Dr Scott Martyn became an engineer to make the world a better place.  He is passionate about Sustainable Health and helping to make this world a healthier place for everyone.

Sustainable Health… solving the problems of tomorrow, today.

But it’s not just about living well and eating right.  The built environment is an integral component in ensuring sustainable health.  And engineers themselves are responsible in ensuring they build the tomorrow we need, today. 

Extra discussions during the episode

This is a “close” copy of the words that were spoken during the Podcast, Season 4 Episode 14

It is not 100% accurate.
The guest was Dr Scott Martyn

INTRO 

Scott: [00:00:00] I’m an engineer to make the world a better place. 

[00:00:04] Mel or Dom: [00:00:04] How did you know engineers did that? So what got you into engineering? 

[00:00:08] Scott: [00:00:08] Yeah. So I ended up in engineering when I didn’t get into medicine at first after high school, but it was probably in retrospect, the best thing that ever happened to me was not getting into medicine at first because it set off an amazing adventure for me. 

[00:00:23] So I studied was a combination of electrical and electronic engineering. And I also did biomedical sciences. And so I was interested in how the human body worked. I was interested in how to make people better. I was interested in how to bring good health care into place. 

[00:00:43]Mel or Dom: [00:00:43] How did you know about engineering though? Cause I, it does sound like you were leaning towards medical and you said that you tried for medical, but how did you know about engineering as an option? 

[00:00:55] Scott: [00:00:55] Look, you hear about engineering as you go through school. Do you see that things are being built? You see things a bit designed. When I was at school, we thought of engineers as someone who builds roads, here in Western Australia, it was very much those who dug holes in the ground to get minerals out of the ground. 

[00:01:12] And that didn’t appeal to me at all.  

[00:01:14] So you asked how I knew about engineering.  

[00:01:17]my first job ever was working for a medical device manufacturer here in Perth.  

[00:01:21]Mel or Dom: [00:01:21] How old were you there? 

[00:01:22] Scott: [00:01:22] I was 15, 14, 15. I was at high school. When most people go and work in retail or fast food, I was sitting in a warehouse doing first of all, packaging. And then I ended up in their clean room putting together their medical devices. 

[00:01:38] And when I was doing the work with medical devices, there were engineers working for this company. 

[00:01:44] So the engineers would talk to me about what they were designing and all the rest. 

[00:01:49] Mel or Dom: [00:01:49] after you go through your degree, what was the first engineering project that you worked on? 

[00:01:53] Scott: [00:01:53] So once I finished at the university of Western Australia I went off to England and I was doing research as a graduate research student in the department of engineering science at Oxford. 

[00:02:07] Mel or Dom: [00:02:07] what were you working on? 

[00:02:08] Scott: [00:02:08] I ended up working on this really awesome project, where we had a little microscopic spray painting device. we were charging a microscopic size and nozzle up to very high voltages. And out of this came a jet, which then broke up into a spray of charged droplets. So what we were wanting to do was create printed surfaces that had some sort of function to them that could be a biological function. 

[00:02:37] Mel or Dom: [00:02:37] Do you know, if the research is still going on now or is it something that they are continuing to develop? 

[00:02:41] Scott: [00:02:41] the problem we had with what we were developing was that things need to have a commercial application and we could have had a commercial application, but they would have been very high end.  And the only way that you can commercialize a low throughput device is if you have something which is on very high value. 

[00:03:01] So maybe had we gone into spinal cord regeneration or something like that. We might’ve been able to commercialize this technology, but with what we are looking at, because it was so highly engineered, it was something which wouldn’t have had a commercial application because it would have cost too much to get it into any sort of marketplace. 

[00:03:23] And so this is a really good lesson in commercialization in the first place that you need to have something which the world can actually afford. You need something which is appropriate for the world and something that we can all use to make a difference. 

[00:03:35]Mel or Dom: [00:03:35] It’s definitely something  good to have learned early on. 

[00:03:38] So, where are you working now with what’s your current role? 

[00:03:40] Scott: [00:03:40] So at the moment, I’m not in engineering for my  paid employment. So my paid employment at the moment is in medicine.  

[00:03:47]Mel or Dom: [00:03:47] How did you officially leap from engineering and being on the medical device side of things to where you are now as a medical practitioner? 

