FIELDS OF GOLD ORIGINS Using plants to mine minerals The peopling of Madagascar Massey News from Massey University I Issue 21 I July 2012 www.definingnz.com Road to Rome Sam McCafferty heads to Italy Games plans Helping to organise the London Olympics | Massey University | July 2012 | definingnz | 1 CONTENTS JULY 2012 20 15 COVER STORY PROFILES 8 The road to Rome 5 Goal oriented Student Sam McCafferty has reimagined the Football Fern Anna Green. form of the smaller motorcycle. Now Honda is sending him to Rome. 6 Games plans Events organiser Lara Middleditch is making sure the London Olympics run sweetly. 22 Speaking out Retired language lecturer Rolf Panny has led an extraordinary life: from the battlefields of World War II to the student unrest of the 1960s and, at last, on to Massey in Manawatu-. Website: www.definingnz.com Editor: Malcolm Wood [email protected] Writers: Kelly Burns, Bryan Gibson, Michele Hollis, Jennifer Little, definingnz is published quarterly Andrea O’Neil, Malcolm Wood, Sonia Yoshioka Braid, Redmer Yska by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Thanks to: Jeannette McKinnon, Kelly Evans Palmerston North 4442, New Zealand. Design : Grant Bunyan Proofreading: Foolproof Subscription enquiries: [email protected] Copyright: You are generally welcome to reproduce material provided you first gain permission from the editor. 2 | definingnz | July 2012 | Massey University 22 11 FEATURES DEPARTMENTS 14 Origins 10 Campus wide Computational biologist Murray Cox has A round-up of news come to some startling conclusions about the from Massey’s three campuses. settlement of Madagascar. Most of the first settlers came not from Africa, just across the Tools of trade way, but from Indonesia, 6000 kilometres of 13 open ocean distant. The articulograph and electromyograph are used to explore the nature of what we do 18 Fields of gold when we eat. Phytomining pioneer Chris Anderson proposes to farm Indonesian mine 26 Mixed media tailings for gold, creating wealth for local Warming the Emotional Climate of the communities and saving the environment Primary School Classroom, Dinner at from toxic run-off. Rose’s, Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writings, plus poetry by Bryan Walpert. You’ve picked up the magazine, now visit the website. www.definingnz.com | Massey University | July 2012 | definingnz | 1 FIRST WORD Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey writes. s I grow older, I become more and more initiatives. Now Massey is to take another major aware that the past truly is a foreign step forward with the formation of a College of Acountry. I grew up in a land where cars Health. didn’t have seat belts, where asbestos was used in To some of you this may come as a surprise. building products, where most buildings were un- True, Massey has had a nursing studies programme insulated and where cigarettes were advertised in since the early 1970s and it was the first university cinemas and on billboards. It was a place mistrustful in Australasia to award a PhD in nursing back in of vegetables, except when boiled into submission, 1989, but it is only in comparatively recent times and so committed to the consumption of its own that Massey has gathered the critical mass to saturated-fat dairy products that the manufacturing contemplate forming a new college. of margarine was restricted by law – the Margarine It began with the founding of the Wellington- Act of 1908 was only repealed in 1989. based Sleep/Wake Research Centre in 1998, It was a place where someone had had the followed in 2000 by the formation of the also- bright idea that if you wanted to send the menfolk Wellington-based Centre for Public Health home to their wives tolerably sober, the best thing Research, and in 2002 the creation of the to do was to close the pubs at 6pm. The result: Auckland-based SHORE Centre and the Whariki institutionalised binge drinking – the six o’clock Research Group. swill, the pell mell rush for workers to drink as In a four-year period, Massey gained or much beer as possible in the short period between consolidated expertise in a variety of health-related the closing of the working day and those of the realms. Think of the relationship between sleep and bars. occupational risk; of the understanding of such It was a place of crutches, wheelchairs, the iron things as the survival rates for cervical cancer and lung and fear: the disease polio still periodically the mechanisms governing the development of swept through New Zealand communities. asthma; of the vexed relationship between New If we don’t act, the One by one, these things have changed, and Zealanders and alcohol and drugs; of how urban along with them so has something else: life design promotes or dissuades us from exercising; outlook is grim: expectancy. According to the actuarial tables, when and of how ethnic and social inequality exerts an an epidemic of I was born my life expectancy was 67. Had I been influence on health and longevity. a girl, it would have been 71. Today, a newborn boy Alongside nursing, these centres and groups chronic preventable can on average expect to reach 78, and a newborn will form core components of the new College, illnesses, an girl to break 82. That bonus 10 years of life – if we but so too will a less expected entity, the Institute can be sure that it is healthy – is a prize beyond of Food, Nutrition and Human Health. Massey’s overstretched health price and there is no reason why life expectancy extraordinary expertise in food, you might think, system that relies should not continue to rise. has far more to do with adding value to New No, not all of this is the consequence of public Zealand’s key export sector or with laboratory more and more health measures – antibiotics and growingly science and engineering than with health. on user-pays or sophisticated medical treatments have played a Yet, looking forward, the grouping makes sense. part – but much of it is. We live longer because Diet has always been known to be key to health. rationing, and a vast we live better and we subject ourselves to fewer You are what you eat. Up until recent times, the risks and hazards. But in terms of what might be drive was to ensure that the food we ate was free waste of human achieved, we are only partway there. of diseases, pesticide residues and adulterants. It was happiness and A good university is a living institution, about preventing illness. Now a transformational constantly in the business of remaking itself shift is taking place, from preventing illness to potential. to meet the challenges of its time. Since it was promoting wellness. founded by Act of Parliament in 1964, Massey has Think of Fonterra’s Anlene, a milk specially scarcely paused to take breath. There have been formulated for adults to help build strong bones, new campuses, new colleges and a stream of new developed with the help of Massey’s Professor 2 | definingnz | July 2012 | Massey University $3.8 million for health research Marlena Kruger. Think of the work of Professor Does unpasteurised milk provide in Wellington, is leading a $466,148 Bernard Brier, who has validated the benefits of some defence against asthma and project investigating the risk factors omega-3 fatty acids in enhancing carbohydrate allergies? Does mobile phone use associated with the incidence of brain and fat metabolism in an ageing population, and increase the risk of brain cancer in cancer in children and adolescents. In of Professors Moughan and Harjinder Singh, children? What can be done to make the course of two and a half years, the who have developed an emulsion-based micro- Ma-ori housing less hazardous for its study will interview 63 New Zealand encapsulation technology, so that omega-3 fish occupants? What has been the upshot children and adolescents, aged between oils can be added to a variety of foods without any of the various public policy endeavours 10 and 24, who have brain cancer and unwanted smell and taste – for much as we want to that have been launched to moderate 126 others who do not. The children consume what is good for us, there is always going the consumption of alcohol in New and adolescents together with their to be a limited market for fish-flavoured treats. Zealand? Funded by the Health caregivers will be interviewed about Nurses and epidemiologists. Food scientists Research Council (HRC), as part of their mobile phone use and a range and sleep experts. Urban designers and exercise its 2012 funding round, four projects of other environmental risk factors. physiologists. The new College of Health will offer led by staff from the university’s new The research is part of a multinational a multidisciplinary approach to a multidisciplinary School of Public Health are setting out MOBI-KIDS study of mobile phone set of challenges, and it will reach out to the wider to answer these questions. use and the risk of brain cancer. health community – to Centres of Research Professor Jeroen Douwes, who heads A project led by Professor Chris Excellence, such as the Riddet Centre sited on the Centre for Public Health Research Cunningham, Director of the Massey’s Manawatu- campus; to medical schools and on the Wellington campus, is leading Research Centre for Ma-ori Health other universities; to district health boards; to local a $1.2 million, three-year study to and Development, also in Wellington, is government; and to international organisations assess whether drinking raw milk is leading a $787,000 project to quantify such as the World Health Organization, the World associated with a lower prevalence of the home hazards affecting Ma-ori Bank and UNESCO.