Peter Reade: That was changed to be virtually a lifetime’s work rather than a period of study such as the PhD provides. I think having PhDs has changed the School dramatically from being a technical trade like-place to being up with the rest of the university in terms of its approach to education, using research as the major tool for graduate students who want to go on and do a bit more. Their topics vary from basic science to clinical research, giving people a chance to fulfill their educational desires. They can take on something pretty esoteric or pretty practical, and work on it in a scientific way.

Those people in the PhD course provide the future teachers for the School and many have achieved senior academic positions around the world.

Ann Westmore: Can you explain what you mean by doing dental research in a scientific way?

Peter Reade: There’s a very good explanation in Tony Storey’s work on the movement of teeth by specialist dentists. It was a topic talked about a lot in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In Adelaide, a teacher of mine, Ray Begg[44] developed from his clinical experience a technique where the forces used were light, small forces, rather than the generally used heavier forces. It became known as the Begg Orthodontic Technique. Tony’s work gave scientific support to Begg’s clinical notion. It was a most important step in the maturing of our research and provided a good example for our students as to how science could explain clinical phenomena.

Tony did the research outside the Dental School – in other University Departments – reflecting that there wasn’t much in the way of support or facilities for higher degrees, in his case a DDSc.

Henry Atkinson: We had started prosthetics in 1953 and we had programs in the physiology of mastication, dental materials science and cleft palate (at the Children’s Hospital). In the period before we moved into the new building, we had a lot of people working in those areas.

Tony would pop in and out of the Dental School from Pathology to talk to me about his research problems, long before he was appointed to the Chair of Conservative Dentistry.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine