The best thing since fortified bread

Thanks to their tenacious lobbying to have folate added to every loaf of bread, Aussie professors Fiona Stanley and Carol Bower have saved more than 4000 babies from spina bifida and other neural tube defects. Genevieve Gannon learns more …

- Genevieve Gannon

When Fiona Stanley looks back on her childhood in 1950s Sydney, she recalls the frightening specter of polio, which ended her Saturday pastime of going to the cinema. Public pools were also closed and parents kept their children at home, safe from the paralysing virus.

But those years also instilled in Fiona a fascination with the potential of research. Her family lived amid a tangle of bushland in La Perouse, in what she describes as “a funny little house below the infectious diseases hospital” where her father, Neville, was working to develop a vaccine.

“My first memory of my father – I was three or four – was of him blowing a spinal cord and brain out of a mouse which was infected with polio and injecting it into chimpanzees to develop a vaccine for polio,” Fiona says. “There was cholera; there were people in iron lungs. It was right on my doorstep.”

American researcher Jonas Salk, whose Salk vaccine was declared effective in 1955, was among the visionaries who visited the Stanley household, helping to shape young Fiona’s view of the world.

“We had this amazing network of international scientists coming through our house. I thought most of them were quite boring. I should have paid more attention!” Fiona laughs. “But there’s no doubt that, in that environment, you’re questioning and you’re thinking. I lived in this family where it was just so exciting because you could actually prevent a disease like polio. My mother was a creative, artistic classics scholar. So, we had the best of both worlds.”