The Golgi War: 2. A possible casualty

A.J. ‘Jock’ Marshall (1911-1967), whose irreverence was remembered by his contemporaries with reverence, was J.R. Baker’s postgraduate student at Oxford. But they had worked together before that. In 1933, Baker recruited him to work on his expedition to Esperitu Santo in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) alongside and then to replace Tom Harrisson. After many adventures and jobs and countries, including New Guinea, London and Oxford, and getting a degree from Sydney—and serving in New Guinea in the Second World War (the title of his biography, One Armed Warrior, denoting his service in 'Jockforce' and the fact that he had shot his own arm off in an accident with a gun as a boy) in September 1946 he returned to Oxford aged 35 as a postgraduate student.

After his Oxford D.Phil (the Ph.D. abbreviation possibly unique to that institution), Marshall was appointed Reader and Head of Department at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School (Barts). He was around Baker when the latter was attacking the existence of the Golgi Apparatus and was aware of the cytological methods that Baker was promoting.

Marshall wrote a review for Science Progress entitled, The structure of the so-called Golgi body. It was published in 1952 and took the side of Baker in the controversy—with knobs on. Marshall began by describing the work of Parat, a Frenchman who threw doubt on the existence of the Golgi. He wrote:

There was a swift and vigorous—some have said violent—reaction to Parat’s conclusions (see, for example, Gatenby, 1931) and although others observed Parat’s bodies and failed to substantiate the net of Golgi, the new concept seems to have been more or less swamped by the positive views of the traditionalists.

After dealing with Hirsch’s non-support for the Golgi in Germany he turned to Baker:

A determined attempt to resolve the problem has now begun by Baker (1944) of Oxford…He failed to find any evidence that the classical net of Golgi existed as a living entity……The next and perhaps most crushing blow to the classical concept of Golgi, Cajal, Aoyama and Gatenby was dealt by Thomas (1947-51). A Beit Memorial Fellow who came to Baker’s laboratory from New Zealand, Thomas used his own modifications of Baker’s and others’ techniques, as well as phase-contrast microscopy, in the investigation of living and fixed nerve-cells of common animals. He too failed to find a Golgi net in the living cell and declared flatly that, in the cells studied, the net was “shown to be an artifact”.

In his conclusions, Marshall divided the world into ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ and it is not surprising that those he dubbed traditionalist were infuriated:

The modernists, though they are too polite even to breathe it, generally seem to feel that the traditional so-called Golgi techniques merely show something funny about a particular part of the animal cell. By an arbitrary method a great man, Golgi, accidentally showed a net; and his followers have messed about until they have found even more certain methods of showing nets. The modernists imply that this is good wholesome fun, but not science. They believe that the Golgi apparatus, if it should be called that at all, is a system of lipoidal spheroids which are demonstrably concerned with cell-secretion.

However, he then started to backtrack:

The present author does not take sides in the controversy…

But clearly the whole tone of the review was taking sides and the reader by now will expect Gatenby to have responded in some way. He was, after all, told that what he was doing, as a ‘traditionalist’, was ‘not science’.

Marshall’s biography (compiled by his widow from his own notes and records) reads:

…it [‘professional knifing’] involved views he had put forward in support of John Baker's work on the Golgi body. Owen Thomas who was also working on it had just come back from seeing Professor Gatenby in Dublin. [Marshall wrote:] Thomas was “as scared as hell that Gatenby will discredit both John and myself. He is going to sue John too - so he says.” This referred to an article Jock had written for Science Progress on this rather esoteric cytological subject - the Golgi body. His article supported the research John Baker and Owen Thomas were doing in Oxford which appeared to negate some of the findings of Professor Gatenby. Thomas reported Gatenby was furious - “He will see to it that I [Jock] never get a better job than I've got [now]. Actually I quite like him although he has added me to his list - a long list - of hates.”

However, Marshall could not count on Baker either in support of any advancement. At about the time the article in Science Progress appeared, he applied for, without expecting to get nor did get, the chair of zoology at Reading. Later and by accident, he saw the reference Baker had written, and was shocked to learn that although Baker had praised his research he brought up, quite remarkably to those of reading it 65 years later, Marshall’s divorce from his first wife and ‘an assessment of Jock's alleged shortcomings as a classical zoologist’.

Marshall’s friends and wife put it down to jealousy. Baker was not a professor, and at this time and in the Oxford grading system that differed from that in other universities, he was a university demonstrator—he was promoted to a readership in 1955, three years before his election to the Royal Society.

Application—and rejection—by Marshall for another chair (this time in Canberra to set up a new department) in 1958 brought the suspicion of Gatenby’s revenge:

…while camped near Kalgoorlie, he received a telegram telling him that the Committee had chosen Professor [J. Desmond] Smyth from Dublin University for the Canberra Chair. Smyth, a parasitologist, came from Professor Gatenby's Department. It transpired that Gatenby, the good hater, had been in Australia at this time. It was tempting to conjecture whether his threat of six years before to prevent Jock from ever getting 'a better job' than the one he then occupied had come home to roost; especially when reading part of a letter he sent to another zoologist in England (the first page is missing): “Marshall threw his weight about so much, they were determined not to have him.”

There is no doubt that Jock Marshall upset the easily upset Australian university establishment by his behaviour. I am not surprised. Of all the university administrative systems I have dealt with all over the world over the years as an external assessor for appointments to chairs and for internal promotions, Australia occupies bottom position. Rigid, po-faced, stuffed shirts are phrases that came to mind, quite the antithesis of what the world sees Australia as like and quite the antithesis of Jock Marshall.

After the quite disgraceful failure of the University of London (described in excruciating detail in his biography) to elevate his readership at Barts to a chair, he did return to Australia—to the then new Monash University in Melbourne in 1960.

As to his support for Baker’s ‘modernist’ views on the artifactual nature Golgi Apparatus, there is a twist. In 1954 and only shortly after the first electron micrographs of the Golgi were published, Dennis Lacy in Jock Marshall’s own department at Barts found the Golgi apparatus in the exocrine pancreas and other cells and followed that up by finding it for the first time by electron microscopy in nerve cells—where Golgi had first described his eponymous organelle.

Marshall Jane. 1998. Jock Marshall: One Armed Warrior, Australian Science Archives Project, Melbourne.

Marshall AJ. 1952. The structure of the so-called Golgi body. Science Progress 40, 71-77.

Lacy D. 1954. Recent studies on the Golgi apparatus of the exocrine and endocrine cells of the mammalian pancreas and the cytoplasmic inclusions of other cells. Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 73, 226–240.

Lacy D. 1957. The Golgi apparatus in neurons and epithelial cells of the common limpet Patella vulgata. Journal of Biophysical and Biochemical Cytology 3, 779–796.

Lacy D, Challice CE. 1957. The structure of the Golgi apparatus in vertebrate cells examined by light and electron microscopy. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology 10, 62–89.

Lacy D, Rogers GE. 1955. Recent observations by light and electron microscopy on the cytoplasmic inclusions of the neurons of Patella vulgata. Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 74, 172–175.