[00:03:58]Scott: [00:03:58] I came back from England.  I ended up working for a year with Phillips research laboratories and I worked on point of care medical devices with them. And. Phillips was transforming at that stage. And it was getting out of the consumer electronics market slowly. 

[00:04:15] And it was moving into these days that it’s moved almost entirely into health and wellbeing and so they we’re making that transition at that stage. And so some of my roles there was to try and look at how we could put microfluidics  between glass sandwiches, where we were printing onto the glass, because they had really good printing technology for printing onto glass and making electronics on glass, and then working out how we could come up with bio-sensors on these glass devices. 

[00:04:46] And so that was absolutely fascinating work.  

[00:04:50] so when I was working for Phillips, there were a few things that, that I started thinking about at that stage as well. One of them was that as an engineer, you work on other people’s problems. Other people tend to identify the problems. And then as an engineer, you get to solve their problems. As a medical practitioner, you’re in a much better position from a healthcare perspective, to understand the workflow, to understand where bottlenecks or problems or diseases are occurring to actually understand the context of where you need to solve these problems. 

[00:05:31] So I very much came to a realization that as an engineer on my own, I wasn’t going to be able to identify these problems myself. I needed to either bring in a medical practitioner to work with me, or I needed to understand medicine myself to identify some of these issues. 

[00:05:53] One of the other things that was happening at that stage within Phillips was that they were looking very much at the emerging economies around the world. And they were very interested in appropriate technologies and technologies that were appropriate for maybe someone who didn’t have the full access to all the services that we would expect, or that. 

[00:06:17] They may not have access to electricity, or they may not have access to a running water supply, or they may not have access to a cooker. And so in many parts of the world, people still cook on wood stoves and it causes great problems in terms of their health. And so if you’re trying to solve some of these problems of health and wellness, you have to understand some of the context of where diseases come from. 

[00:06:45] From a lifestyle perspective as well, and from a technology perspective and what people have available. And so as an engineer, you’re sometimes somewhat limited in understanding some of that context because you’re not exposed to the disease itself, you’re only reading about what people are reporting about that disease. 

[00:07:04]Mel or Dom: [00:07:04] that’s actually a really profound point and I think pretty good reason to get into the medical side of things. So you went and got your medical degree?  

[00:07:14]Scott: [00:07:14] once I got back to Australia, eventually I did get my medical degree,  

[00:07:18]Mel or Dom: [00:07:18] did you find that the things that you learned in engineering in particular, in regards to the methodical kind of nature of engineering made it easier to apply to once you were doing, you got into medicine,  did your engineering sort of help or did it hinder or did they work well together? 

[00:07:35] Scott: [00:07:35] engineering is a great advantage for someone who is studying medicine. Because as an engineer, you understand fluid flow, you understand forces, you understand mechanics, you understand scientific method. And for me as well, I’d done the biochemistry. I’d done the pharmacology, I’d done the protein science. 

[00:07:58] So I understood things at a molecular level. I’d done a nanotechnology. I understood how immunology was working because it was working at the nanoscale. I’d been using the technologies in laboratory set up for cell culture for a whole range of other things over my time that I’ve done my undergraduate studies, my undergraduate research, my postgraduate research. 

[00:08:19] I was understanding what medical devices were trying to achieve. And so as an engineer with a biomedical background, it really helped me understand how the body might be working because the body at the end of the day is a machine. It’s a machine that it’s an organic machine. But it is a machine nonetheless, and it was a really big advantage in understanding how that was all working as a overall system. 

HOT TOPIC  

[00:08:49] one of the things I’ve found myself working on now outside of my clinical work directly is an area that we call sustainable health. 

[00:09:01] And in particular I’ve had a journey over the last 10 to 12 years where I’ve been working with Aboriginal people here in Australia , looking at how we bring about sustainable health, first of all, for Aboriginal people, but also how we work with Aboriginal people to help the whole world live more sustainably in general. 

[00:09:23]so sustainable health, solving the problems of tomorrow today. And I think this is particularly relevant at the moment because we’re currently living in a time of pandemic where there’s this pandemic effecting the whole world. And we’re having to realize that our actions have consequences. 

