Woman of Influence
Jane Harding
There are a great many sheep in distinguished professor Jane Harding’s office.
Plush, painted on mugs, and photographed, they’re gifts from the neonatologist’s students and team-mates. Ewes and lambs have a lot of useful similarities to women and babies, she explains. Lambs’ length of time in the womb and size at birth – plus the fact they don’t arrive in litters – make them better suited to Harding’s clinical trials than the stereotypical lab rat.
‘‘They’re also a species that doesn’t immediately abort if you try and look at the foetus,’’ she notes.
It’s been a triumphant month for Harding, 64, who is both a practising doctor and an academic specialising in ailments related to early births. Based at Auckland University’s Liggins Institute, she teaches, leads research teams, and treats babies.
On October 17, she was awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s most prestigious science prize. A week later, on Thursday, she was named supreme winner of the 2019 Women of Influence Awards.
‘‘It’s not what one expects,’’ she laughs, still trying to get her head around the double whammy wins.
It’s not that Harding isn’t extensively decorated already – she was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and won the Beaven Medal for excellence in health research in 2016 – she just prefers going under the radar.
Certainly a pioneer in her chosen fields, which happen to be male dominated (she was Auckland University’s first female deputy vice-chancellor and only the fourth woman to win the Rutherford Medal in its 29-year history), does she see herself as a pioneering woman per se?
‘‘Not at all! Well, I mean, I have done some things that were the first time a woman’s done them – but that’s not what it’s about,’’ Harding says.
‘‘I’m a person who’s been fortunate to have been able to just get on with things and succeed.’’
On the subject of successes, Harding usually speaks in terms of ‘‘we’’. She’s quick to acknowledge the ‘‘many wonderful teams’’ she’s been part of.
Babies, too, she describes as ‘‘wonderful’’. Harding and her teams have changed the lives and saved the lives of millions of them.
They found, for example, that a once common type of physiotherapy done on babies with severe lung disease can give them brain injuries. Hospitals around the world put an end to the practice, known as chest tapping, after Harding’s team uncovered the correlation.
More recently, they developed a groundbreaking – yet simple and cheap – cure for low blood sugar in babies, another cause of brain damage. Harding discovered that rubbing sugar gel inside a newborn’s cheek treats neonatal hypoglycaemia, and costs a mere $2 a pop.
The method is also being adopted around the world.
Her research begins long before birth, however. Another of her team’s discoveries was that mothers – humans or ewes, in this case – who are undernourished at the time of their offspring’s conception are more likely to give birth prematurely.
When in academic mode, Harding misses the day-to-day contact with families of the babies she works to save. It’s a privilege, she says, to be part of such critical chapters of people’s lives.
But her time on the frontline leaves her with questions she wouldn’t get the chance to answer without her research role.
‘‘That’s the joy of research. It allows you to actually do something about questions that arise in the clinical context,’’ she says. ‘‘It might take you 10 years to do it. But if you do, you might help hundreds and thousands and millions of babies – not just this one.’’
Harding loves running into families she’d been involved with years earlier, hearing about or meeting thriving teens and adults she treated as infants.
Equally, she loves that untold numbers of people the world over, who have never heard of her and won’t even remember their time in hospital as babies, thrive owing to her research.
People who wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the work, I note. What a strange feeling!
‘‘The team’s work, certainly. And that’s right, it is wonderful,’’ she smiles.
Juggling research with being a hands-on doctor is no easy road. Each role requires years of training, neither can be skimped, and the tension between them is challenging, says Harding.
‘‘Because you’re trying to keep a foot in both camps, you always feel as though you’re not quite doing either properly.
‘‘There’s a lot of: ‘I want to do this experiment really well, but actually I’m on call at the hospital in five minutes’ time’.’’
Harding has no idea how many hours she works a week. This doesn’t bother her in the slightest, but possibly contributes to her love of the wilderness. The more remote, the less reception, the better. ‘‘Escape is good,’’ she says, approvingly.
Harding takes her backpack, boots and binoculars around the world. New Zealand’s bush and coastline have a special place in her heart, though ‘‘anywhere with birds is good’’.
She tramps with friends and family, opting more for huts over tents as she gets older.
Family is important to Harding. She and her three siblings grew up around the upper North Island: Harding went to primary school in Kaitaia, intermediate in Hamilton, and high school in Rotorua. Her dad was a civil servant and her mum – Harding’s date at the Women of Influence Awards in Auckland – a speech therapist.
She describes her childhood, naturally, as ‘‘wonderful’’ (also as ‘‘ordinary Kiwi’’). Featuring plenty of beaches.
These days she lives in east Auckland’s Kohimarama with a spoiled cat named for the old children’s story book Katie the Kitten.
Despite tempting opportunities in neonatal research elsewhere, she says she’s deeply rooted in New Zealand.
‘‘You’re never short of things to do, though money to do them is another matter.’’
A pressing challenge in our newborn sphere is understanding diabetes’ impact on pregnant women, says Harding. International guidelines on the subject don’t necessarily fit New Zealand’s unique ethnic mix and physical location – providing plenty of fodder for research.
Reflecting on her lengthy career to date,
Harding struggles to identify a single high point. Unsurprisingly, she chooses finally to go with one celebrating the discovery of someone else: her teacher and the Liggins Institute’s namesake, Sir Graham Liggins.
In the early 1970s, Liggins and Dr Ross Howie discovered that injecting women expected to give birth prematurely with antenatal corticosteroids speeded up their babies’ lung development and improved survival rates. But concerns around possible long-term side-effects meant the practice wasn’t widely adopted.
So, in the early 2000s, Harding and her team decided to track down the babies – then aged 30 – and clear up the lingering questions.
All they had to go on were handwritten records of the mothers’ names and the babies’ birth dates and genders.
‘‘It involved a whole lot of detective work as we didn’t even know the name of the person we were looking for,’’ she recalls.
‘‘And of course 30-year-old New Zealanders aren’t actually in New Zealand, they’re all over the world. But we managed to track many of them down, about 70 per cent of the surviving 800 babies.’’
The team confirmed there were, in fact, no long-term side-effects to using antenatal corticosteroids. ‘‘That study was really important, we could go on and encourage the use of a very valuable treatment,’’ she says.
And though she’s less than a year away from receiving national superannuation, Harding has ‘‘no immediate plans’’ to stop saving babies.
‘‘I’m a person who’s been fortunate to have been able to just get on with things and succeed.’’