Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to take this opportunity to recognise the life of Professor Donald Metcalf AC, who passed away on 15 December 2014 in Melbourne, Victoria. Don was a colossus of science and a pioneering medical researcher whose discoveries helped more than 20 million cancer patients worldwide to recover from their cancer therapies. He revolutionised stem-cell transplantation. Don dedicated his 60-year career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne to the study of blood cancers and the regulation of the blood system. He was the father of modern haematology.

Don's contributions were profound. His discovery of colony-stimulating factors—the hormones that regulate the production of blood cells—has become an integral part of cancer treatment around the world.

Born in February 1929 in the small country town of Mittagong, New South Wales, Don was the son of schoolteachers and was an inquisitive and conscientious student. He obtained a scholarship to the University of Sydney to study medicine, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery. He met his future wife, Jo, during his medical residency.

Don joined the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in 1954, supported by Cancer Council Victoria's Carden Fellowship, an award that he held until his retirement in December 2014. Don's studies of blood-production control led him to speculate that one or more hormones controlled white blood cell production. These hormones, which he termed colony-stimulating factors—CSFs—were his research focus for more than 50 years. Don recognised that CSFs had a potential role in clinical medicine, particularly in cancer treatment. He was a central figure in the international clinical trials of CSFs in the 1980s. On the basis of these studies, G-CSF—Neupogen—was approved for clinical use in 1991. In addition to protecting people with cancer from serious, potentially fatal infections, it was also used to enable patients to have more demanding rounds of chemotherapy to eradicate their cancer.

One of the first patients to benefit from Professor Metcalf's work was the famed Spanish tenor Jose Carreras. After being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, which did not respond to initial treatment, Carreras received the treatment regime that included CSFs. He responded positively. Senor Carreras recovered, and he visited the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 1991 to meet Professor Metcalf and thank him and the WEHI team for the role that they played in the development of the treatment. An estimated 20 million people worldwide have now been treated with CSFs.

Don was a decorated scientist. His honours and awards included the Companion of the Order of Australia, the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in the UK, the Prime Minister's Prize for Science and the Victoria Prize. Don was a loyal collaborator, a generous mentor to hundreds of young researchers and an inspiration to thousands of scientists around the world. His colleagues spoke about Don's remarkable ability to identify talent in younger researchers and mould a cohesive, loyal and vibrant team that constantly made groundbreaking discoveries. Decades ahead of his time, his model of collaborative multidisciplinary research shaped the culture of the Walter and Eliza Hall institute and is now seen as a mandatory model for significant breakthroughs to be made in medical science.

Don was a devoted family man, and his wife, Jo, daughters Kate, Mary-Ann, Penelope and Johanna, and grandchildren James, Martin, Patrick, Elizabeth, Rose and Robert meant everything to him. He would often publicly acknowledge that, without them, he would have achieved little of note. Australia and the world would have been poorer for that.