Ian Buckley - doctor and medical scientist

Abstract

This interview, with Dr Ian Buckley, is part of the Emeritus Faculty's Oral History Program, involving retired staff members of ANU who were part of the university in the early decades of its life. The Oral History Program was initiated and developed by ANU Emeritus Faculty as a contribution to university and community understanding of the beginnings and development of ANU over the past six decades. Emeritus Faculty has a special interest in this era, since the Faculty's membership includes many of the people who helped shape ANU in its early days, to make it the pre-eminent university it is today.

Ian Buckley was born in Melbourne in 1925, and attended school there until drafted into the RAAF in 1943. After the Second World War, he studied medicine at Melbourne University, graduating in 1951 following which he held a series of hospital appointments in country Victoria and Melbourne. In 1956 Ian returned to Melbourne University Medical School to a research and teaching position in Pathology. In 1962 became an NHMRC Research Fellow.

In 1963 he was Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow in CM Pomerat's laboratory at the Pasadena Foundation for Medical Research in California, and in the following year Research Fellow in Keith Porter's laboratory at Harvard University.

Soon after his return to Melbourne University Medical School in 1966, he was recruited by Professor Colin Courtice to join the newly formed Department of Experimental Pathology in the JCSMR at ANU.

Ian Buckley's field of expertise in medicine is the molecular and structural basis of motility in non-muscle cells, and the nature of unregulated cellular growth and invasiveness in malignancy. Since retirement from JCSMR in 1990, Ian has become interested in the political and economic history of modern warfare, in which he now lectures and writes extensively.