Extract from: Memoirs of Lyn Oliver AM PhD,
Physics in Medicine, Making a Better Healthcare
Professor John Mallard
Formation of the ACPSEM
The Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine (ACPSEM) was formerly established on 1 August 1977.
The 17th Annual Conference in Physics and Engineering in Medicine and Biology became 1st Annual Conference of Physical Sciences in Medicine and Biology for the newly formed ACPSEM.
The Conference guest overseas speaker was Professor John Mallard from Aberdeen University.
The College’s First Honorary Fellow
Mallard had previously worked at Hammersmith Hospital where he was involved in the early 1960s with the installation of the world’s first medical cyclotron. Mallard worked with the use of short half-life radioisotopes for organ imaging, initially for thyroid studies, and later brain scans. Mallard designed and built the first radioisotope scanner with the patient moving through the scanner’s detector on a ’floating top’ couch. This brain scan service was believed to have been the first of its kind in the world.
Mallard, was later appointed Professor of Biomedical Physics at Aberdeen University in 1965. By 1967, he had organised the installation of their first commercial gamma camera and then, in 1973, developed the Aberdeen Sectional Scanner able to produce single tomographic slices of the brain. He spoke during the conference about his current research on an MRI image scanner.
Did we realise then how major this work would become for the whole world’s health system? I doubt it. After all, we had already heard by then how wonderful X-ray CT scans were for diagnostic imaging.
But, nevertheless, it was very impressive and exciting to hear and learn. Could it ever be possible to use MRI and see inside the body from head to toe?
In a short meeting held during the early stages of the conference, the ACPSEM invited Professor John Mallard to become the College’s first Honorary Fellow. Mallard gracefully accepted and thanked us for this honour. Another milestone.
The Sydney Visit
Mallard was planning to go to Melbourne for his own personal reasons. But we had struck a hard bargain and asked that he provide a special open lecture in Sydney. Being the host, I was determined that this would be made a success that clearly showed the value of the physical sciences and engineering in health. I also wanted to make sure that Professor Mallard was well looked after. Maybe he might see good reason to move from the Aberdeen cold, miserable weather to work in the sunny, happy atmosphere of Sydney!
I made sure that Mallard’s invited talk was circulated far and wide around Sydney to all the medical professions, technical staff and hospital managers who would find the talk of interest. It was to be a public relations exercise to promote the newly formed College.
Personal printed invitations were sent to everyone I could possibly think to invite.
I received unexpected word from Professor Atkinson, our Director of Radiation Oncology at the Prince of Wales Hospital. He said that the Dean of the University of NSW, Medical School, had received his invitation and wished to meet and have lunch with Professor Mallard. Of course, we were delighted that Professor Mallard could meet the Dean. It would be another good advertisement for the College.
For such short notice, it was a very impressive lunch spread with many of the University dignitaries attending to meet and speak with Mallard. The Dean soon showed where his interests lay.
He said to Professor Mallard “I notice that you are a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists” (the Dean’s speciality was pathology) “how did you get that qualification?”
In Professor Mallard’s polite way, he replied “well I suppose they thought I had earned that honour.”
Not to be denied, the Dean later asked another leading question. “I understand that you are developing some equipment that will help us to better detect and diagnose cancer?”
“Yes” said Mallard.
“Do you think we will be able to find a cure for cancer with your equipment development?”
“Yes” said Mallard “I am sure we will one day.” Of course Mallard did not say when that day might ever be.
With that, the Dean turned to one of his colleagues and quietly whispered “I don’t think they will!”
No doubt the Dean believed that there would be a magic drug developed that would in future eradicate the patient’s cancer. Thirty-seven years later, things have improved to a certain extent, but there’s still no 100% magic cure for cancer.
The Sydney Guest Lecture
Returning from this eventful lunch with the Dean of UNSW Medical School, we prepared for Mallard’s lecture entitled:
I was delighted to see the response to our invitations. Almost 100 people filled the lecture hall to hear Mallard’s talk. It was as the lecture title implied. He opened his talk by drawing our attention to how there had recently been many new exciting technological developments that would make significant improvements for patient medical care.
He was able to provide good examples from his own personal experience at Hammersmith Hospital designing and building the first scanner – initially for thyroid studies but later brain scans with the patient moving through the scanner’s detector on a ’floating top’ couch. With the use of short half-life radioisotopes produced in the hospital’s first-ever medical cyclotron, the scanning service was believed to have been the first of its kind in the world.
