Medicine & Health

Colin Murdoch (b. 1929, d. 2008) of Timaru was working with colleagues studying introduced Himalayan thar (wild goat-antelope!) populations in New Zealand, and had the idea that if a dose of tranquilliser could be safely projected into one of the animals it would be a lot easier to catch, examine, tag and release. Murdoch was a pharmacist who had a veterinary practice on the side. During the Second World War, rifles and shotguns were not imported into New Zealand, so as a serious hunter, Colin became an expert at fixing and modifying guns. With the motive and the means, Murdoch began to develop the range of tranquilliser rifles, pistols and darts that revolutionised the way animals were studied and treated all over the world.

When the king of Sweden presented the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine, he didn't just give it to those limelight-hogging scientists J D Watson and Francis Crick. There was a third recipient, who seems to be often forgotten and was none other than New Zealander Maurice Wilkins (b. 1916, d. 2004).

Watson and Crick's contribution to the understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid is well heralded, and I would guess were you to ask any reasonable educated person who discovered DNA, theirs would be the names put forward. There is a good reason for this: for a long time the idea of the 'double helix' structure of DNA, and its role in life, was referred to as the 'Watson-Crick' conjecture, after the two scientists who basically guessed it first. But it wasn't until Maurice Wilkins had done an awful lot of work that the proposal was accepted as fact. In short, Wilkins 'proved' the conjecture.

Wilson gained the world attention in 1967 when he used a new technique measuring the “immunological distance” between species, which he had developed, to claim that humankind was in fact much younger than had previously been thought. Conventional fossil dating process had the date of the start of human evolution at about 20 million years ago, but Wilson’s technique utilised a comparison of cell DNA from humans and other primates – the so-called ‘molecular clock’.

The fact that such a large amount of the genetic material was so similar led Wilson to deduce that mankind had branched off from the other primates only 5 million years ago. This ‘recent-origin’ theory was a complete shift in thinking from the prevailing views, and remained controversial until it was confirmed when archaeologists discovered the Lucy fossils in 1974.

For this stunning piece of work alone, Wilson would have been celebrated, but Wilson had another bombshell still to come.

Agar is made from seaweed, boiled down and separated off. The resultant substance is jelly-like and clear, and looks a lot like gelatine, which is extracted from animals. Indeed, you could say agar is vegetarian gelatine, but it is also far superior and is preferred for many things.

Agar is that stuff you see on top of jellimeat to stop it going bad, it is used in DNA fingerprinting technology, it is used in the soft centred chocolates Cadbury make, and, perhaps the one we all know from school, it is used in scientific laboratories to grow cultures of bacteria. The little plastic dishes of agar, with their distinctive smell, are the trademark symbol of laboratories the world over. And in 1941 the sole supplier of Agar to the world was Japan.

Can you see the problem?

You may not know this, but if you go up to a pregnant woman and measure the distance from her pelvic bone to the top of the foetus, you will a/ know how far through her pregnancy she is; and b/ get a slap. If you do it enough times, and plead that it's for scientific purposes, then you are Dr John Baeyertz, an obstetrician and gynaecologist from Wanganui.

Dr B (as we'll call him, to lessen the chances of misspelling his surname) realised that the traditional methods of calculating a baby's due date - either by calculating from the date of the last menstrual period, or by the date of conception - were both error prone and unreliable. He had of course heard of the technique of using the measurement from the symphysis to the fundus (doctor-speak for 'pubes to the top of the baby'), but likewise there were problems with this technique too.

Dr B realised that with the advent of AI – artificial insemination – he could accurately measure the time between conception and delivery, and formulate a precise technique to be used for all women. He spent over 13 years collating the data from 127 pregnancies, including some twins, some abnormal pregnancies, some women who were early, some who were late… from his studies he gained a wide cross section of pregnancy in New Zealand, or at least, in Wanganui.

