Maths meets the human body

Peter Hunter is confident New Zealand can grow a bioengineering industry Picture / Brett Phibbs

When Peter Hunter took the quill and signed the parchment book at London's Royal Society in July, he was in the presence of greatness. The book holds the signatures of renowned scientists going back to the 17th century, names such as Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein ... FRS - Fellow of the Royal Society.

Hunter, initially taken aback by the honour - "quite a shock actually" - enjoyed the moment. "I saw the signatures of Darwin and all the rest - it was a great day."

It's an accolade given to only 40 New Zealand scientists, beginning with ornithologist Walter Buller in 1879 and including Lord Rutherford in 1903. The science Hunter is being honoured for involves a collaboration to define the human "physiome" - our physiological state and function. It's a science of measurement and modelling of the workings of cells, tissue and organs - a science of computation so vast that today's super computers struggle to answer the questions it is asking. Maths meets the body.

Hunter takes his FRS as recognition of the work of Auckland's Bioengineering Institute. "It's a reflection on the group as a whole as much as it is on me as an individual."

The statement is classic Hunter: always acknowledging the part of others and forever with a strategic eye on the main prize - the furthering of the research. He agrees the honour also recognises his vision of how computer models of human organs could be used in medicine but adds. "It's a vision that would be totally dead in the water if it wasn't being surrounded by really talented people."

To understand what Hunter is about and where he and the institute are going, it's necessary to go back to 1971. Having finished a Bachelor's degree in Engineering Science at Auckland University, he was strangely attracted by a Masters' project with the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. It involved solving the equations governing blood flow in arteries and marked the start of his transition from engineering to biology - "the realisation there was this wonderful world of biology that you could apply mathematical and physical science techniques to".

There was, however, a slight problem. "I hadn't done biology in sixth form so I couldn't have exactly told you where the heart was in the body."

But Hunter did have a couple of things in his favour. One was growing up in an engineering household. His father, an engineer who ran an instrumentation laboratory, exposed his four sons to a range of DIY mechanical and electrical skills.

"I grew up making radio sets and electronics and working on cars - very hands on. You were constantly exposed to solving practical problems with engineering approaches."

The other advantage was an aptitude for mathematics - something that emerged at Auckland Grammar under the tutelage of Fred Orange. "He always related mathematics to the real world, it wasn't too abstract. It was a very enjoyable time. It's hard to define what makes an outstanding teacher, but clearly he was."

Armed with problem solving and scholarship level mathematics skills, Hunter arrives at the Auckland School of Engineering as it's setting up an Engineering Science course. The applied mathematics suits him as does the newfound calculating power of computers - at that time an IBM 1130 mainframe. "You booked the machine and we used to sit up all night. You fed it cards and you looked at what it printed out - this was before the days of terminals."

It's against this background of ever increasing computing power and an emerging interest in biology that Hunter gets his big idea. "The idea was that you could understand biology on the basis of setting up mathematical descriptions of biological processes - where you mathematically defined the anatomy and the structure of an organ and the function."

The complexity comes when describing function. To do so one needs to talk the language of differential equations and negotiate the laws of physics that apply. Difficult because human anatomy is soft and squidgy, forever changing and endlessly interconnected. It doesn't matter to Hunter the idea is ahead of its time and the technology, he is sure it can be done.

"When I look back, it was a ridiculously ambitious idea, stupidly ambitious really. But fortunately the power of computing continued to grow at such a rate it subsequently became feasible to do what I naively thought you could do back then."

Today Hunter shows what comes from knowing one can - his beating heart, a 3D animation on his notebook computer. In 1999 he needed a Silicon Graphics machine worth about $1 million to display such models. The heart movie looks like a real heart with realistic muscle tissue and blood vessels, but underneath is a flexible wireframed space that contracts and expands to the rhythm of a heart pump. It's built from the cell level up - from painstaking anatomical measurements, initially involving wafer thin shavings from dog hearts, but today using advances in medical imaging such as MRI scans.

The anatomical detail is vital because the models, which include other organs like the lungs and kidney; and the digestive and musculo-skeletal systems, are used in surgical planning and as diagnostic tools. Ultimately they'll be used in drug discovery as a kind of drug test dummy. If that seems too sci-fi, then consider this. Hunter sees a day when a visit to the doctor will involve your body scan combined with mathematical models to test treatment scenarios on a virtual you.

Although the models work at a cellular, and increasingly sub-cellular level, running simulations requires formidable number crunching power. To show, for example, how a particular drug might modify proteins in the heart involves computations that even the institute's supercomputer struggles to handle. "It's still too expensive. It takes over a day on our big machine to crunch one heart beat for some questions we are asking."

Back in 1972, Hunter was just beginning to realise his ridiculous ambition with a Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford. It takes nine months to get there because he cashes in his air ticket and travels overland with his first wife Marnie to Darwin. They trek through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, skirt the Vietnam war to Hong Kong, are rejected by China, tour Japan, then take the trans-Siberian railway from Vladivostock. The itinerary is an apt metaphor for Hunter's career - choosing unusual routes and doggedly following them while enjoying the ride.

They arrive in Oxford broke and live initially in graduate accommodation at St Catherine's College, but later rent a house and begin a family. The PhD work - as the only engineer in a physiology department - is just what Hunter needs. He begins his groundbreaking research on the heart and works with Oxford's Denis Noble who was researching electrophysiology - how nerve signals propagate in cardiac tissue. "I was working on something else - more on the mechanics of the heart - but I got involved with him because he had mathematical problems I could help him with."

Eight years away, and with his children, Stephen and Jenny, near school age, Hunter is ready to return home. "It's important to have roots and feel you belong somewhere. I like the New Zealand character. I like New Zealand as a place to live."

By now Hunter is developing another big idea - creating a world class research group in Auckland. "It's important for New Zealanders to appreciate that they can do it. They shouldn't suffer cultural cringe. We can create an environment here that is every bit as good as anywhere in the world."

But in 1978 it is difficult to get a biological experimental laboratory going within an engineering environment. Undeterred, Hunter teams up with Bruce Smaill in the physiology department of Auckland's Medical School - the start of a close scientific relationship that spans 30 years. It helps that Smaill trained in engineering before going into physiology and that Hunter, via Oxford, is now also familiar with the physiology domain. "We both spoke both languages - that was probably quite important."

The rest is history. A small research group spread among different departments in the university develops and the collaboration with Oxford's Noble is rekindled in 1991. In 2001 the Bioengineering Institute is formed bringing the disparate researchers together. Today it boasts 100 staff and about 20 areas of research.

Where once Hunter was concerned about a brain drain of top flight graduates, he now talks about a brain gain with overseas students applying to work there. The various teams collaborate with others including Oxford, California and San Diego, and Vanderbilt universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the Bioengineering Institute has enough clout to attract international grants.

Hunter is now 58. His children and stepchildren (Johanna and Jonathan from his second marriage to Karin) are grown up. In his spare time he does woodwork and he's hoping he can soon return to playing classical guitar. But, for the moment, life is too busy.

Within five years he wants to hand over the leadership of the institute to someone else and direct more energy to the Physiome Project - a worldwide effort to model the body and its workings. Meanwhile there are bioengineering students to look after, more research to oversee, a textbook to write and about three months travelling each year to keep the collaboration going. And the ongoing battle to convince the Government of the need to at least double its science research funding and to be patient.

Long term he'd like to see graduates developing their own business from the software and expertise of the institute, helping to grow a New Zealand bioengineering industry.

Ridiculously ambitious? By now it's clear many at the institute share the vision and know they can.