A recent study in the Australian Journal of Education found that in Australian high school science courses, there was only one unique mention of a female scientist. Radio National’s The Science Show has long tried to herald the contribution of female scientists. But as Sharon Carleton discovered, it can take for some, 50 years before due recognition is acknowledged. In this case, the daughter of a Nobel Prize winner.
The stars aligned. After years of trying to get someone, somewhere to tell the story of yet another female scientist hidden in the shadows, or in this case, in one Nobel laureate’s shadow, one of her supporters got in touch with Robyn Williams. Would The Science Show be interested?
Back in 2003, I had made a Science Show program featuring Australian Sir John Eccles, the 1963 Nobel prize winner in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. So Robyn forwarded the email to me. The female scientist was Sir John’s daughter Rose Mason who deserved to be brought into the scientific sunlight.
Rose’s own daughter, Kate Mason, a tireless supporter of her mother’s work and welfare, and the indefatigable boss of the Eccles Institute for Neuroscience at the Australian National University (ANU), John Watson, were concerned that time was not on their side.
Rose was in her mid-90s and, while her mind was nimble, her body wasn’t. John visited Rose in her assisted care home in Canberra. Her story had to be told, and soon.
Last year was the 60th anniversary of Sir John’s Nobel prize and 120 years sincehis birth, and John was sure The Science Show should be doing something and by the way, Dr Rosamund Eccles Mason was well worth a mention.
I spoke to John and met Kate to discuss what this astonishing woman had achieved in a comparatively short scientific career. She had studied for her PhD in Physiology at Cambridge University. She had worked with Howard Florey of penicillin fame and had supervised the PhDs of many future eminent neuroscientists. Perhaps the most surprising statement from these two, and then others I spoke to later, was that Sir John Eccles would not have achieved all the greatness that he did, let alone received the Nobel prize, without the work that Rose did. But where was she acknowledged for this? Nowhere.
The Science Show program was broadcast on 9 Sept 2023.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/the-science-show/102753632
And then the most marvellous thing happened exactly one year later to the day - on 9th September 2024.
Dr Rose Eccles Mason at the ceremony in 2024 and at her graduation in 1951
The ANU decided to confer on Rose Eccles Mason an Honorary Doctorate of Science – a belated and thoroughly deserved recognition of her exceptional contribution to experimental neuroscience. And The Science Show was credited with having helped bring Rose to the attention of the powers that make these decisions. Here’s an excerpt from John Watson’s proposal for the doctorate, in which the program was quoted extensively:
Dr Mason has published over 70 excellent papers in experimental neuroscience. This is especially notable for a female scientist and in an era (1950s & ‘60s) when the number of journals and the number of papers were orders of magnitude fewer than now …
As narrated in The Science Show, there is a strong case that the award of the 1963 Nobel Prize to Sir John Eccles was underpinned by his daughter’s work: to progress from appointment as foundation Professor of Physiology, when ANU was literally a collection of paddocks, to the Nobel Prize (ANU’s first and Australia’s second homegrown Prize) and Australian of the Year in less than 15 years was, and is, a cause for celebration. But Sir John Eccles’ success depended on others, as success always does. As covered in the Radio National program, Dr Rose (Eccles) Mason was a superb experimentalist and could make laboratory preparations work when others could not. She mentored many young scientists who went on to illustrious careers. Outstanding neuroscientists such as Professors Stephen Redman, Max Bennett and Alan McComas covered her impact in the 2023 Science Show Program.
For example, Professor McComas: And it was very unfair, because although her work was absolutely vital to her father, in fact he must have depended on her very much indeed in those early days at the Australian National University, but the fact of the matter was that she had already published a considerable number of absolutely first-class papers, by herself or with colleagues, and without her father. So Rose really was a scientist in her own right.
Stephen Redman (former Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research): She understood what her father wanted, she understood the scientific questions, she understood how to go about it. She was really his right-hand person…Rose was fantastic technically, she could make experiments work that a lot of other people wouldn't have been able to make work. And that was her great skill.
The ending of the 2023 RN Science Show program is salutary, but offers a pathway to a better future:
Sharon Carleton: Why did you give up your scientific life [in 1968]?
Rose Mason: I had to stop because I was going to have a family. I was married to an Englishman, to whom all housework and children work, that was the job of the mother. So I gave up.
Sharon Carleton: Was there any support at all from the ANU for you when you had children?
Rose Mason: No support at all.
Sharon Carleton: Rose Mason became the mother of three children. She helped introduce after-school care to the ACT, and received a 25 years of service award from the ANU for her work supervising exams. Her scientific career was relatively short but super-productive and worth commemorating. So why has she spent so long in the scientific shade? Alan McComas, her PhD student from Bruce Rock, is now Emeritus Professor of Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario:
Alan McComas: Well, I think it is simply because when you hear the name Eccles, you think of John and the Nobel Prize. If Rose had been anywhere else in the world, I think she would have been well known.
Sharon Carleton: Rose Mason went on to live a fulfilled domestic and community life, but just maybe, had she received the support she needed, we would all have benefited from her scientific research. And she would certainly have been “well known”.
Sharon Carleton, Rose Mason & ANU Vice chancellor, Genevieve Bell 9/9/24
John Watson's proposal was successful. Finally, just two weeks ago, the sunlight.
At the unique ceremony in Rose’s care home, Professor John Bekkers, Head of Neuroscience at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) was quietly excited. He held in his hand a strange Perspex box with coloured wires which he’d borrowed from the JCSMR museum. While he was looking through some old documents pertaining to Rose, he noticed a photo of this same piece of equipment in a paper that she had written in 1952. It was a recording chamber for ganglionic nerve cells which Rose had made herself.
She had taken a piece of nerve from the neck of a rabbit and suspended it in the chamber. It was kept alive with oxygen in a salt solution. With the electrodes she’d attached to the outside, Rose could stimulate one tiny part of the nerve and record from other points.
It was, as John Bekkers said, “a very elegant” piece of work, and it had never been done before.
When Professor Bekkers showed the chamber to a delighted Rose, it didn’t stop her gently correcting him. That particular chamber was actually from her work in 1955 and it was ever so slightly different to the original chamber pictured in her 1952 paper.
No wonder she is now Doctor Doctor Rose Mason. A happy ending - half a century later.
Sharon Carleton joined the ABC in Perth as a cadet radio and TV reporter in the mid 1970s and went on to work for News, ‘This Day Tonight’ and ‘The 7.30 Report’. She has compered ‘Statewide’ in WA and ‘Nationwide’ in Canberra. She has been a regular contributor to The Science Show for almost 40 years.