In 1981 Ces Richie, Wynn Martin and Max Rutherford were asked by a nun to help design a way to protect the breasts of the girls playing contact sport at her school.

They lived in the shadow of Mt Taranaki whose soft, molten interior is protected by a hard shell-like exterior, and no doubt drawing inspiration from the conical volcano, their company QP Sport made a fibreglass mock-up of a chest protector which was held on by bra straps and could be worn under the girls’ soccer uniforms.

They gained a New Zealand patent for the protector and developed a range of bras that are revolutionary worldwide – for example, their CoolGuard product has two plastic guards which are inserted into a specially designed sports-bra. The guards are unbreakable, Tupperware-style polypropylene and are moulded to spread impact, and are very popular in rugby, combat sports like karate and boxing, and even in paintball and roller derby.

Their products are sold under a number of brands, in over 50 countries – and all thanks to that nun.

After having back surgery in 1999 Kiwi David Dell woke up one night with a flash of inspiration for a better way to make walking sticks. ‘I just woke up and thought, “I’ll put a foot on the end of my walking stick.”’ His Unifoot replaces the normal rubber nosing at the bottom of the walking stick with a small plate made out of plastic and rubber. This means the walking stick has better contact with the ground, and it can also twist to conform to the contours of the terrain. The worldwide patented Unifoot is a startlingly simple idea – at $40 it’s reasonably cheap, it can be fitted to the end of pretty much any walking stick or crutch, it allows the walking stick to stand up by itself when released, and it creates four points of contact with the ground, thereby increasing the grip. Dell has now gone back to his work as a registered builder, but he sells the sticks as a sideline through his website and distributors and reckons he’s sold 100,000 of them.

Let’s give the British royal family the last word:

Dear Mr Dell, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother has just received the special walking stick which you so kindly sent Her Majesty at the time of her 99th birthday in August. The Queen Mother is impressed by the ingenuity and simplicity of your new invention, and it is a birthday present which Her Majesty accepts with pleasure.

Signed (Her lady-in-waiting)

Kiwi surgeon Brian Barratt-Boyes (b. 1924, d. 2006) pioneered radical heart treatments at Greenlane hospital.

Sir Brian (as he became in 1971) was born and educated in New Zealand, going overseas after gaining his MD to further his training in the US. He returned to New Zealand in 1958 to head the heart unit at Greenlane Hospital in Auckland, a role he was to fill for 30 years. In the late fifties the practice of heart surgery was brand new - Christiaan Barnard and others having pioneered techniques just a few years earlier - and Barratt-Boyes set about creating a world-class facility at Greenlane to study it. Practicing on sheep and cadavers, Barratt-Boyes and his team worked out a way to replace faulty heart valves in humans with those from donors, taking the heart valves from dead bodies soon after death and storing them, basically in a fridge, for up to 4 weeks.

They reasoned, and it is still considered the case today, that using transplanted heart valves would be more successful, and more natural, than creating false valves out of synthetic materials.

For over 5,000 allied soldiers in the fields of France, Belgium and other battlegrounds during WW1, luck was not on their side. Facial injuries - usually gunshot wounds - were all too common, and it fell to a young NZ-born surgeon to come up with a way to cope with these often horrific injuries.

Harold Delf Gillies (b. 1882, d. 1960) was born in Dunedin and spent his youth in New Zealand. Son of an MP, Gillies was also quite a sportsman, winning prizes for rowing and in later life representing England in golf. Gillies moved to the UK to study at Cambridge University, and after graduating, Gillies studied surgery in a London hospital. He became known as a talented ear, nose and throat surgeon with a lot of promise. When WW1 broke out, he joined the Red Cross and saw many young men needing facial surgery. He began to think about better ways to help these guys, some of them horribly disfigured.

