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David Hunt looks at the world through a variety of eyes - including birds' eyes and human eyes preserved for 150 years.

When his English grandfather swapped his hobby of chrysanthemum-growing for budgerigar-breeding Winthrop Professor David Hunt's lifelong fascination with parrots and the way they see the world began.

When the greenhouse of his boyhood was suddenly transformed into an aviary, he did not realise that decades later he would become one of the world's foremost and highly cited experts on the evolution of vision not only in birds but in a wide range of species.

A new appointment in the School of Animal Biology, Professor Hunt's fascinating research career has involved extracting DNA from human eyes preserved for 150 years, and recovering and analysing bones from royal remains.

After making his home in Australia, the country in which budgerigars originated, his work over the past decade has been in the vision of marsupials, monotremes (egg-laying mammals) and sharks, working with experts including WA's Chief Scientist, Professor Lyn Beazley, and WA Premier's Research Fellow, Winthrop Professor Shaun Collin. They have formed a neuroecology group in the School of Animal Biology.

His focus as a young scientist was in trace-element metabolism in humans, in particular the enzyme processes that require copper.

"My interest in vision came in 1986 in Melbourne when Professor Jeremy Nathan published two papers in Science that identified the genes behind colour vision in humans and explained red/ green colour blindness.

"I was struck with the power of molecular biology to explain how systems have evolved, how they work, and their role in causing disease. When you understand the sequences, it all falls open."

After his stint in Melbourne, Professor Hunt returned to the UK to develop a molecular approach to understanding vision in primates including humans.

A particularly interesting project involved extracting DNA from the preserved eyes of the English chemist and pioneer of molecular atomic theory, John Dalton (1766 - 1844). Dalton and his brother were both colour-blind and Dalton is credited with formally describing the condition for the first time.

"Dalton was convinced the reason for the defect was a filter that changes colour perception. When he died he left his eyes to science, asking that they be removed and a light shone through them so the filter could be seen. Of course, there isn't a filter," Professor Hunt said.

"We extracted some DNA to see what form of colour blindness he had. Had he lost the long-wave receptors which give you red sensitivity, or middle-wave receptors, which give you green?"

Having successfully isolated DNA from Dalton's preserved eye, more ancient DNA work followed, this time with another famous family - the Royal House of Europe. With biochemist Professor Martin Warren, now at the University of Kent, and historian Professor John Röhl from the University of Sussex, Professor Hunt undertook a project to see if the ‘madness' - in fact the rare disorder porphyria - suffered by England's George III had also affected his relatives.

This involved recovering bones from the graves of German Princess Charlotte (who died in 1919) and her daughter Feodora (1945) and talking to the physician of English Prince William of Gloucester (1972). A book and a Channel Four documentary followed. And in work to develop a method of chromosomally sexing birds he met a surprising breeder of yellow (lutino or albino) budgerigars - another celebrity - the late British racing driver Formula One world champion, James Hunt. (They are not related).

Professor Hunt has lived in WA with his wife Gill for about a year. In that time, he has added another eight papers to his impressive record of more than 200 journal articles and books. And he said the most recent, in which Arctic reindeer's UV vision is explained as an essential survival adaptation allowing them to see food and white-furred predators in the snow, cannot be interpreted as an Englishman's hankering for a cold climate.

Published in UWA News , 27 June 2011