But then he spoke of his move to Aberdeen University; his electron spin resonance research on living tissues; his work modifying a gamma camera for nuclear medicine studies to produce single tomographic slices of the brain; and, finally, he described his current project which was to make his own home-made isotope tomograph machine.
We now know that he successfully designed and commissioned that nuclear tomograph camera system, called Single Positron Emission Computer Tomography – SPECT.
The audience (and I too) could not help but wonder and admire – how did Professor Mallard have so much energy, inspiration, innovation and scientific know-how to create all these significantly improved medical imaging tools?
As if by mental telepathy, he moved on in his talk to tell us how he was able to “deliver the goods”. From memory, he said:
“I could not have been able to develop all these new ideas for the clinic without the contributing input of my colleagues – engineers, physicists, medical practitioners and expert technical staff. With the joint arrangement utilising the expertise and backing of the University on the one hand, and direct contact with the medical staff of the hospital, projects of this kind could be successfully implemented efficiently for patients to receive immediate benefits.”
Professor Mallard then went on to describe his latest and greatest idea as an example. He referred to a number of international research centres engaged in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and showed an image of a lemon (shown above) that Raymond Andrew at Nottingham University had published in about 1974. Mallard explained that he also recognised the value of NMR for medical imaging. Using his previous tomography ESR experience, he was able in 1974 to quickly adapt the technique and carry out experiments using NMR imaging of mice sacrificed for the studies.
At the time of his lecture in Sydney, Professor Mallard was not aware that a separate research group at Nottingham University (lead by the Late Sir Peter Mansfield who was Nobel Prize winner, 2003 for his contribution to physiology and medicine) created an NMR image of a finger. The finger belonged to Mansfield’s postgraduate student.
Progressing on, Mallard explained to the audience that he foresaw a great future in being able to use NMR techniques to scan the whole of the patient from head to toe. He intended to utilise the mechanical design of his nuclear medicine scanner he previously designed. His latest project was to build what he hoped would be the first NMR whole-body scanner that could see all the inside organs of the body – a new imaging tool for the radiologist to use for diagnostic purposes – but without the radiation hazards of X-rays. It would be referred to as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
Part 1. refers to Professor Mallard’s research work, and Aberdeen’s final 1980 MRI machine, as being the first major step (refer to the Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine held on 2 July 1996):
Making the Human Body Transparent:
The Impact of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
It was a very successful Sydney lecture. The audience left feeling happy with what Professor Mallard presented with dreams for what science and technology promised to bring in the near future. MRI became one of the most outstanding medical imaging techniques developed for patient care and has raised the quality of diagnostic imaging healthcare worldwide.
The Melbourne Cyclotron
The next day, I rewarded Professor Mallard by taking him for a tourist drive to all the wonderful Sydney harbour views and its surrounding metropolis – a whole of harbour scan to diagnose its healthy and not so healthy parts!
Whilst we were in a relaxed state and in between driving from place to place, we chatted. He told me why he really had travelled to Australia. He said he was very happy to be part of the founding of the ACPSEM, but he also had an appointment with the Melbourne University powers-to-be.
“Why?” I asked. And so, he began telling me the beginning, to what I now have discovered, was a long, long saga.
Mallard explained that he had heard that Melbourne University was scrapping their research cyclotron. He was hoping to meet with them and try to negotiate the purchase of their cyclotron with what little funds he had. Then he needed to find someone in Melbourne who would be able to help him ship the machine in parts back to Aberdeen.
I received annual Christmas cards after his visit that gave me a regular update about the cyclotron. But then I lost contact with him and was left wondering for years on end what the final chapter was in this story. I changed hospitals and lost contact. Yes, I could have inquired.
I did take pity on him, though. The College was contributing to what must have been a huge pile of APESM Journals cluttering his home. So, I referred it to our Journal editor to sort out. Did we stop sending the Journals? I don’t know! I never checked.
Lyn Oliver AM PhD July 2021
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- Making the human body transparent
- The pathway to clinical imaging
- Creating an NMR image from biological samples
- My brush with fame
- 2003 Nobel Prize
- The first clinical whole-body MRI scanner
- Rekindling my ‘brush with fame’
- IOMP Medal (2016) awarded to John Mallard for his MRI work
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Extract from:
Physics in Medicine, Making a Better Healthcare