Ironically, he cited one of his earliest influences as a German book he was given which had some pictures in it of how the Germans were thinking about this area of medicine. He proposed to the British Army that they create a unit for this 'plastic surgery' work (the phrase 'plastic' coming from the Greek word plastikos, which means to mould or model) and in 1916 was ordered by the War Office to head up this new unit as a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps. It was here that he saw the opportunity for a number of different ways to treat facial injuries. Working with dentists, other surgeons and a tragically unceasing stream of patients, he pioneered techniques for facial reconstruction.

In 1949 NZ dentist John Patrick Walsh (b. 1911, d. 2003) worked with lab staff in Wellington and created a drilling handpiece that was driven by compressed air. The air is forced pneumatically through to the handpiece where the speed of the air passes over fins inside the drill to spin the handpiece at a tremendous rate. This new handpiece was so well-designed that it remains virtually unchanged and universally adopted today.

Walsh's drills typically spin at 400,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), versus the precious low speed drills which operated at about 3,000 rpm. That extra speed translates to quicker drilling, and less patient discomfort. While he was born in Australia, Walsh (later knighted for his services to dentistry - I wonder if he got a plaque? Sorry...) adopted New Zealand as his home, and made a number of contributions to Dunedin, where he based himself and helped establish the University of Otago's school of dentistry.

He also changed the way that dentists worked with their patients, seeming them as people who needed holistic treatment, not just a set of mandibles and canines.

There are three main problems with needles.

One of them is 'needlestick injuries' where doctors and nurses stick themselves - often leading to sickness and even death. Problem two is that they can't delivery very precise doses. And the third problem is just that needles hurt. The fear of needles causes people, in some cases even fully-grown authors, to avoid treatment.

Plenty of people have tried to solve these problems before, but until now inventions to deliver drugs without a needle have been noisy, often painful machines involving springs, compressed gases or explosive chemicals that don't allow precision in how much is injected or how deep a dose is delivered.

Hunter's device shoots a jet of liquid into the skin.

The basic idea is that cancer in the bladder will form a tumour, and some cells from that tumour will break off and pass out through the urine. The urine is mixed with a fluid that Pacific Edge created, which extracts the 'messenger RNA' (mRNA - a family of molecules that carry around information within a cell). Within the mRNA they look for signals of 5 different 'biomarkers' - specific sets of coding which show that this cell can or will do a certain task.

Through a series of chemical and biological processes, scientists can tell if the right combination of these 5 markers is present, which would indicate the cell is likely to be cancerous. It's an amazing process, unthinkable 20 years ago, and a technique that can be adapted to a number of cancers and genetic illnesses. They are seeing test results with 69-90% reliability, and a much lower risk of 'false positives' (detections when there is no cancer).

This means a large number of patients can get the test done painlessly and non-invasively, and only those with a heightened risk or a positive result need to experience the needle.

Some people describe the KODE system as like 'painting' the substance to make it appear like something it isn't. The uses of the technology are extremely varied, and Henry and team are still coming up with unique applications in industry, medicine, drug delivery, even cosmetics. It can be used for attacking cancer cells and protecting newborn babies. KODE Biotech have applied for over 100 patents and have an impressive line-up of customers, including Oxford University. They foresee this business being worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and as a private enterprise with AUT as a shareholder, they stand to be globally successful. But, according to Henry, 'Inventing is the easy part; commercialisation is the hard part'. They have to turn this clever idea into a sustainable business, and a research-intensive company like theirs sucks up money in the early days. After over 16 years of work, they are only just now seeing profits ahead of them. In 2013 they signed a partnership agreement with a US company to license their technology and act as an agent. They're also selling online, and working with other possible agents and business partners around the world.

First the possum is lured by the smell of some sweet bait mixture.

There it is, inside that thing attached to the trunk of this tree! Gripping the tree trunk, the possum pokes his pointy head up into cone-shaped plastic portal with the lure at the top. He gets the barest taste of the lure before he triggers a punch, powered by a CO2 canister, which gets him in the back of the skull. He never knows what hit him and falls out of the tree - dead before he hits the forest floor.

