Devere Hall, Áras na Mac Léinn, UCC, 09 Dec 2009
Prof. Michael Berndt, Head of the College of Medicine & Health, UCC
Winter Conferrings 2009
12.30pm Wednesday 9 December 2009
Address by
Prof. Michael Berndt, Head of the College of Medicine & Health, UCC
One of the inevitable questions asked at interview is where one sees oneself in five years time, with the usual response targeted to the situation and what one hopes is the expected response. In reality, it is a question that is essentially unanswerable. Five years ago, I would not have predicted, after a research career spanning nearly thirty years in Australia, that I would in my mid-fifties move half way around the world to Ireland to take up an Executive Dean role as Head of the College of Medicine and Health at University College Cork. In hindsight, it was even less obvious in my early career where the future lay.
I was raised in what was then a small country town in South East Queensland in Australia that like Milwaukee in the USA had been co-settled in the 1860s by Irish and German immigrants. To the west in familiar sounding centres and towns like Kerry, Killarney and Rathdowney, the Irish had settled and become dairy farmers. Closer to the coast in Beenleigh, where I was born, the Irish were the townspeople and the Germans as the surrounding farming community grew sugar cane. My father was Lutheran but my mother was of Scottish descent and Catholic and my father on marriage converted. Thus in primary school, I was raised by Irish nuns and the local priest was also Irish. The highlight of the year was the Saint Patrick’s Day concert. These were the times when a letter from the head nun secured a scholarship to secondary education in a boarding school run by the Marist Brothers.
Coming from a small country town, I knew only one person who had gone to university. I asked what he did in first year and then took the same subjects! I completed my undergraduate BSc degree at age 19 at the University of Queensland in 1973 with a major in both Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, far too young and still unclear on any career path. A research honours year was the clear default choice, but isolating alkaloids from marine coral did not inspire, so I shifted to the Biochemistry Department and then to a PhD in the field of Mechanistic Enzymology. Doing a PhD in those times was a very different experience to that of those of you who graduated with a PhD today. One was given a topic at the start of the PhD and then left to get on with it. Supervision was minimal and delivered infrequently very much using the “rough end of the pineapple” approach. In retrospect, we were given enormous freedom to do our own research but still graduated as fully trained researchers.
It was at this time that chance events shaped my future career. In the last year of my PhD, I had decided to continue my research career and was looking to do a post-doc overseas but had little idea how to proceed or where to go. Another PhD student finishing at that time had arranged to do a post-doc with David Phillips in the Biochemistry Department at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, but had withdrawn to further a career as a concert pianist. I wrote proffering myself as an alternate, on the basis of similar training. I was offered the position to do research on human platelets, a project that shaped my entire subsequent career, not by foresight but by serendipity and through the choices of others.
Saint Jude Children’s Hospital was a transforming experience. This was the charitable institution founded by Danny Thomas that in the 1970s had made the breakthroughs in the treatment of childhood leukaemia, from a probable death sentence to majority cure. This was also an exciting time to become involved in platelet biology, a research area still in its infancy, with only a handful of prominent research laboratories internationally in the field. It was known at this time that platelets prevented blood loss by adhering to the damaged blood vessel to initiate the formation of a platelet aggregate or thrombus. This process occurring inappropriately caused heart attack and stroke. While during my career I focussed on how blood cells initially stick to blood vessels, David Phillips concentrated on how the platelets clumped together to form thrombus. He showed this was due to a specific platelet surface receptor. Exploiting this platelet specific expression, he went on to found a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company and develop one of the antiplatelet agents now widely used to prevent thrombosis post-coronary arterial stenting.
It is interesting how this was achieved. A group at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla had identified that this receptor functioned by recognition of a small protein sequence, arginine glycine aspartic acid or RGD in single letter code, a finding which they had patented. Phillips took the approach of screening snake venoms and identified that they contained an inhibitor that had this RGD sequence. He screened over eighty snake species and found one with a variation, lysine instead of arginine, KGD instead of RGD. This allowed drug development without the impediment of prior patent issues. Again it was a chance event that in this case ensured success.
In your careers as you proceed, I would encourage you also to expect the unexpected and take up opportunities as they arise. I congratulate you all on your achievement here today. I would encourage you going forward to take a global view, to listen to the views of others, to observe and learn. Having had a career in research, I have had the opportunity to have travelled widely. I still remember vividly the emotion on seeing in 1979 that in Mississippi there were still black and white toilets and overt discrimination. I worked in France in 1984 and China in 1985. In 1989, I worked in Moscow six weeks before the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin wall. These were all defining experiences during which I met and learnt from inspirational people. One such person was Changgeng Ruan in Suzhou who was declared Chinese Person of the Year during the late eighties. In 1985, his was one of only ten state supported laboratories in any field in China. Changgeng had trained as a physician. He was the first person after the Cultural Revolution, during which he toiled in the rice paddies, to leave China and obtain a PhD in a foreign country, France. This was the foundation for his career. UCC has also given each of you the foundation for your future careers. I wish each of you well in your own future extraordinary journeys.
![]()
