[excerpts]
… By mid- 1974, I started, once again to look for a new position.
A shared lectureship at Monash University between Anatomy and Physiology became available, but did not appeal to me. Fortunately, Laurie Geffen, a South African emigré, had recently become Professor of Physiology at the newly-opened School of Medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide. He was looking for new lecturers. Visiting Geoff Burnstock‘s laboratory, he sat in on rehearsals of some communications John Furness and I were preparing for a national meeting. The two of us were listening to each other’s communications and criticising almost every sentence. Laurie must have been impressed, because, in January 1975, he invited Daniela and me to visit Flinders.
In the meantime, John had been invited to become a lecturer in Anatomy at Flinders. I visited Flinders, where the School of Medicine was still under construction, housed within the Flinders Medical Centre. A highlight of the trip was a long conversation with Laurie and the Dean, Gus Frankel, a retired New Zealand Ophthalmologist. Gus knew the Faculty of Medicine in Torino better than I did. He informed me that before fascism the medical degree from Torino had been recognised in England.
At the end of the conversation, they showed me a draft letter in which I accepted a Foundation Lectureship in Physiology! By that evening, after a quick consultation with Daniela, I had signed on for the permanent position. Even then this was an unusual way to be appointed as an academic. Several years later, I told this story to Ann Edwards, our Vice-Chancellor. She commented “Well Marcello, we do things differently these days!.” I still hope that, despite that comment, that I might have obtained a tenured position even in more modern times…
… We set up a research laboratory with John Furness, who had been appointed Foundation Lecturer in Anatomy a few months earlier. Laurie, realising that my partnership with John was destined to stand the test of time, kindly allowed us to continue our studies of the gut. The school gave us a generous setting-up allowance. We applied to the Australian Research Council and were awarded a grant of $900! Since this auspicious beginning, we have obtained uninterrupted funding from national and international granting bodies.
An idea had emerged that different disciplines could be usefully combined to study parts of the nervous system. Our lab was becoming increasingly multidisciplinary by including pharmacology, electrophysiology, biochemistry and histochemistry – all focused on the enteric nervous system.
This led to the need for a unified conceptual framework, bringing together an analysis of methods which extended from the equipment to the observer, taking into account the unavoidable biases implicit in each approach. Examples included how to relate the traces on a rotating smoked drum to the actual mechanical events which generated them. Such was the concern about verifiability, that papers submitted to a leading international journal, The Journal of Physiology, were expected to include the original smoked drum traces with the comments scribbled at the time of the experiment.
Similarly, photos of fluorescence histochemistry, developed by us in the dark room, were not meant to be modified in any way prior to publication. This was impossible, because developing a photograph is intrinsically a manual operation.
The complexity of relating data to the methods used to collect them brought to the surface the issue of the role of the observer in deriving facts (Latin factum=made). Data, plural of the Latin datum, simply means ‘given’, as if bestowed by a divinity. We realised that, as experimentalists, we were restricting the ‘data’ by our choice of experimental set-up. We became aware of the potentially artificial nature of ‘data’, which is usually hidden (implicit) by the selection of a particular method. To make data ‘objective’ ie; independent of the observer, rather than artefactual, they needed to be validated and verified experimentally by others, and then shared in peer-reviewed publications