasmania, over
20 years later! [photo: sj7.tif] Scanning electron micrograph of
golden-brown alga (coccolithophorid), Emiliania huxleyi (5 mm
diameter) After four years of rapid growth of the Algal Culture
Collection, and of work on phytoplankton ecology and electron microscopy, you
received a phone call from the Executive of CSIRO. What was that about,
Shirley?
Early one morning (in late 1981), the phone rang, and Dr
Ken Ferguson, our Institute Director, asked me, ‘Would you become Acting Chief
of the Division of Fisheries for six months?’ My response was, ‘How can I,
when I know nothing about fish?’ But I did say yes. That was a time of great expansion for CSIRO in marine
science, including a new research vessel, the Franklin, and my six months as
Acting Chief became three tumultuous years while the Division moved from
Sydney to Hobart. Let’s look now at your scientific research
achievements. To turn the clock back to the early days in Cronulla, when as a
fresh research scientist you were given the task of purifying chlorophyll:
just what was the task and how did you go about it? I set the flasks in a special configuration in the
freezer and used the appropriate solvents for crystallisation to happen,
achieving a lovely dark emerald green–red fluorescent solution. But next
morning a desperate sight awaited me: the green had turned to a yellowish
colour and there was a lot of red material at the bottom of the flask. I was
devastated. I thought all the chlorophyll must have broken down, because
chlorophylls are very sensitive compounds, highly reactive, and the littlest
thing such as traces of oxygen or acid can destroy them. I thought the
washing-up assistant had not cleaned the flasks properly, leaving on them
traces of the chromic acid that we used for cleaning the glassware. So I
offered to do all my washing up for the next couple of months, doing the
rinsing and everything, and set off down the hill again for my next batch of
seaweed. I went through the same purification processes in the
ensuing weeks and got to the same stage, only to find the emerald green
solutions turned yellowish again, with a red sediment on the bottom. But then,
when I examined the red material under the microscope to see what it was,
there was the answer: the most beautiful green–red fluorescent crystals I had
ever seen! We had done the job but I hadn’t recognised it the first time
round. So they had gone down the sink the first time? Over the past 15 years your work has been very
beneficial to the aquaculture industry. Perhaps you could say how that came
about. In those days, however, some algal cultures would
'crash' unaccountably overnight – a devastating financial disaster for farmers
who had millions of, say, oyster larvae needing their daily food. So one thing
we were looking at was the health of the cultures: the procedures used for
maintaining sterility, freedom from bacteria, and the correct light,
nutrients, aeration and temperatures for growing the particular microalgae. As
a result, we put in proposals to the Fishing Industry Research and Development
Council (FIRDC) for money to help the aquaculture industry by looking at the
nutritional qualities of microalgae grown under different conditions, and
searching for new Australian strains suitable for Australian conditions. We were able to do very rigorous nutritional work on our
microalgae strains and to recommend to the industry better, more useful
strains, as well as Australian isolates. That has been a great use of our Culture Collection: for
the first time it could be used not only for research but in an industry that
was very important to Tasmania. We were able to get the early stages of fish
farming husbandry onto a good footing. [photo: sj4.tif] With colleague Jeannie-Marie Leroi
in the CSIRO Algal Culture Laboratory, Hobart (1990). The Algal Culture Collection has been used also for
the study of toxic dinoflagellate blooms. How did that work begin?
In Hobart in 1984, our new Chief no longer gave us
responsibility for offshore work, so we were looking around for new things to
do. One day Dr Gustaaf Hallegraeff took a plankton net down to the CSIRO wharf
to see what he could find of interest. Within half an hour he came back
saying, ‘The river’s full of toxic algae.’ (Having held an international algae
workshop in Cronulla just before we moved to Hobart, we could easily recognise
the strains.) So Dr Hallegraeff received FIRDC funds to study how and why
these toxic algae came to be there in fish farming areas. They seemed to have
been a recent introduction, and Gustaaf’s careful work and lateral thinking
led him to think that some of the overseas ships (for instance the Japanese
woodchip ships that came to Triabunna and Hobart) might have emptied out their
ballast water, complete with toxic algae which were normally present in the
highly polluted Japanese waters at the ports of origin. We now have a lot of those strains in our Culture
Collection. Dr Sue Blackburn, in our laboratory, has succeeded in working out
the life histories of these species. We have been able, by genetic mapping, to
find out which of the strains we have here are compatible with which overseas
strains, and there certainly seems to be a linkage between the Tasmanian and
the Japanese strains. It is highly likely that they were a recent
introduction. The way to cope now, since we’ll never get rid of these
microalgae, is to know their life cycles, to have very rigorous monitoring
programs and to have the oyster farmers very clued up about it all. The local
State Fisheries now do a lot of monitoring, both of the algae and of the
toxins they can put into the food chain.
There had been some attempts to purify the
marine chlorophyll, known as chlorophyll c. Chlorophylls a and b are found in
green leaves and had been extensively studied by the early pioneers, but the c
compound was only found in marine forms and needed urgent study for helping to
assess algal biomass in the sea. In order to do that you had to have the pure
compound, but getting enough material from microalgae would be difficult so I
decided to use seaweeds growing off the laboratory at Cronulla. I used to go
down and collect a few fronds of Sargassum, extract it in the lab and separate
the various fractions of pigments by chromatography. It was a long, long
development, because the problem with the chlorophyll c was getting rid of all
the polar lipids that were in the fraction, and I had to use the technology of
the day (not very advanced) for lipid fractionation. After many months of
struggle I thought my preparations were very close to crystallisation – by now
my tests for detecting the presence or absence of lipid were showing me that
my purified extracts should be pretty clean.
Yes. I was expecting green or black crystals,
not red. Chlorophyll is a compound for absorbing light and transferring the
light energy on to other compounds. I hadn’t realised that when it was pure it
would also emit absorbed light (at another wavelength). It was showing its
potential characteristic as a highly reactive light-absorbing compound, but of
course I hadn’t thought of that. Nature had to show it to me. That was a great
moment.
Before we came to Hobart, our Culture Collection
was used very actively by many institutions in Australia for research and
teaching. But then, when we transferred to Hobart in 1984 we immediately were
asked to assist the Tasmanian aquaculture industry. Tasmania has a flourishing
aquaculture industry – fish farming, oysters, mussels, salmon and so on –
which use microalgae in mass cultures for feeding larval fish and shellfish.
A videotape of Dr Shirley Jeffrey’s interview
can be purchased from the Academy or borrowed from Cinemedia. For
ordering details and a full list of videotaped interviews, transcripts
and teachers notes available in the Video Histories of Australian
Scientists series, see
www.science.org.au/scientists.