SPRAY ON SKIN
Dr John O’Sullivan was part of the CSIRO team behind the invention of Wi-Fi.
ISLAND isolation has benefits far beyond international border control, with remoteness making this country a natural incubator of great ideas.
Australia is the proud birthplace of some cracking inventions, including Professor Graeme Clark’s Cochlear ear implant, delivering the miracle of sound to the hearing-impaired since 1978.
Some Aussie innovations have changed the course of human history. A Mexican wave is still out for now, but here are some past efforts deserving a standing ovation in iso, or at the very least, a sustained round of applause:
WI-FI
Where oh where would the world have been during the pandemic without the gift of Wi-Fi? Imagine lockdown without video calls. Contemplate the pandemic without streaming services. It’s easy to forget there was a lengthy period of history known as BC: before connectivity.
It was 1996 when CSIRO radio astronomers invented and patented wireless local area network (WLAN) technology. Big props to the team that pioneered technology estimated to be in more than five billion devices globally. Love a Wi-Fi hotspot in your home, office or local coffee shop? It’s all possible thanks to the brains trust: Dr John O’Sullivan, Dr Terry Percival, Diet Ostry, Graham Daniels and John Deane.
CERVICAL CANCER VACCINE
The global effort to find a COVID-19 vaccine continues apace. Meanwhile, let’s celebrate a previous vaccination win. With cervical cancer one of the leading causes of cancer death in women, future generations will be spared, thanks to the work of Brisbane-based medical researchers, Prof Ian Frazer and Dr Jian Zhiou.
Prof Frazer said a staggering 200 million doses of the vaccine had been delivered worldwide to date, helping prevent an estimated 300,000 deaths each year from cervical cancer.
But it did not happen overnight — no effective vaccine does.
“While the vaccine technology was developed by Jian Zhou and myself over one year in 1990, the product was developed and commercialised over the next 15 years by (pharmaceutical companies) GSK and Merck,” Prof Frazer said.
“The vaccine sets a great example of the impact of medical research on human health, and inspires other researchers to see their research translated into clinical practice.”
Burns victims worldwide are the beneficiaries of the groundbreaking work of Prof Fiona Wood, AM, the Perth-based plastic surgeon who, along with her spray-on-skin technology, became a household name when her team used the technique to treat victims of the 2002 Bali bombings.
Prof Wood and colleague Marie Stoner established a skin culture facility in 1993 that enabled them to harness the potential of tissue engineering technology. By taking a small patch of the victim’s healthy skin, they used it to grow new skin cells in the laboratory.
Their world-first technology evolved from a sheet product to aerosol or spray delivery and has significantly reduced recovery time and scarring for more than 1000 burns victims globally.
ULTRASOUND IMAGING
Couples expecting a baby during the pandemic can clutch their precious ultrasound images and cherish the sneak peek of their little miracle thanks to the work of ultrasonic experts David Robinson and George Kossoff. In May 1962, the pair recorded Australia’s first ultrasound image of a foetus. Their images were quickly embraced by the medical fraternity as equal or superior to anything available in the world, placing the new Ultrasonic Research Group at the forefront of ultrasound research and technology.
BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER
Grief is capable of igniting greatness. The late Dr David Warren AO (19252010) was just nine when his father perished in one of Australia’s earliest air disasters.
Later, investigating the 1953 crash of the Comet, the world’s first jetpowered aircraft, Dr Warren argued a cockpit recording of final crew conversations and other sounds would be useful.
The concept didn’t immediately, er, take off, but by 1960 the black box was compulsory for all Australian commercial flights.
Today commercial aircraft around the world carry not one but two black boxes: a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder. Some 100,000 black boxes based on Dr Warren’s design have been fitted to aircraft.
VEGEMITE
The correct spread-to-bread ratio is so hotly contested that most cafes gave up even trying years ago. It’s personal. But there are few things as normalising in a world gone mad than plating up your own vegemite toast in lockdown.
HILLS HOIST
Granted, we’ve spent too much time looking at laundry in recent months, but the most cursory appraisal of drying techniques abroad explains why this humble backyard invention is a national treasure. Lance Hill ultimately pegged — ahem — the market and the millions, but young Gilbert Toyne is credited with pioneering the design as a 14-year old blacksmith apprentice. Toyne’s tale is a total heartbreaker, with history showing that fate hung that poor man out to dry.
FEATURE FILMS
Forget Hollywood and Bollywood, without Australian ingenuity we may never have been able to binge-watch films throughout lockdown. The 1906 film industry first tells a classic Aussie yarn: The Story of the Kelly Gang, coming in at a game-changing 80 minutes when other moving pictures were just 10 minutes long. The film was made in Melbourne, where feature-length films are currently needed escapism like never before.
POLYMER BANKNOTES
OK, no one is using cash right now, but some of us are old enough to remember grubby, torn, greasecoated banknotes sweating in a stranger’s back pocket before being handed over at the till. Within a decade of their 1988 Bicentenary launch, forgery-resistant, durable polymer notes were the only notes issued in Australia and have since been adopted by about 25 countries.