Five Australian medical stories everyone should know

By Gustav NossalJune 17, 2014, 9:21 p.m.

The history of Australian medical research is an unabashed good news story: its led to many astounding yet common medical treatments and to better understanding of disease.

The history of Australian medical research is an unabashed good news story: its led to many astounding yet common medical treatments and to better understanding of disease.

In fact, as a society we benefit every single day from this innovation and growth in human knowledge. Yet so many of the stories behind the science remain hidden: we know so little about how we came to know what we know.

The first is about a young psychiatrist from Melbourne who had no research training whatsoever John Cade.

Cade was particularly interested in bipolar disorder. He was convinced that the horrendous manic phase, where the person goes completely mad, must have been due to some toxin and he thought it would be secreted in the urine, particularly uric acid.

He was completely wrong. But his hypothesis led Cade to inject the urine from manic patients into guinea pigs. Because he knew lithium salts could help dissolve the uric acid crystals, Cade gave these salts to the guinea pigs. When he did that, he noticed they became calm and lethargic.

Not wanting to hurt anybody, Cade decided to take lithium himself. And then published an excellent clinical trial on ten patients in the manic phase of bipolar, six patients with schizophrenia and one with depression.

His results for mania were excellent, but there was no effect on schizophrenia or depression. In the best traditions of medical research, he published the paper in the Medical Journal of Australia. Sadly, the journal was not very widely read at the time and the findings lay silent.

But in the late 1960s, a Swedish group picked up the findings and gave a young man by the name of Mogens Schou the job of investigating further. He did a double-blind trial and got regulatory approval for the drug in 1970.

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Five Australian medical stories everyone should know