[00:09:46] So if we go out and interact with somebody, we might end up with a disease. If we ride that train, there might be people on that train that might be carrying disease. So we might have to do certain things. So at the moment, the whole world is starting to learn to think of tomorrow before we act today. Now, one of the other things about sustainability is that we have to learn to work together. 

[00:10:14] We’re not going to solve this problem on our own. So to combat the current crisis that we’re in at the moment, we just need to work together , where we identify the problems and through co-design everybody brings their ideas together, and we come up with appropriate and a very useful solution to where we’re going. 

[00:10:36]Mel or Dom: [00:10:36] So you’ve mentioned that you’re working with Aboriginal people on this sustainable health. Why specifically Aboriginal what are you hoping to gain by working directly with the Aboriginal people towards sustainable health? 

[00:10:53] Scott: [00:10:53] When I was living in England and particularly when I was working for Phillips, I was looking at Australia from the outside and I was looking back into Australia and I started thinking that our remote areas here in Australia were really good breeding grounds for ideas, for innovation. They were challenging environments. 

[00:11:15] I started learning a little bit more about the disadvantage that our indigenous people had here in Australia. And I’d never really realized the disadvantage that Aboriginal people faced as a non-indigenous person being brought up in an affluent and privileged suburb of Perth. And it wasn’t until I was outside of Australia looking back in that I saw that we needed to do much better by our Aboriginal people. 

[00:11:49]Mel or Dom: [00:11:49] How have you merged your engineering skills and your medical skills with what you’re working with the Aboriginal community.  

[00:11:56]Scott: [00:11:56] When we start to look at indigenous way of knowing, there’s a very different perspective that we see. And when we start working together with Aboriginal people hand in hand, we can start to take a perspective from probably the oldest living culture that we still got on this planet. And there’s encoded within indigenous knowledge is millennia of knowledge. 

[00:12:29] And we can draw upon that and by walking alongside Aboriginal people hand in hand, and by working with Aboriginal people in co-design, we can start to look at some of the problems that is facing humanity as a whole. We can start to think. How are we going to solve problems of food?  How are we going to solve chronic disease problems, but we can even think more broadly. And we can think within the Australian context we can think, well, what’s the use of all of these minerals that is coming out of the ground. There has to be some better use than just shipping it off to another country. 

[00:13:11]We must be able to use our technology more wisely than what we’re doing at the moment. And if we see things from a different perspective, we not only solve the disadvantage that Aboriginal people face, but we solve the problems that we’re going to be facing in the near future, if we don’t start to live sustainably ourselves. 

[00:13:33]Mel or Dom: [00:13:33] I like the way you said you wanted to pick the problems. That’s one thing why you moved into medical and I loved how you’ve  connected with this community that is so ancient and has so much knowledge and you’re picking the problems to help solve.  

[00:13:49]I’m going to ask you a question that I probably should have asked at the beginning. 

[00:13:53] What is sustainable health? Cause I know what sustainable buildings are and sustainable living, but what do you mean by sustainable health? 

[00:14:01]Scott: [00:14:01] the concept of sustainable health is a very difficult one. we see a lot of chronic disease in medicine. We see a lot of diabetes. We see a lot of lifestyle induced diseases, but we also see a lot of diseases based upon not getting the built world right. We stack people up in ways where people shouldn’t be living. We have high density where people may not be wanting to live or may not be able to live in high density in an inappropriate way. We then ended up with pandemic like we’re seeing now we end up with problems of disease. So in the past, for example, we’ve seen things such as cholera emerge. 

[00:14:42] So there were cholera pandemics around Australia, around the world before we had good water supply. And so sustainable health is about preventing health problems. It’s about preventing disease. So it’s very much one about public health, but it’s about looking at it in a holistic fashion. So we’re not just trying to prevent a biological disease, but we’re living with a healthy spirit. 

[00:15:09] We’re living with a healthy mind. We’re living with a healthy heart and where all of the country around us is healthy as well and so forth or an individual to be healthy we need to live within a healthy framework. From a social perspective, we need a healthy family around us, we need a good social support. 

[00:15:28] We need to eat healthy food. We need to have a healthy water supply. We need to have a safe house over our head that protects us from the elements. We need to feel good about ourselves. We need to have a job which brings meaning. So it’s more than just the biomedical side of things. It’s also about the psychological side. 

