Brailsford Robertson, biochemistry genius, produces Australia's first insulin at Adelaide University in 1923
Brailsford Robertson and his wife Jane/Jeannie (nee Stirling) in the laboratory of the physiology department at the University of California in 1912.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Adelaide was blessed by the genius (Thorburn) Brailsford Robertson returning to its university at the height of his international prominence in biochemistry.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Robertson came with his mother to South Australia as a child in 1892 to join his father who worked for a mining company at Callington in the Adelaide Hills. Robertson attended the Misses Stantons' School, New Glenelg, and, after private tuition, entered Adelaide University in 1902, studying physiology (bachelor of science 1905) under professor Edward Stirling.
Robertson considered a career in mathematical physics, under William Bragg’s teaching. But, in 1905, he became assistant lecturer in the physiology department at the University of California, Berkeley, led by the famous Jacques Loeb. Under his influence, Robertson developed his physico-chemical outlook and research skills. His monograph on proteins’ physical chemistry, in 1912, was published in German, later in English.
Robertson had gained his PhD from the University of California in 1907, and his science doctorate from Adelaide University in 1908 – by the age of 24. In 1910, when he married his former professor’s daughter Jane (Jeannie) Stirling, Robertson became associate professor of physiological chemistry and pharmacology at Berkeley, and full professor in 1917.
In 1918, he accepted the chair of biochemistry at Toronto University, Canada, but moved to the chair of physiology at Adelaide in 1919 when Stirling retired. In the next 11 years, Robertson’s brought organisation, flair for research and energy to a modern discipline of biochemistry for the university's small medical school.
By 1926, he was professor of both biochemistry and general physiology. An excellent lecturer, Robertson greatly influenced a research outlook in the medical school. He modernised teaching of medical and science students, setting new curricula, including an honours course in biochemistry. He was crucial in planning the medical faculty’s Darling Building, opened 1922, for physiology, biochemistry and histology.
To merge clinical medicine and fundamental science, Robertson founded the Medical Sciences Club of South Australia and in 1924, with professors John Cleland and F. Wood Jones, the Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science. He was a key to the university’s animal products research foundation. Amid broad interests, Robertson concentrated on studying growth and senescence of cells and animals.
He made another vital contribution by finding and improving a method for preparing insulin. It was made in the Darling Building for the first time in Australia, under licence from Toronto University’s insulin committee, for use on diabetic patients in Adelaide Hospital in 1923, within a year of Banting and Best's discovery of the hormone and its link to diabetes.
His interest in the mechanisms of growth and longevity in animals culminated in the publication of The Chemical Basis of Growth and Senescence (1923) and he was called Australia's first experimental gerontologist. In 1926, Robertson was appointed to the Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Rome.
In 1927, the commonwealth council for scientific and industrial research (precursor of the CSIRO) invited Robertson to form and direct a division of animal nutrition, in the university. Field stations were set up across Australia. He remained professor but concentrated on experiments on growth, and the demands of founding a national research laboratory.
Robertson contracted influenza in 1929-30 but continued working in the laboratory despite summer heat. An asthmatic, he died in 1930, aged 46.