Respected neurobiologist Geoffrey Burnstock has been awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia.
Professor Burnstock’s groundbreaking work in neurotransmitters is now established in neuroscience but he faced a lot of resistance from his peers in the early days.
He was born in London in 1929 into a family of boxers. He had to fight his way to the top.
“I had the wrong background, the wrong accent, the wrong clothes, but I got into biology at King’s College which was the closest thing to medicine. And then I did my PhD at University College London, I later worked at Oxford and then went to America on a Rockefeller scholarship.”
While in the US in 1959, Professor Burnstock had to decide where he was going to continue his career. And it was some Australian friends who inspired him to head to Melbourne. “All my best friends at Oxford were Australians. I didn’t like the pompous prigs … so I went to Melbourne from 1959 to 1975 to join them”.
Professor Burnstock returned to London in 1975, becoming Head of Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London and Convenor of the Centre of Neuroscience. He has served as editor-in-chief of the journals Autonomic Neuroscience and Purinergic Signalling and has been on the editorial boards of many other journals. He has been elected to the Australian Academy of Science (1971, the Royal Society (1986) and the Academy of Medical Sciences (1998), and was awarded the Royal Society Gold Medal (2000). He was President (1995-2000) of the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience (ISAN), and was first in the Institute of Scientific Information list (1994-2004) of most cited scientists in Pharmacology and Toxicology.
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31107/title/Puncturing-the-Myth/