[00:15:50] It’s also about the social side, but it’s also about the land and the country that we live on. And this is whereby engaging with Aboriginal people. We understand this holistic model because Aboriginal people have a holistic view of the world.  

[00:16:07]Mel or Dom: [00:16:07] I love that answer. And I’m very glad that I asked such a basic question because I don’t think I had that concept of that deeper concept of what sustainable health actually is. I hadn’t thought of it, all those layers that you were talking about. 

[00:16:22] I hadn’t really thought about it in that way, so yeah.  

[00:16:26] Can I ask do you feel it’s being embraced and that it’s gaining momentum? Cause I know even from the building side of things there’s movement towards biophilic buildings and bringing the outside in and bringing nature in. 

[00:16:39] And I think people are in particularly our generation, are far more aware of things like diabetes and, and health issues, so that  they’re on the path to, to realize that you can’t just spend your life destroying your body and then get to old age and expect it to just keep going for you. 

[00:16:57]is it really moving along? Do you find that the people are really just embracing it with a lot more Gusto than they have in the past? 

[00:17:04] Scott: [00:17:04] There’s certainly a movement where around the world, we’re starting to see people embrace these ideas of integrating plants and buildings and integrating concepts of sustainable living in with this. Some of this I feel is still lip service because I think some of it’s being done for marketing purposes and it’s not actually getting to the heart of what sustainable healthy is. 

[00:17:28] And there are still areas where there’s complete disregard by cowboys along the way where they’re just trying to make the most money in the fastest route possible. So when I got back to Perth from the UK, there was a mining boom here in Perth. And there was massive development along the coastal strip here in Perth of new housing developments. A lot for the fly in fly out workforce who were spending time down in Perth during their time off, there were little blocks with big houses. 

[00:18:00] We ended up with terracotta jungles, and people were all heading indoors to watch these television on these new plasma screens that were starting to emerge and I started to wonder, well, I limited on the one hand, there was the loss of these green spaces. There was this quick buck it’s being made for these land development. 

[00:18:20] People were spending all of their time, just inside on their own, not seeing the community that they’d been on. And when I’d been over in Oxford, I was living in a medieval town that was alive, where you’d go outside and you’d see this community and everybody was all around. And so to me, it was quite a reverse culture shock to come back to Australia and then to see everybody just retreating to their own little space inland to watch these plasma screens. And so that was actually quite distressing for me. And I thought there must be a better way to do things. There must be a better way to build community. 

[00:18:58] There must be a better way to bring people together. And I didn’t see it as a very healthy way of living where you just retreated inside to watch television at that stage, it was DVDs. It was pre Netflix back then. So it was go in what’s your screen and watch the DVDs. 

[00:19:15]Mel or Dom: [00:19:15] It’s sad that we have a culture like that. Cause a friend of mine who he moved to Ireland when he first graduated  as an engineer. And he was in a small town out of Dublin and every night, you’d have dinner and then you’d all get up and go to the pub. 

[00:19:29]Like everyone, the kids the whole lot, would go to the pub. Yeah. And it wasn’t to go to the pub to drink yourself crazy. You go and have like one or two drinks, but you catch up with everyone in the town. So it was almost as though it ensured that you had that community feel on a daily basis so that you were going on in people’s lives and you went for a walk. 

[00:19:48] So you went for a walk and you had to drink. Caught up and then you walked home and the kids all played and, you know, off you went. And so there’s that really strong community feel that that goes with it, which is surely going to be better for you physically and mentally as well in regards to, you know, the longevity of  

[00:20:06] Scott: [00:20:06] life. 

[00:20:06] And now Dom, you’re starting to understand what we mean by sustainable health. And this is where the role of an engineer comes in because an engineer is the one who is responsible for the built environment. And look, I understand that in a lot of this it’s developers, there weren’t engineers involved for many of these things. It was developers trying to make a quick buck. And it was all about land planning. And I know that that’s broader than engineering itself, but I think as engineers, we can reflect on this and we can think that when we’re doing a project, it’s not just about the function that we’ve been given from a design brief, there’s actually society around that. 

[00:20:43] And we need to understand what the impact of what we’re designing is within the context of what we’re designing. An example of this is that along the coast of Western Australia to the South of Perth, between Perth and Bunbury. And even down towards Busselton, we had this large swathe of what was called Tuart forest. 

