Historical Article
Medical Physicist, Foundation President
(Extract from ACPSEM Journal)
Kenneth Clarke hails from London, England. He cannot claim to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells because there was not a strong enough south-easterly blowing at the time, but he does claim to having been born within two good cricket-ball throws of Lord’s. He was educated at the London Polytechnic, where he was able to include two years practical engineering en-route to his science based matriculation, and at the Royal College of Science, London University, where he graduated majoring in Physics with Mathematics and Radio Communication as subsidiary subjects.
He gained his school colours for rowing and competed in the highly competitive British Head of the River, – 180 eights sent off at 1/2 minute intervals for the 41/2 miles on the Thames from Mortlake to Putney. He was also a member of the only British junior team to compete in the Neuwied Regatta in Germany in 1939 (the German Henley).
After graduation in 1943, Ken was commissioned as a Radar Officer in the Royal Navy and, posted to the aircraft carrier Victorious, saw active service in the North Atlantic, Burma and Pacific theatres. After the cessation of hostilities in the Pacific, Ken was sent as Radar Officer to the sloop fleet based in Hong Kong to conduct sea trials on modified radar for small ships.
Ken’s first appointment as a Medical Physicist was at the Middlesex Hospital, London in 1947 where he became mainly involved in radiotherapy physics. A chance contact there with a leading Melbourne Radiotherapist, Dr R. Kaye Scott, led him to apply for a position on Dr Eddy’s staff at the Commonwealth X-ray & Radium Laboratory, CXRL (later called the Australian Radiation Laboratory and now the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Science Agency, ARPANSA) in Melbourne. He joined CXRL early in 1950 and commenced work under Dr Hal Oddie in the then very new application of radioactive isotopes in medicine (now known as Nuclear Medicine). In 1953, whilst still at CXRL, he gained his MSc. degree with a thesis on the “Use of Radioactive Iodine in the Study and Treatment of Thyroid Disorders“, the first Master’s degree in Medical Physics in the University of Melbourne.
Ken joined the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in 1954 as Deputy Physicist and became Head of Department in 1960. He actively encouraged his staff to pursue higher degrees, pursuing problems arising in the work programme to a fundamental depth to earn the honours, and is very proud of his staff’s achievements 11 MSc’s and 2 PhD.,s to date.
Apart from establishing the first Nuclear Medicine Unit at the Cancer Institute (1954), he played a major role in the establishment of Nuclear Medicine Units at Launceston General Hospital (1956), Prince Henry’s and St Vincent’s Hospitals, Melbourne (1962).
In 1963, recognising the growing need for a special course of training for medical nucleographers, he and Miss Jean Milne designed a basic 3-year course which was run conjointly by the Cancer Institute and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The first course was launched in February 1964 and is believed to have been the first such course anywhere.
Ken cites as one of his most rewarding studies “The Use of an Intramuscular Depot of Iodized Oil as a Long-lasting Source of Iodine”, with Dr Terry McCullagh (physician) and Mrs Dora Winikoff (biochemist), which became the basis of large-scale programme to combat goitre in Papua New Guinea, and was later taken up by some Some South American countries faced with the same health problem of prevalent iodine-deficiency goitre in remote areas of the country which were only visited by medical teams infrequently and where other means of administering supplemental iodine were unsuitable.
Between 1959-62, Ken played a major role in the formation of the Australian Regional Group of the Hospital Physicist’s Association and the Biophysics Group of the Australian Institute of Physics; and later 1975-77 in the establishment of the College. In December 1959, he started the Australasian Newsletter of Medical Physics as a link between medical physicists in Australia and New Zealand, and from this humble beginning, has grown to the present College Journal. He firmly believes that the College has tremendous professional potential for making many fields of medicine and surgery more soundly based scientifically, thereby improving the standards of healthcare considerably.
Ken was a member of the National Committee for Biophysics appointed by the Australian Academy of Science (1969-78); has served on a number of working committees of the NH&MRC; has been honorary or consultant physicist to Prince Henry’s Hospital (since 1961), Alfred Hospital (1965-79) and Royal Women’s Hospital (since 1976); Member of Council of Swinburne Institute of Technology and Swinburne College of TAFE (1980-87); Member since 1973 of the Physics Advisory Committee, Swinburne Institute of Technology and Chairman for some 10 years; Member of the Medical Physics & Radiography Course Assessment Committee, Queensland Institute of Technology since 1983. He is an Associate of the Royal College of Science; Fellow of the British Institute of Physics; Foundation Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics and first Fellow of ACPSEM.
In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, he actively supported the World Vision Rehabilitation programme as one means of doing something constructive in an area of seemingly meaningless destruction. He became so involved that in 1971 World Vision asked him to organise the hospitality programme for the 5-day visit to Melbourne of the World Vision Korean Children’s Choir, 38 children and 5 adults. It was part of an Australia-wide tour aimed at making people more aware of the needs of others in the trouble spots of the world. He rates this as a very memorable experience.
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