The best thing since fortified bread

When Fiona Stanley looks back on her childhood in 1950s Sydney, she recalls the frightening spectre 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.