Geoff Renton: We came up with the hummingbird because it's so small and its wings beat at sixty to eighty beats per second, enabling it to hover. We believe that the hummingbird represents microsurgery, it’s so miniature. Then John Haddad[96] and I came up with the concept and gave it to Grey Advertising which did some pro bono work for us to produce a book on microsurgery. If you have any knowledge of birds at all, you will know that the beak should be straight but we took the liberty of bending it to resemble the microsurgery needle. So we have that as a trademark, both for the Foundation and for the Bernard O’Brien Institute. We’ve also registered throughout Australia, the word MicroDay. It’s been my ambition to have MicroDay on the shortest day of the year as a fundraising day and we wanted to sell badges with these beautiful little birds on it. John Haddad had this idea that we could get little birds that you could stick on the car aerial and they would flap in the wind. So they’re all possibilities. But at the time it was a branding thing – trying to get something that related to microsurgery – how delicate, small and precise it was.

Laurie Muir: Can you tell us the future of the name, the Microsurgery Research Centre?

Geoff Renton: Well, the Microsurgery Foundation is still there as a legal entity. But the Bernard O'Brien Institute assumed the Microsurgery Research Unit or Centre, as it was called, it was renamed the Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery (BOBIM) and then incorporated. And so my answer to the question of whether any name will be swept away would be, 'No, that while I’m still here and on the Board, we’ll still keep the Foundation as a source of expertise on fund-raising, marketing, management and business’.

The same people are also involved in the Bernard O'Brien Institute which is really running the day to day operations of the research and the money gets transferred in and out where it’s needed. Plus there is the Hospital’s involvement. We have financial accounts with them under a Research Unit Code. And the University of Melbourne Department of Surgery is also linked. We have an affiliation with them and collaborative research agreements specifically on the chamber for tissue engineering, with the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Melbourne to develop that chamber.

These arrangements were made for specific reasons. Initially, the Bernard O'Brien Institute was renamed but it wasn’t an incorporated body. The State Government said that if we weren’t incorporated, we would lose our grant of $154,000 a year. I think this was set up in Alan Skurrie’s time and there are now conditions to that, too. You have to get a million dollars of peer-reviewed grants or you have to amalgamate or merge with someone else. So we’ve done extremely well in that particular area. But that was a necessity of incorporation that we had to put in place in 1998.

Out of that has grown tissue engineering that developed from 1996 to 1998.[97] At that time we set up the Victorian Tissue Engineering Centre Pty Ltd (VTEC) which the Institute owns in its own right, and whose objective is to develop tissue engineering. Eventually the patents that are in the Bernard O'Brien Institute will go into VTEC, and VTEC will then deal with the outside commercial world. The reason for that is that we didn’t want to create problems with the Bernard O’Brien Institute with taxation and other things that say we’re getting a lot of income from the commercial area. We would lose our tax status, our donation status etc.

And, as I said before, when all the scientists, the professors and the surgeons came together in 1996-98 to discuss the discovery of tissue engineering, their wish was that they didn't want to get involved in all this (commercial world). They wanted to deal with the science. That’s part of the reason to create the split between the two companies.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine