Celebrating 100 years of the Kolling Institute

Eva Kolling sets foundation stone for Kolling Building

After a final and risky visit to his ageing parents in Breslau, Lemberg and his wife arrived in Sydney on 1 October 1936. Australia must have seemed remote from his academic life in Heidelberg and Cambridge, especially as “there was little space for research and hardly any equipment.” Nevertheless, Ingram and Lemberg established a good partnership, Ingram as the director of the Institute of Medical Research and Lemberg later as assistant director until his retirement in 1972. Ingram managed the administration and provided the clinical input, while Lemberg undertook fundamental scientific research, primarily into porphyrins and tetrapyrrole metabolism. This research strengthened the institute’s scientific reputation. The institute during the Second World War During the Second World War, Ingram enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Corps and served as Lieutenant-Colonel until 1944. Lemberg remained in his laboratory, contributing to the war effort with research into the metabolism of trinitrotoluene (TNT) in animals, the role of sulphonamides in bacterial metabolism, and the preparation of X-ray contrast media, among other topics. Eva Kolling, who remained one of the most significant supporters of the institute, died in 1941, and left an extraordinary bequest of £25 000 to support and expand the work of the institute and the Charles Kolling Memorial Laboratory. The Institute of Medical Research, 1945–1974 In 1948, Royal North Shore Hospital became a teaching hospital of the University of Sydney. In 1950, Ingram created a Unit of Clinical Investigation within the Institute of Medical Research, under the direction of Frank Rundle, later founding Dean and Professor of Surgery of the University of New South Wales. A new teaching block in 1963 provided additional facilities for the institute, and a closer relationship with the clinical school The text on pages 3-5 is reproduced from the Medical Journal of Australia (213: 511-513, 2020) by kind permission of AMPCo.

developed. In 1964, routine hospital pathology moved from the Kolling laboratories into stage one of the new hospital complex, so that the Institute of Medical Research was free, for the first time, to concentrate solely on research. Lemberg continued his basic biochemical research. In 1949 he published his monograph on Hematin compounds and bile pigments , which became a standard text in the field of tetrapyrroles and confirmed his international scientific reputation. In 1952, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 1955 was elected the first president of the Australian Biochemical Society. His scientific output was prodigious, encompassing more than 200 scientific publications. After Ingram and Lemberg: the Kolling Institute of Medical Research Following the retirements of Ingram and Lemberg, David Nelson, clinician and researcher, was appointed the first full-time director from 1974–1989. From 1971, the institute was commonly known as the Kolling Institute of Medical Research, and, under Nelson’s direction, concentrated on the emerging discipline of clinical immunology. Under its third director from 1994–2011, Robert Baxter, the Kolling focused on endocrinology and cell biology. In 2008, the various research laboratories were all relocated to a new purpose-built facility on the Royal North Shore Hospital campus. With the appointment of Jonathan Morris as its fourth director in 2012, the academic research focus of the Kolling broadened to ensure that medical research findings informed clinical practice. Carolyn Sue was appointed the fifth director in 2019. The institute now hosts numerous research teams investigating an extensive range of medical conditions. The Kolling Institute of 2020 has thereby remained true to the original charter of the Institute of Pathological research in 1920, investigating the “common diseases of mankind.”

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