Getting to know ... Mark Wahlqvist
Emeritus Professor Mark Wahlqvist
Name: Mark Lawrence Wahlqvist AO
Title: Emeritus Professor, former Professor and Head of Medicine at Prince Henry’s Hospital and Monash Medical Centre, Associate Dean (International Health and Development) and Director of the Asia Pacific Health and Nutrition Centre
Faculty: Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences and the Monash Asia Institute
Dept: Departments of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine; Asia Pacific Health and Nutrition Centre
Campus: Prince Henry’s Hopsital, Monash Medical Centre, Clayton and Caulfield
How long have you worked at Monash?
In separate stints: two, 15 and 10 years, 27 years in all. I was made Emeritus Professor in 2011.
Where did you work prior to starting at the University?
Prior to 1st appointment: Royal Adelaide Hospital, Melbourne University, Karolinska Institute and Hospital (Sweden), Uppsala University (Sweden), Australian National University (Department of Clinical Science, JCSMR), Canberra Hospital and Woden Valley Hospital
Prior to 2nd appointment: Deakin University (Foundation Professor of Human Nutrition)
What do you like best about your role?
The opportunities to integrate disciplines, especially public health and clinical medicine, with a focus on multidisciplinary ambulatory care, to foster interests within and beyond medicine in international health and nutrition, and to nurture a questioning and constructve approach to health care among students and staff, so building institutional capacity.
Why did you choose your current career path?
Because I wanted to make a difference, for the better, to the human condition, locally and internationally.
First job?
Selling newspapers and being gardener for the local GP, at the age of 9 years - illegally I believe, since in those days children had to be 10-years-old to have paid employment! In high school vacations, I did returns on wheat harvests or delivered heavy household white goods. As a medical student, I had a couple of National Heart Foundation vacation scholarships and did a related BMedSc.
Worst job?
Selling programs at ARF matches, more ruthlessly competitive than the match itself, at least in my youth. While not the worst, the most difficult was an assigment from the Department of Foreign Affairs to assess and advise on the Indonesian transmigration program which moved large numbers of ill-prepared Javenese to Sumatra with dire health consequences.
The most challenging was the Presidency of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences, partly because my wife and best friend, Dr Soo Sien Huang, died during my tenure and partly because we made a concerted effort to make a nutrition-health difference in Africa. But both the worst and most difficult taught me much and the most challenging was the most rewarding.
What research/projects are you currently working on and what does it involve?
In my post-adminisrative years, I have had a new lease of research life, working between Monash University, the NHRI in Taiwan and Zhejiang University in China.North-East Asia is recognised as currenty the most rapidly transitional part of the world, increasingly matched by South-East Asia, South Asia, Brazil and parts of Africa. With the opportunities for economic and health advancement come the risks of food, energy and water security with major demographic shifts through ageing and migration. Solutions which take these tranisitions into account through ecosystem management have become a research passion.
Along with this, especially in bio-informatics rich Taiwan, it has been possible to link National Health Insurance, registry, screening and survey data to ask major health questions at the whole-of-population level, with large representative samples and cohorts. High on the agenda have been food security, food patterns and optimal health, predictors and interventions for neurodegeneration, neoplastic disease and stroke, each a growing load on the health care system. Throughout, we take into account accessibility, affordability and sustainability. While this work is of immediate relevance to Han Chinese and local indigenous peoples, the implications and strategies can apply widely. In any case, there has been a dearth of information on these populations where occidental approaches have often been inappropriately transferred across cultural and geopraphic boundaries.
What is your favourite place in the world and why?
It is the tiny community of Blädinge, near Växjö in Småland, Sweden, where my great-grandfather was born and became a teacher. The old family farm runs between a lake and and a narrow north-south road which was for a thousand years the route between Denmark and middle Sweden. Around and about there are burial mounds of my ancestors going back hundreds of years. One place is marked out as a ship with stones - Småland is a stony place and the woods transformed into fields only by hard work. There are two domarringar, or rings of stones, looking over the lake, which have been there for about 2000 years as meeting and decision-making places - they are regarded with much reverence. Whenever I visit I am received with the traditional seven small cakes and, it used to be, in traditional costume. In my younger years, stories were still told by older relatives about events which could only have happened a thousand years or so before, but like it was yesterday...’over there lived an old woman who fought off the Danes...' and much more. I find peace and connectedness there whatever the seasonal extremes or the state of the world.
What is your favourite place to eat and why?
“Red Emperor” at Southgate in Melbourne, by the Yarra not only because it looks towards the city sky-line and its food is exquisite and healthy, but because it’s co-proprietor studied nutrition with me and because many a family and professional memory is embedded there. As a family, we do not use the menu because Christina and Vincent know our tastes and preferences and they make a special effort to have fresh vegetables picked just prior to the meal. Our favourites there include steamed whole fish with ginger and shalots and Mapu tofu along with the Hakka tofu and fish balls, yong tofu (Soo Sien was and Christina is Hakka) .
What is the best piece of advice you have received?
From my father, "with your principles, do not be afraid to go the second mile and to go against the tide for that is where you will make your contribution”.
Tell us something about yourself that your colleagues wouldn’t know?
A note on my predecessors in the Prince Henry’s Hospital Chair of Medicine, Bryan Hudson as the Foundation Chair and Colin Johnston as the 2nd Chair and my successor, the 4th Stephen Holdsworth is in order. Bryan still came each Monday morning to his, now my, old office for an 8am Endocrine Journal Club, which gave me encouragement and provided me his wisdom. Colin counselled me to guard my career in internal medicine when I took the Deakin Chair of Human Nutrition. Steve conferred on me the descriptor of ‘vascular biologist’ at my retirement, which has, it seems, been a continuing thread in my career.
But there are a couple of events which have had lasting effects.
One is that I encountered both protagonists of the then smoking and lung cancer debate which raged throughout my medical student days. As I recall, cigarettes were still advertised in the Medical Journal of Australia when I started and first-years took up smoking. But, by the time I finished, this had gone and smoking was not acceptable. Ronald Fisher, the father of modern statistics joined our Adelaide medical school, smoked a pipe (at least) and was scathing about the validity of the link and about Richard Doll who propounded it. I presented in trepidation my first scientific paper, based on the idea of an inflammatory basis of atherosclerosis, as a student, to the Medical Sciences Club in Adelaide to, inter alia, Ronald Fisher. He grudgingly shook my hand and said ‘well-done’.
Remarkably then, when Richard Doll was on trip to Melbourne in 1978, and I had recently been appointed to the first chair of Human Nutrition in Australia, Robert Moore of the ABC asked me to debate the topic “Diet and Cancer” with Sir Richard, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, in his Monday Conference TV program with a live audience. As my inaugural TV appearance, I felt as intimidated as I had years earlier with Sir Ronald. It turned out to be a very physicianly exchange unlike it was designed to be.
As a medical student , I courted my future wife and fellow student, Soo Sien Huang, but met with warnings from a senior academic about the immorality of inter-racial marriage and the way it would prevent my career progress. Fortunately, this view did not prevail as we gained support from other more enlightened teachers. Moreover, the Chinese family network had begun to work in our favour. Soo Sien’s cousin Chen-Ya Huang (now a neurologist/neuroscientist) and I both did a BMedSc, he at Sydney University and Adelaide for me ,we both joined the Australian Physological and Pharmacological Society and both got recognition at the ANU during Sir John Eccles tenure. Chen-Ya’s father, Nan-Yang Vice – Chancellor, argued my case for marriage to his niece!
I now continue the Chinese connection married to Meei-Shyuan Lee, Professor of Public Health at National Defense Medical Centre in Taipei.