News Archive

Professor Terry Nolan, Foundation Head of the University of Melbourne School of Population Health, says the Bachelor of Medicine Science degree was profoundly life-changing.

He had already had his interest in research fuelled by the Mary Raine Vocational Research Scholarship which he won at the end of second year medicine and again at the end of third year, which prompted him to undertake the BMedSc in his fourth year.

He and close friend Jim McCluskey, now Professor and Head of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne (see page 13), were the only two students to undertake the degree in 1973.

“It confirmed my interest in research,” Professor Nolan says. “I was offered a place to do a PhD at Cambridge at the end of my year but I decided instead to finish medicine first and to make a decision then about whether I would go into a full-time research career or not.”

During his BMedSc year he worked with Dr Gareth Jones, who later became Professor of Anatomy and Structural Biology and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International) at the University of Otago and who was a world leader in the description of nerve synapses.

“Our findings were novel and important in defining the ultrastructure (of nerve synapses),” he says, adding that they were published in several international journals.

“At the time, we were using cutting-edge electron microscope technology. We were looking at how nerves transmitted their messages from one nerve cell to another. The structure and how those electrical signals were generated were still being understood.”

In the same year, he used funds from a Sobotka scholarship to head for the University of Otago in New Zealand to work for three months in the pathology department where they were using a brand-new technique for examining the structure of cell membranes.

On his return to Perth, he taught the new technique to researchers at UWA.

“At the end of the year I was exhausted but I felt enthused and committed to continuing working in research in medicine,” he says.

Having completed his BMedSc, Professor Nolan was awarded yet another vocational research scholarship at the end of his fourth year and then, once he had graduated in medicine from UWA, he went interstate and overseas to undertake further studies and complete his training in paediatrics.

“But it (the BMedSc degree) was such an important year to give me the intense exposure to research at an early stage,” says the Professor, who is also Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences in the University of Melbourne. “It allowed me to confirm my interest by having some firm scientific training and a level of contact with other people working in medical research.

“It had a huge influence on my later life.”

Professor Nolan’s research career led him in the opposite direction to where he was heading during his BMedSc year.

“I have ended up pursuing research in humans and in public health which is quite the opposite end of the spectrum to laboratory research,” he says.

But his experience in the laboratory has been invaluable and made him appreciative of the importance of such research.

“The convergence of molecular information with epidemiologic and public health information is where things are going now,” he says. The work of virologists and molecular scientists who are “virus detectives” discovering new viruses is married with the findings of epidemiologic studies that provide the samples and with environmental information about the way in which epidemics spread.

His research centres on the epidemiology of respiratory viruses and other vaccine-preventable diseases. He is also involved at a high level in the evaluation of vaccines, such as the candidate vaccines being considered by CSL for protection against the bird flu in humans.

He is Director of the National Health and Medical Research Centre for Clinical Research Excellence in Immunisation and is Chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, among many other high-level positions.
-By Cathy Saunders