Australian Dictionary of Biography

Professor John Shaw, 1991

The University of Sydney News 23, no. 13 (1991): 97 (cropped), University of Sydney Archives, REF-00040580

John Shaw (1940–1997), physician, scientist, and medical administrator, was born on 22 December 1940 at Burwood, Sydney, eldest of three children of English-born Jack Shaw, cost accountant, and his Melbourne-born wife Joan Margaret, née Broady. John grew up in Strathfield and attended primary school there and at Summer Hill (opportunity classes), then Homebush Boys’ High School, before proceeding to the University of Sydney (MB, BS, 1965; PhD, 1975). Over-enthusiasm for sports (tennis, squash, sailing, and surfing amongst them), as well as a love of ballroom dancing and his support of his mother during her prolonged illness that year, resulted in his repeating his second year of medicine. On 7 March 1964 at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church he married Robin Elizabeth Randall, an occupational therapist.

Shaw was appointed to the clinical staff of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) (1965–69), first as a resident medical officer and then as a registrar; he qualified as a member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1968 (fellow 1974). From 1969 to 1971, with a research fellowship from the National Heart Foundation of Australia (NHF), he undertook doctoral work at the Hallstrom Institute of Cardiology of RPAH under the supervision of its director, Paul Korner, studying circulatory control in hypertensive arterial disease, specifically the effects of the then-new hypotensive drug clonidine. He then gained overseas experience, as a research fellow of the NHF, in two notable laboratories. In collaboration with Richard Ross at the Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, Baltimore, United States of America, he applied the thermodilution methods of his doctoral work to the measurement of cardiac output in coronary-care patients. Travelling to London, he worked as an assistant physician in Stan Peart’s unit at St Mary’s Hospital, where he studied the circulatory effects of salt elimination from patients’ diets.

In 1974, back in Australia, Shaw joined the department of medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, as physician-in-charge of its hypertension clinic. Concomitantly first assistant in clinical pharmacology at the University of Melbourne, he established both the hospital’s department and the university’s first undergraduate course in that discipline. He was an early anti-smoking campaigner and was in the vanguard of those who argued that passive smoke is inimical to non-smokers’ health. With the microbiologist Ken Harvey he began writing Antibiotic Guidelines for the staff of the major Melbourne hospitals: it was a great success in its influence on the use of those treatments, and the committee for the guidelines would become a company, Therapeutic Guidelines Ltd, in 1996.

Returning to Sydney, in 1979 Shaw was appointed the first Reckitt and Coleman professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Sydney (head of department 1980–83). There he initiated a similar antibiotic guidelines project with Richard Day of St Vincent’s Hospital. Shaw’s research in this new role, especially the scale of the clinical trials he initiated, was a novelty in that it involved collaboration elsewhere within the university and its teaching hospitals as well as nationally and internationally. An example was his LIPID study (‘Long-term Intervention with Pravastatin in Ischaemic Disease’), which ran through the National Health and Medical Research Council clinical trials centre at the university and was also financially supported by the American pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons Pty Ltd.

While in Sydney, Shaw held various appointments at Repatriation General (Concord) and Royal North Shore hospitals as well as RPAH and the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children. Beyond his department, he was an active director of the university’s medical foundation. He also chaired the curriculum review committee of the medical faculty from 1980 to 1984. His directorships included the Kindergarten Union of New South Wales (1981–86), Royal North Shore Hospital (1983–86), and the Australasian Medical Publishing Company, the publishing arm of the Australian Medical Association (1983–89; chairman 1988–89). Over his career he was a member of numerous hospital and professional committees, including the council of the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists (1974–84; president 1981).

Appointed director of the NHF in 1991, he resigned the following year, a unique setback to his career. The reasons for his decision are not clear, but it is likely that he disagreed with the board’s decision to abolish the office of director, replacing it with the positions of administrative director and medical director (which was, effectively, a demotion for him), and that the board probably found his hopes for a grand expansion of the NHF’s remit as a public educator too ambitious. As the board’s chief executive officer, he was obliged to give effect to its policies, something he felt unable to do. The situation was exacerbated, professionally and emotionally, when he developed an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He drove himself and his clinical colleagues fiercely in the treatment of that disease, including with bone-marrow transplantation, but in vain.

Despite Shaw’s illness, in 1994 the biopharmaceutical firm Merck Sharp and Dohme (Australia) Pty Ltd appointed him its medical director and, characteristically, he threw himself into that role until his death, including its educational ventures. A man of unbounded energy and enthusiasm, he possessed a natural and unforced ability to charm patients and colleagues alike. He always seemed to be smiling—an impression that was reinforced by his adoption, in mid-career, of chic bowties. He died from the effects of his condition on 14 August 1997 at Darlinghurst, survived by his wife, their son, Peter, and their three daughters, Jennifer, Susan, and Philippa; he was cremated. A postdoctoral fellowship with the NHF and a lecture at an annual Merck Sharp and Dohme symposium were named for him.