Celebrating New Zealand; TOP 10 NEW ZEALAND SCIENTISTS

Jan 08, 01:36 PM

Physicist and science communicator

A physicist specialising in the use of magnetic resonance to study soft matter and porous media, Callaghan is Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington and the director of the MacDiarmid Institute.

One strand of his work - at the intersection of physics, chemistry and biology - has been researching the way in which a certain species of soap-like molecules cluster and deform when subjected to uneven stresses, and how this can be used in so-called smart materials. Aside from his pure science achievements, many New Zealanders will recognise Callaghan for his monthly conversations with Radio New Zealand's Kim Hill. He was appointed a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 and awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Rutherford Medal in 2005.

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SIR JAMES HECTOR (1834-1907)

Geologist and natural scientist

Geologists commemorate his March 16 birthdate every year with Hector Day field trips. The Scot, who studied medicine, geology, botany and zoology, came to New Zealand in 1862. In 1865, he was appointed director of the recently formed New Zealand Geological Survey and Colonial Museum. He was the only scientist working for the Government and became the official adviser on all things scientific. He developed what is now the Royal Society of New Zealand, published 45 scientific papers, oversaw catalogues on birds, fishes, shellfish, insects, grasses and flax, and was knighted in 1887.

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ROY KERR (1934-)

Astrophysicist and mathematician

A dark horse of our science scene, the University of Canterbury astrophysicist is the mastermind behind the eponymous "Kerr solution", which has played a pivotal role in fundamental areas of general relativity and quantum gravity and has been lauded by Stephen Hawking and Nobel laureate astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

In 1963, Kerr came up with a mathematical solution to Einstein's equations of general relativity describing the space outside a rotating star or black hole. Many had thought the solution might be impossible, and Kerr's achievement caused a revolution in astrophysics. Kerr still works at Canterbury University.

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BRIAN MASON (1917-)

Geochemist and meteorite scientist

The 90-year-old Brian Mason is one of a group of New Zealand scientists who has enjoyed a higher profile overseas. During his long career at the American Museum of Natural History and then the Smithsonian Institution, Mason studied and classified meteorites using a system he developed based on their mineral composition. By 2001, he had examined more than 7000 meteorites and is still working on meteorites collected in Antarctica. An asteroid discovered between Mars and Jupiter in 1999 has been called 12926Brianmason.

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WILLIAM PICKERING (1910-2004)

Rocket scientist and electrical engineer

New Zealand's "rocket man" was the steady, guiding hand behind much of the American space race of the late 1950s and 1960s. Pickering's degrees in electrical engineering and physics propelled him to the directorship of the US's Jet Propulsion Laboratory by 1954. Pickering's job was to build Explorer 1, bringing together cosmic ray expert James Van Allen and German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who invented the V2 rockets. That he did so, in quick time and under the watchful gaze of the US Government, has been called his proudest moment.

Pickering rated one of his biggest achievements the Ranger 7, which sent back the first photographs of the Moon's surface in 1966.

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ERNEST RUTHERFORD (1871-1937)

Pioneering atomic scientist, 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Lord Rutherford of Nelson remains our most famous scientist and is a familiar face to those lucky enough to have $100 notes in their wallet. Rutherford left New Zealand aged 23. Before that, in the dark, poky cellars of Canterbury College (now the Arts Centre of Christchurch), he carried out pioneering research in electricity and magnetism. Later he determined the structure of the atom, predicted the existence of the neutron, changed nitrogen into oxygen, dated the age of the Earth, oversaw the development of large-scale particle accelerators and led Allied research into the detection of submarines during the First World War. Rutherford received three civil honours, had a train named after him and was interred in Westminster Abbey.

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BEATRICE HILL TINSLEY 1941- 1981)

Astronomer and cosmologist

Tinsley was professor of astronomy at Yale University in America when melanoma took her life at the age of 40. The Canterbury University masters graduate in physics showed her promise early and, when she submitted her doctoral thesis at the University of Texas in Austin on the evolution of galaxies, her professors called it "extraordinary and profound". Tinsley has been credited as a world- leading cosmologist and one of the most creative and significant theoreticians in modern astronomy, especially in changing established views of the origin and size of galaxies.

JOAN WIFFEN (1922-)

Self-taught palaeontologist

Wiffen's story is one of those classic Kiwi yarns - the retired Hawkes Bay housewife whose retirement hobby ended up proving that dinosaurs once lived in New Zealand. Now widely know as "New Zealand's Dinosaur Woman", she and her husband went exploring. After a wrong turn, they eventually arrived at the Mangahouanga Stream, clamboured down a steep bank and were confronted by rocks that, in her words, "seemed to sprout fossils".

While there were no obvious dinosaur skeletons or bones, the grey sandstone rocks were full of fish teeth, shark teeth, fish scales and vertebrae, shells, belemnites and ammonites.

In 1974, the first toe bone of a land-walking animal was discovered there and by the early 1980's the work of Wiffin and others had proved conclusively that New Zealand had once been home to dinosaurs.

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MAURICE WILKINS (1916-2004)

Biophysicist and DNA pioneer, 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology/ Medicine

Heir-apparent to the title of New Zealand's greatest scientist after Rutherford, Wilkins' work on deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, effectively made him the third man of DNA, along with American geneticist James Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick. He worked on the development of radar and cathode-ray technology during World War Two. In California in 1950, he took the first images of DNA. An X-ray diffraction picture of the DNA molecule taken two years later was used by Crick and Watson to build their detailed model of the DNA double helix.

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ALLAN WILSON (1936-1991)

Biochemist and evolutionist

A controversial figure whose theories of evolution flew in the face of anthropological thinking, Wilson was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize and enjoyed living on the fringes of the academic community that found his views unpalatable. He completed his masters degree at Otago University and did his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where he stayed for 35 years, running one of the world's great biochemistry laboratories and upsetting the anthropological apple-cart and American creationists. He and doctoral student Vince Sarich compared genetic material from humans with chimpanzees and found it was 99 per cent identical.

Using their "molecular clock" reasoning, they deduced the earliest proto-hominids evolved only five million years ago, 15 million years more recently than conventional anthropology stated.

Then, in the early 1980s, came the "Out of Africa" theory, that all modern humans evolved from one mother in Africa about 200,000 years ago. As with his earlier work, many palaeontologists rejected Wilson's conclusions, but 20 years on his theory is better accepted and has married fossil science with that of genetics.

GRAPHIC: JOHN HARFORD

TEXT: PAUL GORMAN

PHOTO RESEARCH: JUDE TEWNION

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(c) 2008 Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Celebrating New Zealand; TOP 10 NEW ZEALAND SCIENTISTS
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