The breath of life
In many remote communities, the thought of electricity can be a distant reality, but now a device is producing oxygen without electricity and saving lives
CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.
CHRIS HATZIS
Take a deep breath in and out. There - now you're aware of your breathing. That ability - to breathe without issues - is one we mostly take for granted. Now imagine your ability to breathe has been compromised: you have an illness, and even worse, you're in a remote community with no access to electricity - so an oxygen mask is out of the question. That is, it was out of the question...
ROGER RASSOOL
Hi, I'm Associate Professor Roger Rassool. I'm in the School of Physics. I am a teacher and researcher. I'm formally associated with the Experimental Particle Physics Group, but more recently I run another group and we’ll find out a bit more about that in the podcast.
CHRIS HATZIS
Roger, from the University of Melbourne's School of Physics, developed a way to produce oxygen without electricity. His work may soon help thousands in developing countries around the world. Dr Andi Horvath sat down and spoke to Roger about his work, the FreO2 Foundation he is a part of, and the intersection of physics and social equity.
ANDI HORVATH
Roger, you’re passionate about physics, but you’re also passionate about social equity. You like solving industrial problems using physics. Let’s talk about the physics side of Roger. Tell me about your passion for physics, when did it start?
ROGER RASSOOL
That’s an easy one to answer. My passion started with curiosity, so as a young kid I was always curious about how things work, and the best way about finding out about how things work is to break them and never put them back together. So, my father was always associating me with everything being in bits, and partially reassembled because the journey of finding out how things work was the excitement. You didn’t always have to put them back together, but it does pay when you can.
ANDI HORVATH
So you always were interested in how things work, and therefore you went to university. What did you study?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, university was interesting for me because I came here with a migrant family and no one had been to university. So as we grew up, and I went to a secondary school, a major turning point in Australia was that during the Whitlam era university became accessible. I recall the teachers coming into us, and it was called forms at that time, that’s how long ago, it’s a century ago, that’s how long ago. I remember them coming in and saying okay, are you boys? Yes - and I went to a boys’ school - and you boys are going to go to university. So we got excited and apparently we had to do some work, so we started working and come along I finished my Year 12 and got into university. I still remember the first time coming into Melbourne University, I came with dad and we drove all the way into town from the northern suburbs, and we walked into the Union. I still have this really vivid memory of walking into the Student Union and looking round and thinking, well this is the University, I mean the Student Union. We picked up a copy of Farrago.
ANDI HORVATH
That’s the magazine.
ROGER RASSOOL
The magazine, the Student Union - yeah.
ANDI HORVATH
The student magazine. Yeah.
ROGER RASSOOL
It was very risqué because it had naked men and women in the magazine, pictures. I remember dad getting a copy of that and saying, I don't think we’ll show this to mum. [Laughter] So that’s my first recollection of the university.
ANDI HORVATH
Now you’ve never left the university. You’ve been here all your life. Is that right?
ROGER RASSOOL
That’s correct.
ANDI HORVATH
Tell us about the turning point then from studying physics to becoming a physics researcher.
ROGER RASSOOL
It’s one of those grey areas. So coming here, and people will now work out that I must’ve come here when I was only three years old because it was 40 years ago when I came here. I recall I came along and I thought, we’ll do a degree, that sounded pretty good. I was never sure whether I was in the right course because I was in science and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be an electrical engineer, but I think my love of physics came about through in physics, I could actually also look at electronics and other aspects that might have been covered in engineering, but I was able to still pursue science for science's sake. So then at the end looked at, should we get a job, and decided to do an honours here, and that sounded pretty good. Then I thought, oh should I get a job? And I thought oh, why not start a PhD? I had never come to university with the prospect of well I'm going to do an honours here and do a PhD, I’d just come with the prospect of doing university.
Anyway, so that got me excited and I love teaching so I got a job as a demonstrator, and I think that ignited my passion for really communicating science or physics, and I don't know how it was but I stumbled at a very young age into a tutorship and seemed like a good idea, and the next thing I knew I had a job. But I didn’t have the PhD because along the way it no longer seemed important to do my PhD because I was in the university, I was doing what I loved, loved what I’d do. Got paid to do it. There’s not much more you could ask for. This is not an advertisement for how to do a PhD, but it took me 12 years to finish my PhD because once you’re working full time and you’re doing all those other things you don't seem to focus on it as much.
