Emeritus Professor Sir Roy Douglas Wright he was an extraordinary man, a giant, and there has been no figure in Australian academic like him. There were many facets to his exceptional personality, and originality of thinking. His scintillating and Rabelaisian wit was legendary, and a fascinating and challenging task awaits his biographer. Roy Douglas Wright was born in Tasmania at Central Castra, which is near Ulverston. His father was John Forsythe Wright who had married Emma Marie Lewis. He was educated at the Devonport High School and following matriculation he did his first year of the medical course at the University of Tasmania. Because of his outstanding record he was awarded an open scholarship to Queens College, University of Melbourne. He graduated in medicine in 1929, having received honours in all subjects of the course and exhibitions in surgery, anatomy and physiology.

In 1930 he was appointed resident medical officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and his exceptional mind and unrestrained curiosity led him immediately into research - one of his first interests being the possibility of ameliorating the privation of biliary obstruction and jaundice in patients by treatment with bile salts and high fat intake. Opportunities for clinical research in those times were minimal, and, indeed could meet with real obstruction from on high. However, he developed a close association with the Department of Pathology, and accepted an appointment as senior lecturer with continued over the period 1933 to 1938. He also held an appointment as outpatient surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital between 1936 and 1939. During this time he initiated a number of enquiries which reflected the diversity of his interests. He wrote on the anatomy of the wrist joint and the biological effects of radiation, and recounted experimental observations on the effect of increased intracranial pressure on the calibre and rate of flow of blood in intracranial vessels. However, the most significant of his early papers was the one which dealt with "A crucial structural consideration in the evolution of the nervous system". This short document recognised the elemental fact that with each succeeding layer of cells on the surface of the cerebral cortex, the space beneath was increasingly occupied by descending and ascending processes with corresponding limitation of the cellular population as one progressed down from the top layer of the grey matter. Thus an enormous advantage accrued from folding in the cortex in terms of surface area and the number of cells feasible. Professor W.E. Le Gros-Clark, Dr Lee's Professor Anatomy, University of Oxford in Essays on growth and form presented to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson attributes "the demonstration of this simple proposition as a general principle in cortical development", to Wright.

Another group of papers concerned the derivation of blood supply of metastatic tumours. He showed that blood vascular supply of hepatic regenerating tissue was derived from a new group of portal vessels, whereas any group of tissue with fibrous proliferation, as in secondary carcinoma, was supplied from the systemic arterial circulation. Similarly, he showed in the lung that regenerated lung alveoli were supplied from the pulmonary artery, whereas the bronchial artery supplied any fibrous growth, including that of secondary carcinoma. This followed on Virchow's observation of increased size of the bronchial artery with fibrocaseous tuberculosis.

In 1937 he began a year and a half's stay in Oxford with Professor Howard Florey (qv 1), who with Margaret Jennings and Wright published important contributions to knowledge of secretary processes of the gut. They wrote a review on the subject for Physiological Reviews. His association with Florey continued as a warm friendship over succeeding years, and included further work on the comparative physiology of the secretary processes in the stomach, with particular interest in fauna peculiar to Australia. They studied the nature of gastric digestion in the spiny anteater, a monotreme with a stomach lined by squamous epithelium. I recall a memorable day in the course of one of Florey's sojourns a the Department of Physiology in Melbourne, when a spiny anteater, previously prepared with gastric fistula, was placed with due ceremony on an ant hill in the bush one fine summer afternoon. The anteater was not interested in the ants, and took off through the bush. The sight of Wright and Florey weaving through gum trees and logs in hot pursuit of their precious creature would be difficult to forget.

When Wright became Professor of Physiology at the University of Melbourne in 1939, the Department had only one full-time senior member of staff - himself. It is a striking tribute to his catalytic intellectual spirit that ten to fifteen years later, despite the disruption of the second world war in the intervening period, the Department was a ferment of ideas and in the late 1940's and early 1950's there were several groups developing which were to make major contributions to medical knowledge. It was reflective of Wright's generous and supportive nature with unswerving dedication to scientific investigation that so many people gravitated to him. His general suspicion of orthodoxy, of which he had encountered much in Melbourne Hospitals, gave rise to a tolerant and often very encouraging view of people with eccentric ideas.

To instance some of the programs which had developed in the Department of Physiology over this period, and were being actively pursued in the 1950's - Dr Sam Rose and Dr J Nelson developed a new microinjector which permitted local perfusion in particular organs over a period of days to weeks. This "Rose/Nelson osmotic pump" which was used to deliver a show infusion to the posterior pituitary, or the posterior chamber of the eye, was essentially the forerunner of the Alzet osmotic pump which now has vast application throughout the world. The Rose and Nelson technique was described in the Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science in August 1955. Dr Ray Bradley was at the time in the early 50's using perspex chambers with two compartments which were developed with the object of observing the effect of local continuous application of various substances to growing tumour tissues. The perspex chambers were placed in the peritoneal cavity of animals and perfused by the use of the Rose/Nelson osmotic pump. This preoccupation with in vitro culture and perfusion of tissues led Dr Bradley subsequent to a sojourn he had at the National Cancer Institute of the United States, to embark on methodology for the growth of clones of mouse bone marrow cells in vitro using an Agar culture system. The first paper on this by Bradley, TR and Metcalf, D. The growth of mouse bone marrow cell in vitro, (Aust. J Exp Biol Med Sci,1966, 44, 287), was jointly from the Department of Physiology, University of Melbourne, and the Cancer Research Institute of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and became a Citation Classic. It led eventually to the identification and development of the colony stimulating factors, a medical advance in which Metcalf played the predenominat role.

