My term as Director was a time of expansion in the ANU. In the JCSMR, this was represented by the establishment of four new Departments: Clinical Science, Human Biology, Immunology and Pharmacology.
The Head of the Department of Clinical Science, Professor Malcolm Whyte, had been appointed in 1966. However, because of delays in the completion of new laboratories for the Department in the Canberra Community Hospital, he worked in the School building and in the field in Papua New Guinea before moving into the Hospital in September 1967. In the Canberra Community Hospital, besides providing a clinical service, by referral, for both ambulatory patients and in-patients, the Department conducted a program of clinical and laboratory research oriented towards problems associated with coronary heart disease. Initially there was a good deal of suspicion among doctors in the hospital that the presence of the Department of Clinical Science was the thin edge of the wedge, the introduction of government-paid medicos into a purely private practice hospital. Malcolm and his staff negotiated these problems effectively.
A Department of Human Biology was established in 1970 by bringing together Robert Kirk, a human geneticist who had elected to remain within the JCSMR when Catcheside transferred to the Research School of Biological Sciences, and the Urban Biology Group, headed by Stephen Boyden, which had previously been located in the Department of Microbiology (see Chapter 5). Research in the new department was carried out in these two fields, each concerned with human population biology. In 1972, the Urban Biology Group, in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong, initiated a study of the human ecology of Hong Kong, then the most densely populated city on earth. This was a groundbreaking study of the ‘metabolism’ of a city, which was completed in 1977 and which led to Boyden's involvement in UNESCO's Man in the Biosphere program.
Kirk's interest had long been in human genetics, and in Canberra he undertook population genetic studies of Australian Aborigines, natives of Papua New Guinea and, with local collaborators, inhabitants of India and South Africa. In 1973, he was appointed Head of the Department of Human Biology.
In 1970, Council approved the establishment of a Department of Immunology, and Bede Morris, who had come to Canberra with Colin Courtice in 1958, was appointed Professor and moved from the Department of Experimental Pathology to the new department, with three other academic staff and four PhD students. Initially dispersed in several parts of the building, early in 1973 they came together in the space previously occupied by Catcheside and his staff. Their studies were focused on self/non-self discrimination, with a particular concentration on transplantation biology, using a unique and particularly useful system of pregnant sheep and their foetuses. This made it possible to cannulate the lymphatic system of both mother and foetus and study the development of circulating lymphoid cells in both animals.
In 1966, David Curtis, Eccles' first PhD student, had been appointed a Professor within the Department of Physiology. In 1973, when space became available in the laboratories occupied by the former Department of Medical Chemistry, he was appointed Professor of Pharmacology, and with his staff moved into some of the vacated laboratories. Research in the new department was concentrated on in vivo studies of the effects of known chemicals administered close to single neurones in various portions of the nervous system of the cat and the relationship of the effects observed to synaptic inhibition or excitation.