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Interview Dame Bridget Ogilvie ‘I’ve jostled the system’ Dame Bridget Ogilvie Hon FRSB explains how a dramatic encounter with parasitic worms inspired her journey from rural Australia to Cambridge and a range of high-profile roles in UK science Dame Bridget Ogilvie’s parasitology research explored how parasitic worms evade and modulate the body’s immune response. Further, in her long career, she took on various roles in public engagement and science funding, most notably as director of the Wellcome Trust from 1991 to 1998. She was made a Dame in 1996 and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia – the country’s highest civilian honour – in 2007. She is now retired and lives in North London. You grew up on a farm in New South Wales. What was that like and how does it compare to North London? I was born just before the Second World War, so things were pretty simple. Nobody had much money; it was a pretty elementary kind of life. However, I came from a family with a long history of education, which was very unusual in that sort of environment. My father and grandfather actually both went to the University of Oxford, graduating from Balliol College. For my father, there was no question I wouldn’t go to university, but his contemporaries thought he was extremely strange. His bank manager called him in one day to say he should be spending all this money on fertiliser, not his daughter’s education. My father told him: “It’s the finest form of fertiliser I know!” Although he went to Oxford, he was always on the land, like his father. And my brother did economics and still lives on the land in Australia, too. As they say, “you can take the boy out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the boy.” I own a house with him and retain an interest in agriculture, and go back there every winter. How did your childhood shape your interest in science and parasitology? Working on the farm as a child, we spent enormous amounts of time pouring anthelminthics down the animals’ necks. At the same time, vaccines against things like Clostridium had just come in, and you could vaccinate against it and the sheep would never get it again. So I would wonder what the difference was between these parasites, why the worms kept coming back. I can remember very vividly the effect of liver fluke. We were moving a herd of young ewes and suddenly one of them just dropped dead. It looked fine on the outside, but when we opened it up, it essentially had no liver. There were so many immature I M M U N O LO GY FO R I E T Y S O C I S H I T B R 18 / The Biologist / Vol 65 No 1
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Liver flukes sparked Dame Bridget’s interest in animal parasites “Once I began to study agriculture all that came back and underlay my interest in science” forms of Fasciola hepatica that there were just a few fibrous bits of the liver left – they’d eaten the rest. That was really dramatic actually. I also saw the benefits of science as a child – the application of sulphur and phosphate, which are often missing from the poor Australian soils, transformed the practice of agriculture. Once I began to study agriculture, all that came back and underlay my interest in science. How did you go from there to studying parasitic worms at the University of Cambridge? I started doing science at the University of Queensland, but I didn’t like it and one day saw a flier for a new course on the science underlying animal production at the University of New England. The dean said if I passed my first year, I could join the second year. He was a vet and a very informal guy, and I remember him throwing his feet up on his desk and saying: “Yes! Do come, they are all men and if you come, that’ll make the buggers work harder.” I thought that was a strange thing to say, but apparently there were often years when all the students were male and it was well known that when they had a woman in the class doing well they all worked harder. The average mark went up by 15% and stayed up – I was terribly amused by that. He was a seminal figure in my life who organised for me to apply for the first group of Commonwealth scholars. I was awarded one and came over to do my PhD at Cambridge. You didn’t speak hugely fondly of Cambridge… I didn’t fall in love with it, no. You had to live in colleges and there were only three that accepted women in the 1960s. They had very short terms and postgrads had to find somewhere else to live in between. So I quite quickly had a row with them over that and several other things. There were some wonderful people there, but I also found an enormous arrogance in a lot of people there, some of whom weren’t of the same calibre as people who had taught me in Australia. Of course, Cambridge has changed and I ended up as the high steward, which is in effect the deputy chancellor, and an honorary Fellow of Girton College. Vol 65 No 1 / The Biologist / 19

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Interview Dame Bridget Ogilvie

‘I’ve jostled the system’

Dame Bridget Ogilvie Hon FRSB explains how a dramatic encounter with parasitic worms inspired her journey from rural Australia to

Cambridge and a range of high-profile roles in UK science

Dame Bridget Ogilvie’s parasitology research explored how parasitic worms evade and modulate the body’s immune response. Further, in her long career, she took on various roles in public engagement and science funding, most notably as director of the Wellcome Trust from 1991 to 1998. She was made a Dame in 1996 and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia – the country’s highest civilian honour – in 2007. She is now retired and lives in North London.

You grew up on a farm in New South Wales. What was that like and how does it compare to North London? I was born just before the Second World War, so things were pretty simple. Nobody had much money; it was a pretty elementary kind of life. However, I came from a family with a long history of education, which was very unusual in that sort of environment. My father and grandfather actually both went to the University of Oxford, graduating from Balliol College. For my father, there was no question I wouldn’t go to university, but his contemporaries thought he was extremely strange.

His bank manager called him in one day to say he should be spending all this money on fertiliser, not his daughter’s education. My father told him: “It’s the finest form of fertiliser I know!”

Although he went to Oxford, he was always on the land, like his father. And my brother did economics and still lives on the land in Australia, too. As they say, “you can take the boy out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the boy.” I own a house with him and retain an interest in agriculture, and go back there every winter.

How did your childhood shape your interest in science and parasitology? Working on the farm as a child, we spent enormous amounts of time pouring anthelminthics down the animals’ necks. At the same time, vaccines against things like Clostridium had just come in, and you could vaccinate against it and the sheep would never get it again. So I would wonder what the difference was between these parasites, why the worms kept coming back.

I can remember very vividly the effect of liver fluke. We were moving a herd of young ewes and suddenly one of them just dropped dead. It looked fine on the outside, but when we opened it up, it essentially had no liver. There were so many immature

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18 / The Biologist / Vol 65 No 1

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