Professor Wright actively encouraged medical students to come and talk with him about problems and questions, scientific or otherwise. My own experience of his generosity of spirit and enthusiasm caused me to seek him out when, as a Junior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital with Sir Albert Coates, I observed renal behaviour of a patient losing large amounts of pancreatic juice from the body to be different from current texts of physiology and clinical practice. He encouraged the writing of a Letter to Nature.

Dr Victor Wynn initiated the development of flame photometry in the Department in 1949 to investigate acute medical and surgical emergencies. In 1953, I commenced using Pavlov-Glinski type parotid fistulae in sheep to subtract large volumes of sodium containing fluid from the body, and it soon became apparent that not only did these animals have renal behaviour analogous to the earlier patients, but also they had a remarkable adrenal mediated change in parotid salivary Na/K ratio. Further, parotid salivary flow, which is continuous in sheep, fluctuated with environmental events. The rate, however, was very difficult to measure, and Professor Wright had the ingenious idea of improving on the original Pavlov preparation I had developed for the sheep by a plastic surgical operation which created a skin teat on the cheek. This worked superbly, and I termed it the "Wright fistula". The results from its use led to a publication in Nature on conditioned reflexes. In relation to the aldosterone mediated change of salivary Na/K ratio, the problem was to study control in a conscious undisturbed sheep, and Professor Wright with Dr James Goding successfully implemented an idea I put forward to transplant the adrenal to a combined carotid artery jugular vein skin loop. These two outstanding surgical innovations reflecting his great skill were intrinsic, together with radiochemical methods developed by Dr John Coghlan, to the novel experimental data which eventually attracted the wide support which resulted in the establishment of the Howard Florey Laboratories of Experimental Physiology and Medicine in 1962. Very many people involved during the great development of the Department of Physiology to the stage of occupancy of the wing of the new triradiate Medical Centre of Melbourne University had been Professor Wright's students. Despite his obviously powerful personality, his approach to administration was the antithesis of authoritarianism, and quiet discussion and appeal to logic was the basis of his transactions.

The Howard Florey Laboratories which operated as a relatively autonomous section of the Department of Physiology over the next decade were incorporated in 1971 by Act of Parliament as the Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine. This important step in the institutional development of medical science in Australia was the result of a coherent vision of the scientists, the original donors to the Howard Florey Laboratories, and the University of Melbourne, and Wright played a major role. He became an Originating Member of the Board and served thereon until his death in 1990. About the time of incorporation, Wright retired early from the Chair of Physiology and accepted the Medical Directorship of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, which he held until 1975. This institution was another where Professor Wright played a seminal role in its foundation in 1948, and had it named after his old teacher, Peter MacCallum (qv) the former Professor of Pathology.

During the Second World War, Wright engaged in research directly pertinent to care of service personnel, particularly the treatment of shock. However a principal activity was to join his friend, Colonel Alfred Conlon, in the Research Directorate, a body with direct access to the Commander in Chief, Sir Thomas Blamey. He held rank at the colonel level, and probably the main emergent from this "think tank", involving many people who became eminent figures on the national scene in post war Australia, was the plan to create an Australian National University. This was envisaged as a powerful critical mass of scholarship and scientific excellence, co-habiting the national capital with the politicians and civil service. It was conceived as likely to have a profound and irradiating catalytic effect on the national enterprises over decades. Blamey was enthused by the idea and persuaded Mr Curtin, the Prime Minister, that it would enable the attraction to Australia of distinguished expatriates, particularly Sir Howard Florey, Sir Mark Oliphant, Sir Keith Hancock and others. Key national figures in the genesis included Dr H C Coombs, Mr Dedman and Professor Mills, and together with Wright and Conlon they ensured that the concept became reality. Wright was a member of the Interim Council, Secretary of that Council from 1946 to 1948, and was elected to the Council in 1952 and served until 1972. During this post war period he also played a very significant role in the reform and augmentation or profile of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

While Medical Director of the Peter MacCallum Institute, Wright continued his experimental work at the Florey, centering it on the basic physiology of secretion of the parotid gland - a consuming interest which occupied the remainder of his research life. In 1975 he returned to the Florey Institute full time, and spend the remainder of his academic life with the Florey at his base. Of course, his commitment to the cause of Professor Sydney Sparkes Orr made a major impact on academic life in Australia. He believed that the conduct of the Council of the University of Tasmania towards Orr was the antithesis of the standards of dispassionate and objective analysis of facts, commitment to due process, and the search for the truth appropriate to a community of scholars. He saw it as the improper impact of entrenched establishment interests on an academic society. He effectively recruited many churches, societies and institutions to the cause and eventually, after many years, succeeded in so far as the University settled and payed damages to Orr. It is probably true to say that the likely demeanour of any Australian University governing body towards an accused academic was altered from thereon as a result of this history. He became the counsellor and best friend of not only academics, but of many people in trouble, who sought his help over the years, and his support was given generously.

In 1963, he was elected to the Council of the University of Melbourne, and this formalised a deep interest and perennial commitment to the welfare of the institution closest to his heart. From 1972 to 1980 he was Deputy Chancellor, and from 1980 to 1989 he was Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. His presence daily on the campus added a particular measure to his role, which involved a much closer attention to the welfare and affairs of the University than would have held had he regarded the office as primarily a ceremonial function. Possibly this active participatory role was not always applauded by elements of the administration, and perhaps he was not always right on specific issues, but the overall benefit to values in academic life would be beyond cavil.
Whereas his relations with professional societies were sometimes turbulent, he maintained a warm attitude to the College and its purposes. At the time of admission to the Fellowship of the College he completed the form required in characteristically cryptic style answering the question as to his relation with other Fellows: "Some good - some not so good". He is survived by his wife Meriel, and a son Douglas and daugher Judith, children of his first marriage. In 1983, he received Australia's highest honour from the Queen - the Knighthood of the Order of Australia (AK), a fitting tribute to a very great man.