Wayne Morrison: Yes, perhaps, if I might mention, a new area of research we are doing is tissue engineering.[73] Again, it's an area that has developed logically from microsurgery because tissue engineering in most spheres is done in the laboratory at the moment - in dishes where you’re talking about a very thin layer of cells growing that don’t need much nourishment. If you actually try to transplant those into the body, they need a circulation or a vascularisation. And again, with our background in plastic surgery and microsurgery, it’s the blood vessels that keep things alive. So here we are poised to be big players in three dimensional tissue engineering. Then of course you’re talking about stem cells and all the other exciting things that can be used to attract vital research funding from the public and from business because it’s very modern in a sense.

Figure 12

Ken Knight: John Hurley was a world expert in wound healing and I think that was something which leant itself to research in microsurgery and plastic surgery where the idea was to search for scarless healing. Through the 1990s when John Hurley was most active in the research laboratory, that was one of the fields he was pursuing, together with Michael [Hickey] and others.

I guess with these collaborations we've had over the period of time we’ve also been engaged in research fields such as neuroscience. When Aurora Messina arrived she had expertise in that area so we spent quite a lot of time looking at nerve repair and that obviously has direct application to hand surgery. So there have been a number of different fields that have all come together. And the lessons learned from wound healing now have great application in tissue engineering, - many of the same principles apply.

Ann Westmore: Is surgery poised to move into a whole new domain, for example with the stem cell work, and is that reflected at the NHMRC level by increasing interest in making sure that Australia can make that jump?

Wayne Morrison: Yes, funding is a topical thing. You have to be, in a sense, in the trend areas. Unless you're in those you’re not going to be a winner. So you have to be opportunistic all along. I should say that St Vincent’s Hospital is very much a partner of the O’Brien Institute and shouldn’t be seen as a separate thing. Our profile has been influenced very much by our access to patients who, unfortunately, sustain these horrendous injuries. They [the patients] have become, in many cases, great friends and ambassadors for us. So it’s a partnership between the hospital and the research centre. It’s a great asset for all research institutes if they can have a link with a teaching hospital. This is what is very fortunate for surgery, in that it’s what they call translational research where you can quickly transfer the research from the laboratory into patient care. That can be more difficult for bigger institutes which are essentially separate from hospitals.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine