Rising to the challenge

Last year I had committed myself to giving a public lecture on Zealandia, entitled "The Sanctuary Vision and its importance to New Zealand. I wondered as the due date of February 13 approached whether I could manage the task. My good friend, ecologist Professor Charles Daugherty, offered to act as understudy for me, if necessary taking over on the evening if I should falter. The venue was the Rutherford House lecture Theatre of the University. We were fully subscribed and ran an overflow video in an adjacent theatre. As it turned out, I was able to complete the lecture, sitting down from time to time to relieve the abdominal discomfort. I took a good dose of morphine in advance and it carried me through. The audience gave me a standing ovation, no doubt in part because of my completion of the mission!

That was last night. Today I have been utterly exhausted, sleeping most of the day. There has been some wonderful feedback. I understand that the lecture was videoed and when the link comes, I will publish on this blog.

And, while I remember, here is the audio link to my Rua Rautau lecture delivered at Te Herenga Waka Marae on January 29 and broadcast on national radio on Waitangi Day, February 6.
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/wrr/wrr-20120206-2106-2012_-_sir_paul_callaghan_and_hon_luamanuvao_winnie_laban-048.mp3


Part 4 and final: Wellington

I moved my group to Victoria University of Wellington in 2001. I was ready for a change, but I had no idea just how big a change it would be. First, I ended up establishing a new research institute, the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechology, named after Kiwi Nobel Laureate Alan MacDiarmid. Alan, who won his prize for co-discovering conducting polymers, was a national hero. Based at the University of Pennsylvania, Alan was a regular visitor to his homeland and a great communicator of science. Being in the capital city plunged me into the world of science communication as well. Motivated by Alan’s example, I followed my route in trying to bring science to the general public, with a radio show, television documentaries, and popular science books.

Then something quite surprising happened. While at Massey University, I had started collaborating with a brilliant electronics engineer named Robin Dykstra. Robin had been with Craig and me on some of our Antarctic visits. In 2004, Robin, Craig, and I, along with my PhD student Mark Hunter, discussed the possibility of starting a company to commercialize the rheo-NMR attachments, a one-sided access NMR system that Mark had designed, and the Earth field spectrometer that Robin had improved so much, by comparison with its 1980s genesis. The company was formed in late 2004, headed by a CEO of great talent, the same ex-PhD student of mine, Andrew Coy, who was already well known in NMR circles for his work with me on q-space diffraction. Andrew had been in the business side of IT in Sydney and London for nearly a decade. He turned up in Wellington, heard we were starting the company, and expressed his interest in running it. Magritek has never looked back, in its 6th year now, with 21 staff and with export sales of NMR systems around the world. Suddenly I had entered the world of science commercialization, and my university research group was expanded to include NMR technology, along with our continuing work in soft matter and porous media.

I have had a wonderful life in magnetic resonance, learning so much from my students and collaborators. Much of what I have done, as well as the work of international colleagues, is summarized in my recent book published by OUP. I have always enjoyed dreaming up new ways of extracting information about molecules by manipulation of nuclear spins. And my particular interest in doing this is to gain insight regarding how molecules organize, align, and move about. Such insight is of some importance in helping physicists understand soft materials, self-assembly pathways to nanotechnologies, and the behavior of complex fluids and porous media. Of course, such understandings can assist a whole array of applications, from food science, to biotechnology, to biomedicine. That’s a motivational factor, but for me, it’s not the main one. It’s the beauty of magnetic resonance that holds my interest, as well as its essential veracity.

Photos: The Zealandia lecture, The Magritek founders and the PM