[00:21:04] A lot of that’s been knocked down for farmland or for development or for housing or whatever, but there are still remnants of this beautiful Tuart forest left. And there’s a small remnant in a place near Bunbury that I walked through some years ago and right in the middle of this remnant of Tuart forest. 

[00:21:23] With some sort of installation for maybe it was a pump house. Maybe it was for some sort of electrical facility or something. I can’t really remember what it was, but it was built in a purely functional way. There was a fence around it made out of your chicken wire fence. It was something which had all of this metal there, but it didn’t look beautiful at all. It didn’t fit in this piece of Parkland. It looked like someone had just dropped this thing right into this space and it didn’t bring any beauty to it. And in the past, when we built structures, when we built equipment, we go back to, we look at Renaissance time. We look at Victorian time. We look all the way back to Roman time and engineers built things with beauty, as well as function. And so what is it that we’re doing now? Why is it that we’re not thinking about the other aspects of something when we’re building it? Why aren’t we integrating aesthetics into what we’re doing? 

[00:22:27] Why is it purely just a functional design? 

[00:22:29]Mel or Dom: [00:22:29] so how do we get engineers to engage in that sustainable health?  

[00:22:33] Scott: [00:22:33] It’s difficult because a lot of this probably comes from outside of engineering in that a lot of this is probably coming from the funders of a project in the first place, and they’re probably not putting in the funding for these aspects. And so a really good example of that at the moment is that there’s just been a freeway widening here in Perth, along the river. And so the Kwinana Freeway here between the mounts Henry bridge and the Narrows bridge has had some widening. There used to be some beautiful green space between the road and then whatever was next. But now we just see these big concrete blocks that have been put up for sound barriers. 

[00:23:14]And they haven’t been softened into the environment. We’ve just placed it there. And what was once a really beautiful drive along this piece of river, and certainly, I don’t think the freeway was appropriate on that space in the first place, but this has made it even less appropriate from my perspective, because now you’ve just got this really claustrophobic type of feel where you’re between these concrete barriers. 

[00:23:39] And heaven forbid what a hot day is going to be like on a 40 degree day, you’re going to be having this really, really hot space that you’re driving along. Whereas if we had trees to provide shade, to provide cooling, if we designed for all of this in part of our brief, we would be solving a lot of the problems of tomorrow, today. 

[00:23:59] So we would be thinking about when we design this freeway, rather than just designing it as this functional route to get cars from point A to point B. We could be putting trees in along this route, which are going to grow up big. They’re going to take the carbon in. They’re going to provide shade. They’re going to provide cooling. 

[00:24:17] They’re going to provide beauty. They’re going to make us feel happy that we’re commuting along this beautiful drive. And so if we start to look at some of these other aspects and if the funding people actually build this into their design brief as well, they we’ll start to see that change. So I think as engineers, we actually have to say to the funders. Look, we could do what you’re asking for, but within the context of society, that’s  unhealthy, and it’s probably not the best of ideas. And if that’s what you’re asking me to build, I’m sorry, I can’t actually build that. And that’s where we need to take on a stronger stance as engineers to say that look, we actually have to build for a better world, and you’re not asking me to do that. 

[00:25:03]Mel or Dom: [00:25:03] Yeah, I agree. And it’s come through with a lot of discussions that we’ve had with engineers, where I think as engineers, we need to stand up a little bit more and do exactly what you just said to say. No, that’s That’s that’s great. And it’s functional. It’s going to get you from there to there, but we really need to think about more than just  the road. We need to think about the impact of the other aspects of, of what we’re going to do. I’m feeling very positive about this. so I’m going to say I’m feeling very positive about the future, but what are your thoughts on the future of engineering? Do you think we’re going to get there? 

[00:25:34]Scott: [00:25:34] I think we will get there. I think we’ve always been getting there. I think history has shown that people are ingenious. So it is a natural human way of being to be engineers because we are ingenious and we’re always solving problems. We’re always trying to make the world a better place. And this is what to me is so exciting about actually being an engineer as well as being a medical practitioner , is that we’ve work on making the world a much better place for everybody to live in. 

