Retiree's Lunch Update February 2022
Written by Dr Richard Thwaites, FRACI CChem
Published 4 March 2022
Guest Speaker: Professor John Webb OAM
Professor John Webb OAM has had a very varied and distinguished career, and has held many roles in several different parts of the world. He entertained the retirees’ group at their latest “virtual lunch” with stories from Gundagai, Sydney, California, Paris, Delhi, Oxford, Perth and Timor Leste, not to mention his current role in Melbourne at Swinburne University of Technology and his recent paper (co-authored with Tom Spurling and Greg Simpson) on “Science Diplomacy – where Chemistry is Crucial”.
To start at the beginning, John was born in Gundagai, NSW, and attended Marist Brothers Mosman, an all boys Catholic High School before entering a Catholic Seminary to train for the priesthood in the early 1960s. He soon realized that his vocation was not quite what was needed for this sort of career, and moved to Sydney University to study for a BSc, majoring in chemistry. While at Sydney, he lived in International House, a new co-ed residential college, the first of its kind in the university. He married Sandy, his wife, in Adelaide in 1968, and proceeded to the USA to undertake a PhD at Caltech in what was then a rather new area of chemistry, bio-inorganic chemistry (or inorganic biochemistry). John’s particular interest was the role ferric ions played in different organic molecules, like proteins, of biological significance, in particular, Ferritin. His supervisor was Prof Harry B Gray, a pioneer in the field. A bit later in his career, John spent 6 months at Oxford with another of the pioneer founders of bio-inorganic chemistry Professor R J P (Bob) Williams. John said that his time in Oxford, in Bob’s lab, was among the happiest of his career. (As an aside, Bob was my tutor when I was an undergraduate at Wadham College, and I agree he was certainly outstanding in every respect.)
John recounted his various meetings and encounters with distinguished American Nobel laureates, like Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman, while in the USA in the 1970s, but he returned to Australia to take up a role at Murdoch University in Perth, where he stayed from 1977 to 2007. The Head of Department when he joined Murdoch was Dr Jim Parker, whose main interest was in hydrometallurgy – how to get valuable minerals out of rocks using solvents and chelating agents rather than high temperatures and extreme conditions.
John continued to be interested in the association between iron and various organic molecules, and indicated how it was possible to treat thalassemia using chelating agents. Thalassemia has long been known to be a hereditary disease affecting people living around the Mediterranean Sea, but it also affects large populations in Indonesia and elsewhere in S E Asia.
John also recounted his experiences Scuba diving to recover marine organisms, particularly mollusks, containing high concentrations of Fe often in the form of complexes between iron and chitin.
John reminded us that Perth is nearer to many towns and cities in S E Asia than it is to Sydney or Melbourne, and this stimulated his interest in becoming involved in networks of scientists, particularly in developing countries. He noted that natural product chemistry was a popular area of study in many science departments, and mentioned Dr John Kingston, a charismatic UNESCO official responsible for the formation of many networks of cooperation in the region. Kingston died in 2015, and John and Tom Spurling wrote an obituary in the SMH entitled: “John Kingston: Feisty chemist had the winning formula”. UNESCO funding needed to be directed, according to John, to the needy, not the greedy!
The establishment of the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies, FACS, was a result of extensive collaborations among various chemical societies in Asia, which John played a key role in developing, from the longest established organisations such as those in Australia and Japan, to the very recent addition in 2017 of the Chemical Society of Timor Leste, which John and Tom Spurling were instrumental in putting in place. It was as a result of John’s role in establishing collaborative research networks in Asia that he was awarded an OAM in 1996.
John talked about his association with the late Peter Dunn AO and Bob Mathews OAM in the development of Australia’s crucial involvement in the development of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the OPCW, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Australia can be proud of the leading role it took in helping to eliminate chemical weapons from theatres of war, signing up to the Convention in 1994.
A digression from purely academic life, John was given leave of absence from his role at Murdoch to take up a position with UNESCO in Paris in 2002/2003, to work on science diplomacy, and then from 2005 to 2007, to become Counsellor (Education, Science and Training) with the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, India. His responsibilities included working on the Australia/India Strategic Research Fund.
Leaving Murdoch in 2007, John was appointed Deputy Director of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne for the period 2008 to 2012. He currently holds a position at Swinburne University of Technology in the Centre for Transformative Innovation in the School of Business, Law and Entrepreneurship.
The large number of questions following the formal part of John’s presentation was clear demonstration of the interest generated by John’s talk. At the conclusion of the meeting, Richard Thwaites thanked John for his most interesting autobiographical overview of his fascinating and fulfilling life.
The next meeting of the retirees’ group will be held at Graduate House on Tuesday March 1st at 12 noon. The next virtual meeting will be on Tuesday April 5th at 12 noon on zoom. All retirees and would be retirees are welcome.
Hope to see you soon!
Richard Thwaites
Go to back to Newsletter