Kester Brown: I think that's a reasonable comment because there was only a limited amount of money to go around. I ran research in the Anaesthetic Department largely by collaborative work with outside organizations which had the facilities and we had the projects and we worked together. And I did get one grant from the National Heart Foundation in about 1977. But it wasn’t easy to get money from the Hospital because there were other people who were researchers taking most of it to start with.

Glenn Bowes: I think it's a fair comment that whenever there is internal money there is a danger of being soft. And I think that for the last 25 years or so, the Children’s Hospital moved from having some relatively soft money internally through to the point where that money was used absolutely to get leverage on external national and internal competitiveness. And there was a period of transition that was moved through during that time.

Peter Phelan: That would be my interpretation. Clearly there's some money that you could say was a bad investment. But we all make bad investments.

Susan Sawyer: Going back to research scholarships. Thinking of that as an investment in terms of later appointments to the Children's Hospital, we recently audited them. If we look at the last ten years, 80 per cent of those paediatric trainees who were funded through, what have now become known as, an MCRI scholarship,[101] have subsequently been appointed to the Children’s Hospital. So the leverage you’re talking about in terms of grants from external money, we can use the same sort of thinking about leverage of research funding in terms of investment back into the Royal Children’s Hospital.

Kester Brown: I'd like to make one comment. You mentioned John Hutson, and the major contribution he’s made to surgical research. I think we should recognize the fellow whose foresight brought John Hutson to the Children’s Hospital. That was Bob Fowler.[102] He had a good intellect and was involved in surgical research early on. He sort of got marginalized during all this time. He picked John Hutson - I don’t know how he got on to him - and brought him to the Children’s to do a research job when he was still a trainee surgeon. And then he [John Hutson] went back and finished his training and came back to us then to do research.[103]

Glenn Bowes: John was an outstanding graduate of Monash Medical School. If he didn't top the year he was near to doing so. I think he’d been dux at Melbourne Grammar School and was an outstanding resident intern at the Alfred Hospital. It was in that period that he was attracted [to the Children’s].

Durham Smith: Bob Fowler should be mentioned in the research connection. He had a first-class research brain. He started off with research interests and did some training in Cincinnati for a couple of years and he came back really steamed up with the whole transplant scene. I know he had difficulties with management and made a personal decision that he didn't want anything to do with research, he just wanted to be a clinical surgeon.[104] And his research ability was lost to the Children’s.

I think all of us are responsible for that. I don't think we as a staff cared for Bob enough. I shared an office with him for twenty-five years and I don’t think we as a staff, including myself, really went out of our way to really encourage him in research.

Max Robinson: Can I make a comment about conditions prior to the establishment of the Research Foundation. Many of us on the staff, while we didn't do basic research, we contributed to the literature based upon clinical experience and observations. And I think the Royal Children’s Hospital did as much as any other hospital in this country in that way before the establishment of the Research Foundation. And this all had to be done in one’s spare time. There was no money available, you did it after hours.

Susan Sawyer: Some things don't change.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine