Fiona wood brief biography of benjamin

She still finds her public profile very uncomfortable, years after she shot into the national psyche for her role in treating victims of the Bali bombings and as Australian of the Year in Bestselling author Sue Williams has been writing to Wood every year for at least a decade, asking to write her biography. Each time, she received a polite demurral with an apology that Wood was simply too busy.

The truth was more complicated. There are some people who revel in telling you all about their life and their achievements but there are some who regard it with absolute horror, and she was, unfortunately, in that category. Nothing comes easy. Her teachers describe her as feisty, with a fierce sense of right and wrong. She would need her trademark tenacity when she decided to study medicine in London; one of just 12 female students alongside 60 men.

During that time, Wood had also met Australian Tony Keirath, who was also training to be a surgeon. They got married 10 weeks later, on the first weekend they were both rostered off. As Wood encountered burns patients and the life-altering, disfiguring scarring they suffered, she was left with a recurring thought — we must do better. She began to seek out burns cases and when she fell pregnant with son Tom in Octobershe worked until she could barely reach the operating table.

Shortly after he was born, she was back at work. Wood did with Tom as she would with all her children over the ensuing years — she took him with her to the hospital, feeding him and then leaving him with willing nurses while she was in theatre. On the first morning, Wood woke her husband urgently just after dawn, insisting they not waste a sunny day.

We used skin culture from Melbourne, and it was all working beautifully, and although he got peripheral neuropathy and had, basically, die-back of his nerves, they almost all regenerated. But it took him nine months and it was a long road. For a period of time, yes, which is very unusual and had not been recognised in such cases before.

Well, people are really surviving in the ICU against the odds, with massive injuries, not just burns. How could I have done better? How could I have avoided that? To be honest, I think it was good for me to be able to accept that we were not infallible; we had a lot of work to do. There are two ways to look at that reaction. How did you balance it out?

You were, from the sound of it, ready to jack it all in and just do breasts and noses! But the question for me was whether I was prepared for the emotional energy. And I went close to the edge. Yet, am I strong enough to cope with that? And I guess it did strengthen me. It strengthened my resolve that there will be answers and we will get better.

That was a young boy. I have had pictures of him, of his face particularly, over my desk for about four years, trying to work out how to fix it. But it was, oh, tough times in children, in different ways. Death is much more frequent in adults because the injuries are bigger. The pressures in kids are very different, because of the family and the fact that then they grow!

A value system of determination and respect.

Fiona wood brief biography of benjamin: A pioneer in the field of

They choose to ignore it when it suits them. I was born in a Yorkshire mining village. I had two older brothers so I was a sort of kid sister, but I did have a younger sister. They were very focused on education and sport, my parents. Dad was a miner. Mum worked in the youth system until I was about Then she saw a job advertised for a house mother in a Quaker boarding school.

She used to work nights and to pick brussel sprouts and so on in the daytime. So she went off to have an interview at the school, and she came back as the phys ed teacher — which was most impressive. She went on and did great things. She was coordinator of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards for north England and things like that. She saw that what she wanted basically was for my sister and me to go to school, to the Quaker school.

By then the education system had changed. My eldest brother had left school at 15, having been in the secondary modern system. We girls were caught in the next stage. Then I was in this Quaker school where they were all pacifists and wore long cloaks like Harry Potter. Well, I certainly have a great deal of respect for my fellow human. As I said, I can run fast.

So he had a sort of sniff of the fresh air. He was absolutely adamant about that. I went there because my brother went there.

Fiona wood brief biography of benjamin: Free Essay: Fiona Wood (born

My interview was interesting. Oddly enough, later on he followed me here. It was great when he and his family came to Australia. I came here with a couple of years still to go. I had got my general surgical fellowship and I was part way through my plastic surgical fellowship, so we landed here with about two years to go. But I ended up sidestepping — being sideswiped is probably a more accurate description — into general surgery for a year, before going back into plastic surgery.

I then passed the plastics exam. I had two when I arrived here. We want lots of these. Then I had a child shortly fiona wood brief biography of benjamin I leaving the UK. My second child was just five weeks old when I moved to Australia. Then my third was born after the first six months of my plastics training in Australia. And I had three children as a consultant.

Someone asked me what I did and how I managed when they were young. There are never any boundaries to research. You might have postdocs and so on, but the lab keeps going 24 hours a day. At least in surgery you get days off. Can you give me a brief sense of how you organise your life? Well, it must be okay if they accept the plastic surgeon to look after their broken bones.

When the kids were younger I used to work a lot at night while they were asleep. Then as they have got older they want their bit of time as well. So getting up early helps. And I like to stay fit. Her father Geoff was a miner and her mother Elsie was a physical education teacher. Growing up in relative poverty, Wood's parents pushed their children to get a better education — with her mother transferring to a Quaker school to improve the children's educational opportunities.

She was athletic as a child and hoped for a career as an Olympic sprinter. She completed her training in plastic surgery between having four more children. InWood became the first female plastic surgeon in Western Australia. InWood began working with medical scientist Marie Stoner on tissue engineering. They focused on a particularly painful pain point — burn treatments.

Through their work, Wood and Stoner were able to greatly decrease skin culturing time and greatly reduce permanent scarring in burns victims. In OctoberWood was propelled into the media spotlight when the largest proportion of survivors from the Bali bombings arrived at Royal Perth Hospital. She led a team working to save 28 patients who had between 2 and 92 per cent body burns, deadly infections and delayed shock.

In Marchfollowing the crash landing of Garuda Indonesia FlightWood travelled to Yogyakartato assist in the emergency medical response for burn patients. Inshe attracted criticism for publicly endorsing the drug brand Nurofen. The profits from this endorsement went to the McComb Foundation, of which she was the chairwoman. The Australian Medical Association subsequently advised doctors against "endorsement of therapeutic goods".

Wood later said of the endorsement that she "would not explore it again because I believe the negative perception outweighs the gain … I believe it was a mistake for me personally". Inshe released her biography, Under her Skin by Sue Williams, with her share of proceeds from the book going to the Fiona Wood Foundation. Wood has become well known for her patented invention of spray-on skin for burn patients, a treatment which is being continually developed.

Where previous techniques of skin culturing required 21 days to produce enough cells to cover major burns, Wood has reduced the period to five days. This reduction hinged on the types of skin harvested; Wood focused her efforts on thinner skin which took less time for enzyme solutions to penetrate.

Fiona wood brief biography of benjamin: Fiona Wood's journey toward

Through research, she found that scarring is greatly reduced if replacement skin could be provided — within 10 days. The two women began to explore tissue engineering. They moved from growing skin sheets to spraying skin cells; earning a worldwide reputation as pioneers in their field. The company started operating in and now cultures small biopsies into bigger volumes of skin cell suspensions in as few as five days.

This service is used by surgeons in Sydney, Auckland and Birmingham. Cells can be delivered via aircraft and ready for use the next day in many cases. Royalties from licensing will be ploughed back into a research fund, named the McComb Foundation. As well as receiving much praise from both her own patients and the media, she also attracted controversy among other burns surgeons because spray-on skin had not yet been subjected to clinical trials.

A clinical trial was planned in at Queen Victoria HospitalEngland.