In the meantime I’d supervised five PhDs because we were working in Japan and I was doing the research I wanted to do. Then I remember somewhere in the mid-90s I thought, well I've got this ten years of experience, maybe I better finish that PhD. So I took six months off and finished it.
ANDI HORVATH
What was it in?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, I can actually tell you, I have a PhD on oxygen. The nuclear structure of oxygen, and in particular what we were looking at - my PhD was in Nuclear Physics, and it really focuses on the nucleus. So, many will know the size of the atom, the atom’s ten to the minus ten of a metre.
ANDI HORVATH
That’s very small.
ROGER RASSOOL
It’s tiny. What is it, one ten-thousandth of a millionth of a metre. Now, everybody can obviously visualise that, so for those of you who can now visualise that atom and place it in a football arena, and if you’re in Melbourne, the MCG, or if you’re somewhere else, a big football arena, if you now call that the atom the nucleus is like getting six jellybeans and putting them in the middle of that field. That’s the actual nucleus, and that’s ten to the minus 15 of a metre roughly, the size thereof. In the outer seats of that arena are specks of dust, and that would be the electrons. The analogy that I'm trying to paint is that an atom is mainly space.
So, what we were studying was really what holds the nucleus together, why in the case of oxygen can we get eight protons and eight neutrons and shove them in so close, so tightly packed and it stays together. So we’re looking at the structure of that, and in particular, what the role of the neutrons were in there.
ANDI HORVATH
You’re renowned around campus as a Physics lecturer. You’ve got cult status, people attended your classes who weren’t even enrolled in your courses. Tell us some anecdotes over the years, some favourites of teaching physics.
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, I'm not sure I'm renowned, but they are interesting lectures. I enjoy teaching. This is my first year, after 21 years of not teaching first year, and I'm really going cold turkey. I'm teaching this master’s course, which is great because it’s one-on-one with the students, rather than classes of 200 or 300. The one thing I've loved about teaching first year is that it’s an opportunity to introduce students to self-directed learning, rather than simply teaching. Yes, it’s a bit of a transition, yes it takes students a while to get used to it, but years later you bump into them and say, look - I look back on those lectures and they were really great. From a teaching viewpoint, in physics, the way we teach is very experiential, and of course we can get the textbook and read it to the students, and in some of my lectures - actually my first lecture - I’d normally start doing that. Say look, can I take it for granted you’ve read the first 237 pages of this 1500-page book, and if you haven't, make sure you go home and do it tonight, and turn your books to page 238 and we’ll start reading from the top left-hand corner. Get away with this for about 30 seconds or 40 seconds while the students looked stunned.
[Laughter]
ANDI HORVATH
You’re playing with them.
ROGER RASSOOL
Yeah, and then I said, oh by the way, right at the back of the book is an index, and if you want to look up Newton’s laws go to that section. My job is to point you to the right section of the index and explain a little bit of this, and we throw the book away. But physics is about the natural world. Yes, and maybe the sub-natural and the non-natural, but at the end of the day first-year physics is about how and why the world works, and so my belief is that everything should somehow be tangible and testable.
So in all of our lectures, and that’s not me in isolation, we put a very heavy role on using demonstrations. Now, they are spectacular because they often go wrong, and that’s even better because there’s a lot of learning that takes place. So we’ve been known to have the odd explosion in a lecture. We do the shattering wine glass - I don't know if you remember those operatic tricks, where you…
ANDI HORVATH
Sure.
ROGER RASSOOL
…get an operatic singer. So we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to set up technology so that we can image that and show the students, and oscillate the wine glass, and the way we strobe it you can actually see the wine glass pulsating, and it moves three or four millimetres in and out. You’ve got to choose the wine glass carefully to get the resin of frequency. Most times it breaks, but sometimes it doesn't.
