I was interested in science form the age of 12 when I went to secondary school in Hobart. By the end of my first week the physics master had us out on the tennis court with some very slow photographic paper, a horseshoe magnet which we held underneath a paper and iron filings which we sprinkled on top. He collected the paper, developed it and presented us with our very own pictures of a magnetic field. I’ve still got mine. The chemistry master was equally imaginative, because he explained to us how iodine tincture was made. We all knew iodine because in those days our mothers dabbed every little scratch with it. This sort of information so early in my secondary career captured my imagination and from then I was hooked on science.
I was very fortunate to be able to study for a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Melbourne. I then set my sights on doing a Master’s degree and I was fortunate enough to be selected to do that in Organic Chemistry. It was a marvellous fifteen months or so. The group that went on to their Master’s year was a very challenging group of men and quite frankly I was overawed by their calibre. We used to get out on the lawns at lunchtime, have lunch together and talk chemistry. We all pushed each other along, or if you like, dragged each other along. It was a very, very stimulating period, something I look back on with gratitude.
I was called into my Professor’s office one day and he said there was a job going at Kraft Foods, and that I had an appointment to see Dr. Callister there. I went to see him and he appointed me as a research chemist to begin in March 1938. He had been appointed to the company in 1923 to develop a yeast extract that became Vegemite. He told me that there was a new method for measuring vitamin B1 chemically, that he wanted me to develop that method and use it to measure vitamin B1 in Vegemite. This was a marvellous challenge because it was real research. I developed simple equipment, methodology and so forth and I soon began to get results. I was able to do basic work on model solutions which led to quite a number of papers in refereed journals. I then extended my work to food and found that the same kinetic treatment that I was using for the model solutions, applied just as well to the degradation, the hydrolysis of vitamin B1, in foods. This was important in being able to predict how long the vitamin would last in a product in a given market. During the War, Sir Stanton Hicks, who was setting up ration scales for the armed services, came to see me and saw what I was doing. He subsequently wrote Vegemite into the ration scales as a source of vitamin B1 because in those days there were no supplies of the synthetic vitamin. So Vegemite became part of the ration scales for the Australian servicemen, particularly in the tropics as protection against beriberi.
We extended this work to other B group vitamins, riboflavin, niacin (nicotinic acid) and folic acid and we were able to tell paediatricians how much there was of these factors in the product, so they were able to write Vegemite into the diets of young children which was then taken up by the baby health centres. This happened during the War and the company had to ration Vegemite so that it went to the segment of the population that needed it the most, the very young. Yeast extract, in this case Vegemite, is a concentrated source of the B group vitamins. Vitamin B1 is present in other constituents of the diet and what I was doing was simply making sure that the mathematical treatment, the kinetic treatment that I had observed and recorded in the model solutions and in the yeast extracts in Vegemite, also applied to other foods - particularly during cooking. I visited the directors of maternal and infant welfare in Melbourne and in Sydney and later, New Zealand. These ladies were a bit sceptical but I was able to go in with reprints of my papers and talk to them as another scientist, so I had no trouble. This was the translation of the results from the laboratory into the practice. Although it was tied up with a particular company product, we knew it was right. By this time a lot of the dieticians and nutritionists knew what I was doing and they read my papers in reputable journals, so there was no problem.
At the same time as I was working on the chemical methods, work was being done by our microbiologist on the microbiological methods for nicotinic acid and folic acid, and together with colleagues we produced a paper on folic acid. I also jointly published a similar paper on riboflavin, another of the B group vitamins. Unfortunately Dr Callister died in 1949 and the company went through a considerable reorganisation. In the early `50s we built a new research laboratory in Port Melbourne. By this time my group had expanded to seventeen, and whilst I was not scientifically involved, work was being done on cheese starters. It was also a time that factory audits were developed at Kraft; a system of identifying and documenting hazardous points in a food process, working out methods of controlling the hazard and reducing the risk. This was the work of Miss Margaret Dick, who also is a Fellow of the Academy. In this she was ahead of the Americans.