Then the trap automatically resets. It's not uncommon for one trap to account for five possums in a single night and the CO2 canister is good for 20 kills. Because possums are only a pest in New Zealand, Goodnature have made a version that nails rats and stoats as well.

In a trial of two rat traps in Indonesia each trap killed seven rats in one night.

Up until a couple of years ago, when two or more people's DNA was mixed together in a single sample recovered by the police there is trouble. Not only has something criminal gone on (or something very naughty at least) but also the traditional methods of interpreting and matching DNA will not resolve the sample and match it with records held in the database. Any vague hints given by the interpretation will be too sketchy to stand up in court.

The DNA sample is useless and the perps will get away with it. ESR isn't quite CSI or the FBI, but their research and testing in all sorts of science underpins New Zealand's health and justice system. ESR scientists, based in their multi-storey building on the northern slopes of Auckland's Mt Albert, are the forensic DNA analysts for the NZ Police. ESR DNA scientist Jo-Anne Bright calls the situation where no DNA match can be made a 'stop', and prior to 2013 ESR had to report many DNA investigations as stops, also bringing stops to the police investigations, or at least hampering them greatly.

As Bright says 'It was quite hard to interpret in the olden days - the olden days being last year!'

Working at the DSIR, engineer and inventor Alfred (Alf) Melville (b. 1916, d. 2006) created the first prototype for Dr Matthew Spence at Auckland Hospital using an Agee jar borrowed from his wife.

Melville worked out how to construct a wire within the jar that warmed water and air, a system for airflow, and the attachments required to connect it to a patient. It was a breakthrough that the company is rightly proud of, and the original jar is displayed still in their head offices in South Auckland. From this humble beginning has grown New Zealand's largest medical device company, and one of our largest exporters.

It took time and investment from the parent company to ensure the small humidification business lead by F&P engineer Dave O'Hare took off, but after years of investment and R&D, success started to come.

Murdoch studied pharmacology, married and in 1954 moved to Timaru to set up a pharmacy. Small town life meant that his knowledge and expertise were also in demand as a vet, and his work treating animals led to many of his inventions. The glass syringes that were used at that time were sterilised between uses, but not always properly. Often the diseases spread by improperly sterilised syringes were worse than the ones they were meant to be curing.

Murdoch's idea was simple, and changed everything. Flying on a DC3 one day, Murdoch had a 'eureka moment' and pulled out the fountain pen he always travelled with. He designed a disposable plastic syringe, and patented it in 1956 at the age of 27.

He set about making dies and took a prototype to the New Zealand Health Department to get their blessing and help with its development. They gave him the feedback that his idea was good, but 'too futuristic'. In their opinion, nobody would want to be injected from a plastic syringe.

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it isn't a classic, inventive, No.8-wire, bloke-in-a-shed response to New Zealand's isolation. In the 1970s the world was experimenting with psychoactive drugs, and that included New Zealand.

In 1974 there were just 24 criminal cases involving the most addictive of them, heroin. By 1979 heroin was much more available in New Zealand thanks to extensive drug trafficking by syndicates like the infamous Mr Asia drug ring. Then the New Zealand police cracked down. The Mr Asia ring collapsed and customs and the police strangled the flow of heroin into New Zealand.

As the 1980s dawned the heroin addicts of New Zealand were starved of what they needed - and their necessity gave birth to a weird antipodean bastard - homebake.

In 2001 Garth Sutherland invented the Smartinhaler to help patients lift their game.

Smartinhaler attaches to your normal puffer and reminds you when to take a dose, then automatically stores data on when the medicine is taken. This data is wirelessly available to both patient and doctor, who can follow progress and make decisions based on how much medicine the patient actually took rather than how much they were supposed to take. After 18 months development Sutherland's company Nexus6 sold its first product to New Zealand scientists doing clinical trials with inhalers, and in 2005 full distribution began around the country.

In 2013, with 20,000 Smartinhalers in use around the world, Sutherland raised over $4m dollars to take the technology 'to scale'.