I remember one time having the glass in my hand on camera, saying to students, amazing this glass how I can squeeze it in and glass is flexible, and unfortunately I squeezed it a touch too much, which it shattered and cut me and blood went everywhere, at which point Laura Parry [Associate Dean, Research and Industry, Faculty of Science] walked in to give a biology lecture and there’s a physics lecture with me bleeding all over the place. So that was spectacular.
ANDI HORVATH
Explosions, blood on the hands, teaching physics. So tell us about the oxygen molecule. You’ve been very interested in healthcare and oxygen.
ROGER RASSOOL
I've become interested in healthcare. It was a turning point in 2011, so now six, seven years ago, and remember the life of this young person who’s now an old person. I came to university, got to study physics, and when you’re a physicist you grow up thinking that you can solve every problem. I learnt very early on working with industry, that we could solve 80 per cent of every problem. It takes engineers to really take those solutions and really get that to a workable solution. That’s where scientists work well with engineers, but I'm not an engineer.
My research work, I was fortunate to work at places like CERN, the Australian Synchrotron, Stanford, and we worked in very expensive experiments. We were always very ingenious and frugal, but budget was virtually no limit in the overall scheme of things. In 201,1 we were approached by some medical doctors to start looking at whether we could diagnose anaemia, and looked at some laser technology we had, and digital imaging, processing them, whatever.
That relationship got us invited to what I will call a 'nerd fest', but it was really the No Limits Symposium held by the Nossal Institute, where Jim Black [global health expert, Nossal Institute for Global Health] and other colleagues had got together all these global health specialists who were working in very difficult resource settings. They presented some of the challenges they were dealing with to a team, an assembled audience of engineers and scientists, what I call nerds. Our job was to sit there and become acquainted with what their problems were, and use our wisdom to solve their problems.
ANDI HORVATH
Brilliant. So basically people who had various problems said, let’s ask physicists, see if they can see something we can't. So problems like anaemia, which is where you don't have enough either blood molecules or enough oxygen in your blood, is a major health problem. What happened next?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, and you heard the word oxygen come up, the good thing was my PhD was useless because it was a PhD on the structure of the nucleus rather than the MCG [laughs]. So, as I mentioned, it was physicists and engineers, scientists, maybe they even had some financiers there too because at the end of the day money solves many problems, so give me more money was normally the solution. Anyway, so this differed because often a scientist, you have a solution and you go looking for the problem, so this was quite clever, reach out with problems and see who has solutions. It was a key member of my team who came away, and we were originally tasked with trying to produce electricity in remote areas, to run machines to produce oxygen.
ANDI HORVATH
For healthcare.
ROGER RASSOOL
For healthcare in low-resource settings, and I’ll describe a bit of that possibly later. But let’s assume you need oxygen, and so like most physicists, we just assume oxygen comes from somewhere, and we thought okay, well you cryogenically cool air and you separate the oxygen from the nitrogen.
ANDI HORVATH
Oh, is that how it works?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well that’s what we thought [laughs]. Anyway, so we rang a few hospitals and they told us, oh we’ve got those little machines that you plug into the wall that make oxygen. So we said, oh could we have one? One of the companies gave us one, and we pulled it apart and had a look how it worked, and we were quite surprised, it was quite straightforward. You have a compressor, like you could buy from Bunnings or any hardware store, including Mitre 10, we don't want to promote any one hardware store. Then you have these two filters, and of course those in the know will know they’re not filters, they’re adsorbent material, that they’re zeolites, and by pushing air cleverly through these objects you could separate nitrogen from the air.
Air is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, one percent argon and the rest of other things, so you could be left with 95 percent pure oxygen, all you needed was to run the compressor. So these guys wanted the electricity to run the compressor and we said, well hang on, don't you just want oxygen, why don't we just make oxygen for you? So rather than make electricity to make compressed air, our team proposed we could make oxygen - now we proposed…
ANDI HORVATH
How?
ROGER RASSOOL
By simply making compressed air somehow in the natural world, and then using that through those filters.