We also worked on gas chromatography, a method of separating the constituents of gaseous components. I discerned that this was going to be fairly important and that no food company could really exist without a gas chromatograph because it dealt with extremely low concentrations of substances and was very powerful in assessing contaminations of all kinds and their effect on flavours. One of my staff offered to build one and I let him go ahead and do it. The hook we hung that on, to justify the expenditure, was cheese flavour. He became expert and so we began to apply it to packaging. In 1956 I went to America and I came back convinced of the need for the scientific control of packaging. So, I set up a small packaging section. Gas chromatography was applied to packaging and was very important in studying the transfer of gases across a film, because when an unprocessed cheese is wrapped it continues to live. The micro-organisms continue living and produce carbon dioxide causing the package to swell, so it needs to be permeable to that. Nor should the cheese dry out through losing moisture. On the other hand oxygen must not come in because it promotes mould, so the film had to achieve a number of things. At this time I oversaw four sections: chemistry, microbiology, food technology and packaging. My great advantage was that the people I had in charge of those sections were first class and I could let them run.
I suppose looking back my greatest career achievement is the building up of Kraft R&D. By the middle of the 1960s we had about sixty-five people. It mushroomed. After Dr. Callister, the Chief Executive Officer, Mr H.G. Osborne strongly supported R&D and allowed me to run the department within the broad company policy guidelines. Outside Kraft I am proud of the contribution I was able to make to the founding of the Academy.
My other great interest was food additives and contaminants and I wrote a small book on them. The Commonwealth Committee on Food Additives and its successor, on which I served for thirty three years, was concerned about food additives and contaminants. The committee included scientists from food industry, Commonwealth Health Department people, medicos, toxicologists and university people. There was a growing consumer anxiety about food. Regulations require additives to be stated on the packet but not as long organic chemistry names. They do not mean anything to the consumer and are not pronounceable. When Europe looked into this, they introduced what they call the ‘E’ numbers, the idea being that if a product contained an additive with an ‘E’ number, then the consumer could be sure that that additive had been thoroughly assessed. We use the same ‘E’ numbers but without the ‘E’. We deleted the additives we didn’t particularly want to use and added those we did want. We would get an application from the food industry to use a substance and we would look at all the evidence we could get as to the safety of that particular additive in the concentration at which it was proposed to be used. The two of us from industry knew that in one or two cases we were going to hurt our own and other companies. The industry created a bit of a fuss but then began to understand and very quickly accepted the position. The Committee has been disbanded, unfortunately.
I became one of a small group to look into the value of an Academy of Applied Science because the Academy of Science in Canberra had different categories for election and excluded a lot of very good people. At a meeting I chaired as convenor, I made a speech about what we were proposing to do and asked for support. In attendance were Sir Ian McLennan, Sir Maurice Mawby, Sir Willis Connolly, Sir William Hudson, Dr J R Price, then Chairman of CSIRO, and Dr Louis Matheson, Vice-Chancellor of Monash University together with my colleagues, Drs Bob Ward who arranged the meeting with Sir Ian McLennan, Bill Whitton, Louis Davies and Howard Worner. For valid reasons Drs Price and Matheson declined but the four knights joined us and we became a committee for a new Academy. In due course Dr Matheson became a Foundation Fellow.
I think the Academy has a vital role in continuing to advise government on the areas in which it quite obviously has expertise. We have already established the fact that we can provide expertise in a number of different areas of application of technology and science. I also think that there is an important role to be played in bolstering the teaching of science and technology in the schools. You’ve got to capture children in primary school and then very early in their secondary education. They have to be challenged very early by the concept of what science can do and what they can do in science. There is a tendency for people to think that science is boring or too hard. It has got to be made interesting and exciting. I think this Academy has a role to play in that. Also, we have to retain in science and technology, a lot of people who are coming through to degree stage. That is perhaps another area in which this Academy can be useful, in making people at the post-education stage aware of what science can do and its limitations.
The future for food science and technology looks quite bright. There are a lot of things happening. There are some aspects of the organisation of it that I’m a little bit wary of, such as the way in which CSIRO is being pressed towards application all the time. There has got to be blue sky research. There have got to be people permitted to ask questions. Insofar as Australian research generally is concerned, there has got to be a group of people always doing research for its own sake. This is why I’m fearful.
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