[00:26:07] And that gives me hope. That is a guiding light for the future. And if we can think of tomorrow’s problems and start working on them today and solve them today before they become a problem tomorrow, then there’s a lot of hope for humanity. And there’s a lot of hope for the future. 

[00:26:24]Mel or Dom: [00:26:24] So, what would you say to people just starting out in engineering? 

[00:26:28]Scott: [00:26:28] I would say, imagine the future, imagine what you want the future to be not just for yourself, but for the whole world and work hard at bringing something that makes the world a better place for you, your family, for your community, and for everybody else who lives on this planet. 

[00:26:47] Because once you do that, you will be solving all of the problems of the world. 

[00:26:52]Mel or Dom: [00:26:52] I love that. I freaking love that. Just like that’s whole imagine the future and then move towards it. And I actually really quite liked that. It’s very uplifting. And, so just to finish up  what’s a piece of engineering that has impressed you. 

[00:27:05]Scott: [00:27:05] I think within the context of what we’ve been speaking about today, there’s actually a number of things which are very impressive. We look at the Roman aqueducts and just the precision with which they were built and the health benefits that came out of these and to just think the most minuscule gradients that they designed these aqueducts with and the beauty with which they produce them with these stone arches around the place that is absolutely phenomenal. 

[00:27:31] But then you look at. Once you get the clean water somewhere, it becomes dirty. And then you end up with sewerage. And so the sewer system of London with probably something which is never really thought about as a piece of engineering, but was a great piece of engineering, which relieved this massive cholera pandemic that was facing London at the time. 

[00:27:53] And the health ramifications of putting the sewerage system into London in the 18 hundreds was absolutely phenomenal. And that’s lasted until now.  

[00:28:04] We’ve seen other projects which has brought about amazing health benefits, and we look at here in Western Australia. For example, we had a cholera pandemic of our own, both in Perth, as well as out in the Goldfields. It’s just over 120 years ago and a pipeline was built to get water from here in Perth, all the way out to Kalgoorlie. 

[00:28:26] And then that solved the cholera pandemic that they had out in our gold fields. And so shifting water from one place to another has been done for millennia. And it’s a great piece of engineering now and in the past. 

[00:28:40]Mel or Dom: [00:28:40] It’s amazing that something so simple as water can be so critical in so many ways. It’s, it’s just amazing. And so finally, just to wrap up, do you have an engineer that you admire? 

[00:28:52] Scott: [00:28:52] I’d like to talk about Isambard Kingdom Brunel today. He was someone who I learned about a fair bit when I was studying in the United Kingdom. And I had the absolute delight of being able to ride on some of the railways that he had originally built, taking people out on the great Western, out into the West country, in the UK. 

[00:29:16] And when he was building his railways, he considered the landscape. He considered the gradients. he had to try to minimize the curvature and minimize the gradients to try and get trains from London, out to the West country as fast as possible. But that then inspired him to do more. He went on and he started designing these amazing ships that took people out to North America. And he was looking at drive shafts and steam engines and all sorts of amazing pieces of engineering to get people across from the UK elsewhere. But one  are the things that he was less known for was the building of a flat panel hospital, a hospital in the Dardanelles during the time of the Crimean war. And so the British soldiers who were fighting out in the Crimean we’re facing malaria, they were facing cholera, they were facing dysentery. And the more well known person who is contributed to our healthcare, who has come out of the Crimean war was Florence Nightingale. And so she started writing about all of these problems that she was seeing within the military hospitals and Brunel was commissioned to design a civilian run hospital for the military that was put into the Dardanelles. And some of those concepts that we see in that flat panel or in that prefabricated hospital that he put together are the same principles that we’re seeing popping up today in dealing with the current pandemic that  we’ve got. 

[00:30:56] And so there’s a lot that we can learn from in the past in trying to solve the problems of today, as well as the future. 

[00:31:04]Thank you for that.   

[00:31:05] Mel or Dom: [00:31:05] That’s a perfect way to finish off as well. I think that was wonderful. Thank you so much. 

[00:31:11] Scott: [00:31:11] You’re welcome.  

Outro  

And thank you for listening to Engineering Heroes as we present the new dawn of engineering challenges for Engineers Australia. Your hosts have been Melanie and Dominic De Gioia. You can view this episode’s show notes or learn more about our podcast by visiting our website, www.engineeringheroes.com.au 

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