At a time when few women attended university, young Bridget Ogilvie was something of a curiosity to her father’s friends and colleagues. Even his bank manager once called John Ogilvie in to his office to question his spending on her higher education at UNE, instead of fertiliser.
“My father told him: ‘It’s the finest form of fertiliser I know!’,” says Bridget. But few could have foreshadowed the prolific ‘growth’ of this pioneering scientist, science educator and communicator. Now Professor Ogilvie, she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1996, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 2007.
It’s a far cry from Bridget’s upbringing in the midst of World War II, and earliest education at a one-teacher bush school. However, there was one thing upon which her family would not compromise. “My family valued education for all its children,” she says. “My father and grandfather both went to the University of Oxford and two of my father’s sisters had university degrees. There was no question I wouldn’t go to university. This attitude was rare at the time and non-existent among my father’s agricultural contemporaries.”
Bridget believes it was on her family’s fine wool property near Glen Innes that her interest in science was piqued. As a child she witnessed the deaths of countless sheep plagued by helminth parasites, and noted the success of vaccines for bacterial infections while similar controls for parasites did not exist. “We knew so little about the immune response back then,” Bridget said in a 2011 interview with Professor Robyn Williams. “We knew that antibodies existed, but we knew nothing about their diversity nor the immense complexity of the immune response, involving, as it does, cells and soluble factors as well as antibodies.” Bridget’s research identified some of the immune responses stimulated by helminths in their hosts.
But that was not before she had ruffled a few feathers at UNE, where Bridget had enrolled in Rural Science in only its second year of delivery and taken up residence at Mary White College. Flamboyant foundation dean of the Rural Science faculty Professor Bill McClymont, she says, was “thrilled” when she joined the all-male group. “After their initial shock, the students treated me well, despite the fact I was top of the class in most subjects. Bill knew the arrival of a woman would make the men work harder, which happened. The average mark went up by 9%.”
Bridget Ogilvie (front centre) with her undergraduate class in their final year. The back two rows are staff with the Professors in the middle row, the unforgettable Professor Bill McClymont is in the centre.
After graduating from UNE in 1960 with First Class Honours and the University Medal Bridget became one of the first Commonwealth Scholars to study for a PhD, at the Cambridge University Veterinary School. From there she joined the UK Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) to work on immune responses to intestinal parasites. “Moving to that institute, led by Sir Peter Medawar, was a wonderful experience and it was there that my career took off,” she says. “Though I constantly read about the problems women have with their careers, my family background meant I had no more problems than men have.”
Bridget would remain at the NIMR until 1979, when she began her long association with the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research to improve human and animal health. After coordinating the Tropical Medicine Program and overseeing research labs in the Amazon, Jamaica, Kenya, Thailand, Vietnam and South India, Bridget went on to serve as Wellcome’s director until her retirement in 1998. She considers the establishment of the Sanger Institute (now the Wellcome Genome Campus), which played a major role in sequencing the human genome, as one of her most notable achievements.
“Retirement” has seen Bridget appointed to the boards of the UK Association of Medical Research Charities, Cancer Research UK, Lloyds TSB bank, AstraZeneca, the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, and Sense about Science. She was also the founding Chair of the Medicines for Malaria Venture.
In 2001 Bridget was elected the High Steward of the University of Cambridge and, seven years later, became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Twenty-five honorary doctorates and numerous awards have since recognised her contributions to biomedical research, science and global health advocacy, but it is her primary schooling and UNE education that Bridget credits with developing her independence and capacity for independent thinking.
“The teacher at my primary school, A.B Clark, was inspirational and exceptional; he used the brighter children to help him, so freeing him to devote more of his time to the less able children,” she says. “He expected me to put my gift to work helping others at an early age. That experience and UNE were the educational keys to my life. I flourished as a PhD student at Cambridge thanks to the excellent series of courses that Rural Science at UNE put us through. Bill McClymont was a seminal figure.”
Bridget returns “home” to Australia each year to “escape the gloomy Northern Hemisphere winter and see family and old friends”.