ANDI HORVATH
Did you?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well we proposed to do it in 2013 formally, where we got a grant, and we expected it would take us six months and we would use water to do it. It took us close to five years, and yes, we have done it.
ANDI HORVATH
Congratulations.
ROGER RASSOOL
So how we managed to do it was to exploit a very simple, natural phenomenon. When water moves through a pipe, if that pipe goes up and down the pressure drops at the top of the pipe. We put a hole in the top of the pipe and really a siphon is what that pipe is. We created a vacuum, which is an absence of pressure, and we reversed the process. So rather than use the pressure to produce the oxygen, we used a vacuum to remove the nitrogen, and so that’s how FREO2 was born.
ANDI HORVATH
Wow, so you’ve created oxygen without the use of electricity, and this means remote healthcare facilities or any places without electricity, have got access to oxygen for healthcare.
ROGER RASSOOL
Provided they have access to some flowing water, the answer’s yes. So we’re the only group in the world I suppose, firstly mad enough to propose it, be silly enough or committed enough to try to do it, and now we can actually do it. On the border between Uganda and Congo, the DRC, we actually demonstrated and ran that system earlier this year for a small community.
ANDI HORVATH
Now, for those of us who are not familiar with healthcare, what is oxygen used for in healthcare?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, we’re using oxygen right now, Andi, aren’t we?
ANDI HORVATH
Oh yeah, we are.
ROGER RASSOOL
For?
ANDI HORVATH
Yep, breathing.
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, that’s normally what it’s used for in healthcare. So if you look at illnesses and any illness where you suffer a deficiency of oxygen, it’s called hypoxia. Pneumonia, being the biggest killer of kids in the world, for instance - most people don't know that, they think it’s AIDS or malaria, whatever. Pneumonia and diarrhoea account for one quarter of infant mortality, or of under-five mortality in the world, and in fact pneumonia kills almost a million children each year. Well, children who have pneumonia, basically their lung function’s compromised, they can't breathe, they can't fight that infection because they can't get oxygen into their blood to actually fight the infection.
You could try to give them antibiotics, but only 25 percent of pneumonia cases are bacterial, the other 75 percent in these areas are typically viral. Strangely, or not strangely, these children who can't breathe deeply - what if you gave them pure oxygen or medical-grade oxygen? They get a lot more oxygen into their blood, their bloods sats come back up, they fight the infection, and there’s a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in mortality just by putting them on oxygen. It’s great. So all you’ve got to do is provide oxygen.
You mentioned the MCG, there’s another thing that we take for granted, that we have access to liquid oxygen in Victoria and in Melbourne, in Australia, in the world. Well, 1.4 billion people on earth have no electricity, they don't have necessarily roads, they don't have wired telephones. They may have wireless telephones now, but they don't have oxygen in their facilities. So we have set ourselves a task of trying to provide oxygen to smaller remote health facilities that may not have energy to produce it.
We’ve now gone beyond just using water because when we use water, of course, everyone criticised, well what are you going to do when there’s no water? So, we can now use solar, and people say, what do you do when it rains? We say, well we can use water, and we can use electricity. People say, well what happens when the electricity blacks out? We can store the oxygen in these very low-pressure vessels. So the real journey of physics for me has been, how can we holistically provide oxygen?
So rather than focus on all the great innovations, I think the major innovation we’ve done now in Uganda in particular, is on the wall, it’s blank in most of these small hospitals. On that wall we’ve put a piece of wood and a tap, and that tap delivers oxygen. What happens on the other side of the wall is the innovation, what we want the nursing staff to do is to go up and turn the tap on and use the oxygen. That’s our major innovation, to put the tap.
ANDI HORVATH
That’s fantastic. To think that this went back to its origins at a nerd fest, and it’s physicists savings lives. It’s physicists saving lives.
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, I love hearing the term physicist, it’s physicists working with epidemiologists, working with engineers, working with biologists, working with paramedics, working with medicos, working with finance specialists, it’s really interdisciplinary work that’s actually going to make this save lives.
ANDI HORVATH
What would you like to activate in society, Roger? I'm putting you in charge of the country.
ROGER RASSOOL
Okay, the four Is.
ANDI HORVATH
Four Is?
ROGER RASSOOL
Yep. See, I grew up with the three Rs, reading, writing, arithmetic. I translated that 15 years ago when we started doing all the science outreach, to the three Es, engage, enthuse, excite, and therefore educate. Now I have the four Is.
ANDI HORVATH
Which are?
ROGER RASSOOL
An idea. University’s curiosity, they drive ideas. But ideas are just like this little impulse delta, I've got seven ideas today, fantastic.
ANDI HORVATH
They’re a dime a dozen, aren’t they?
ROGER RASSOOL
Yep, that’s right. Now, the next word is contentious because I'm not sure it’s a government policy anymore, but innovate. Take the idea and innovate. Innovation’s great, burn a lot of money and a lot of time, and take that idea and show it works.
ANDI HORVATH
Make it work.
ROGER RASSOOL
The next I is implement. Because there’s no sense innovating until the cows come home, until you implement. The last I is the I that is the real measure, impact. Have the impact. So, in our work our first idea started around 2011, that’s when the nerd fest was. We ran for two years with no funding, like we ran backgrounds - and notice it’s we, we, we because this podcast is about me, me, me apparently, but it’s really teams that actually make this thing happen.
Teams that I'm part of that worked weekends, bought things out of their own pockets. Then in 2013 we actually get a grant from the Saving Lives at Birth, and Bill and Melinda Gates USA, Grand Challenges Canada, that group, and then we basically raised a lot of money. On 17 July 2018 we delivered oxygen to our first child, baby Francis. Two days later I got to hold Francis with permission of his mum, because he was fully recovered, and that’s our first impact.
So we went from zero on our measure of impact, to one, and it’s now just over a month later and we’ve treated more than 35 children since. So we’re slowly climbing that little impact ladder. We haven't stopped having ideas, we haven't stopped innovating, we’re building teams around us to implement, and we’re now starting to measure that impact.
ANDI HORVATH
Roger, next time we stop and take in a big breath of air, what would you like us to think about?
ROGER RASSOOL
Well, think how lucky we are, that we can breathe. Think how little we know about ourselves. What we learnt as physicists - Valda McRae [formerly School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne], who is my dear friend in chemistry, passed away a few years ago, was always disappointed in me, in my performance in chemistry. Our entire group have had unspectacular performances in chemistry [laughs] as undergraduates, but we’ve had to go back and learn so much chemistry late in life, and the foundations were there, do you get me?
I probably wasn’t the best student at the time, I remember going and doing French rather than having to repeat chemistry, because I did fail chemistry [laughs]. So when we look around, think how lucky we are, do something about sharing the wealth and the knowledge. Share your knowledge, share your time, share your thoughts, and consider the word yes. So when somebody asks you to help just say yes. If they can reward you they will. If they don't reward you haven't lost very much, all you did is said yes and helped.
ANDI HORVATH
Roger Rassool, Associate Professor of Physics. Thank you.
ROGER RASSOOL
Thank you.
CHRIS HATZIS
Thanks to Associate Professor Roger Rassool from the School of Physics, University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath. For more info on the FreO2 Foundation, go to freO2.org… that’s F, R, E, the letter O, the number 2 dot org.
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on August 28, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
Pneumonia is the biggest killer of children worldwide. But when it comes to fighting the disease, particularly in remote communities, the key problem is access to medicine and technology
Oxygen, with antibiotics, is crucial to pneumonia treatment, but not every healthcare facility has oxygen available. In fact, some don’t even have electricity.
In 2011, a team of physics researchers - including Associate Professor Roger Rassool from the University of Melbourne - collaborated with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines to develop the first electricity-free oxygen concentrating system, known as FREO₂.
FREO₂ draws water from local river streams and uses it to produce oxygen, without electricity. And now, it’s saving lives.
Episode recorded: August 28, 2018
Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath
Producers: Dr Andi Horvath, Chris Hatzis and Silvi Vann-Wall
Audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis
Banner: Peter Casamento
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