The Science Of Being Karl 'i'm Actually Remarkably Close To Average, My Iq Is Only 110 ... Any University Student Is About 120.'

Illawarra Mercury

Saturday October 30, 2004

SARAH HEINZMAN

Like coffee, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is a stimulant. A never ending stream of facts and figures pour from his mouth. But beneath the brainy facade, SARAH HEINZMAN found a loving father and a handy plane passenger.

CAFFEINE is a remarkably safe drug, probably the world's most popular legal drug, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki says as he prepares a hit for me with the coffee machine which sits on the shelf next to his computer.

"However, it has the unfortunate side effect that it both shrinks blood vessels and makes them stiff for a little while, which is not good," he continues. "Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, reverses this, so therefore every time I have a coffee, I have a piece of dark chocolate before it."

Right on cue, Dr Karl's assistant, Caroline Pegram, offers me a square of dark chocolate from a big glass jar sitting near the door of their cluttered office.

I accept it and stand self-consciously holding it between my index finger and thumb.

Dr Karl sweeps past me, my coffee in his hand (he's already had his morning coffee, he tells me) and asks: "Now where do you want to do this interview?"

I tell him to lead the way to wherever he thinks is best.

But before we even make it five steps out the door, Dr Karl is imparting more knowledge.

"Now what do you think happened here?" he asks me, pointing to a picture which is stuck on his chaotic noticeboard. The image shows a commercial plane with the back end dragging on the ground during take-off.

I fail the test miserably considering I think it is a picture of a plane landing and I can't remember the explanation he gives.

By the time we are sitting in comfy chairs in the corner of a common room in the University of Sydney's School of Physics (where he holds the position of Julius Sumner Miller Fellow), Dr Karl has moved on to Sir Hans Sloane, the man who is credited with introducing the recipe for milk chocolate to Europe.

"He sold the secret to the Cadbury brothers," Dr Karl explains, adding that Sloane was also responsible for setting up the British Museum. "He was a terrible collector of things."

But I didn't meet with Dr Karl to learn more about the world I live in - I came to learn more about him.

Who is the real Dr Karl? Who is the man behind the science?

IT would be hard to have not come across Dr Karl at some point in your life. You may have heard him on radio, either on his one-hour science talkback show on Triple J, or on his 15-minute segment on ABC 702 Sydney with Sally Loane.

Failing that, you may have seen him on television on his regular slot on Channel 7's Sunrise. Or maybe you have read his weekly column Mythconceptions in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine.

Or you may have come across one of the 23 books he has written. (He was also a writer and presenter for the first series of the ABC's science program, Quantum; is regularly invited to speak to school and university groups; travels the country every year as part of the Sleek Geeks science week tour with Triple J breakfast show host Adam Spencer; is an after-dinner speaker; and a corporate video writer and presenter).

And that is just the start of it.

Wollongong-raised Dr Karl has had 15 years of university education and has degrees in physics and mathematics, biomedical engineering, and medicine and surgery.

He was a medical doctor for four years with two of those years spent at The Children's Hospital at Westmead. He has also been a physicist, labourer, roadie, mechanic, film-maker, hospital scientific officer, biomedical engineer and television weatherman.

How he has managed to fit all of this into one lifetime is a mystery and one that, no matter how hard he tries, he just won't be able solve for me.

"I'm actually remarkably close to average," he maintains. "My IQ is only 110 ... any university student is about 120, but the point is, I work hard. My body might be old and decaying and flabby on the outside but inside my brain is as finely tuned as (the body of) Arnold Schwarzenegger. I work on the principle of: If you don't use it, you lose it."

Triple J breakfast host Adam Spencer attests to the work ethic of his Sleek Geeks partner, calling him "an absolute workaholic" and believes the secret to his multidisciplinary success is that he has focussed on his greatest strengths.

Spencer says that makes them a great partnership.

"Karl has a knowledge of science that indescribably overreaches mine but I've got a bit more of an idea of how to construct a joke or a narrative ... and make a show out of it," he says. "So he'll be there explaining to me exactly why this thing would decay in water and I'll be going, yeah, yeah, but the funny bit was when the guy burnt his penis - and you put that bit at the end!

"My job working with Dr Karl alternates between the steering wheel and the handbrake. Occasionally you just need to steer him in the right direction and occasionally you need to just pull it back a bit."

WHEN he was 19 and working as a physicist at Port Kembla's steel works, Karl Kruszelnicki never imagined he would one day become a media personality.

"Absolutely not. I imagined I would stay working at the central laboratory at the steel works on Five Islands Rd for ever and ever and ever," he says.

But within two years, he had landed himself a job in Papua New Guinea conducting research into hair and wool. By the late '70s, Karl was working for Fred Hollows and designed and built a machine to pick up electrical signals of the human retina. The invention was somewhat of a watershed for him.

"I could have gone two ways," he explains. "I could have done a PhD in the field of visual electrophysiology or I could have done medicine. I thought, 'Oh well, I think I'd like working with people more."'

He still says medicine was the most satisfying job he ever had, but he left because he thought he could do more good bringing science to the masses.

"The only medicine I do nowadays is emergency medicine," he says. "I also do emergency medicine in aeroplanes. My record year was '99 when I had five medical emergencies to deal with. Four of them lived and one died and since then it has sort of ticked away at one medical emergency per year." And then there's an irresistible opportunity to add some more facts.

"You normally have one medical emergency per 11,000 passenger flights," he adds.

What kind of emergency situations does he encounter?

"There's a whole variety," he says. "Heart attacks; PFO (pissed and fell over); trauma, like little kids nearly cutting their tongue off by having their tongue between their teeth when they bounce on something; chest pains; a little kid with a funny rash and difficulty in breathing on a plane back from Brisbane this year."

And then earlier this year there was a different kind of medical emergency in the Himalayas, which affected him so much it jolted him into proposing to his de facto, Mary.

"Yes, after three kids and 20 years, we're going to get married," he drops into the middle of an explanation about something entirely unrelated.

Hang on, let's back up. You're getting married? When?

They don't have a date yet but they have at least agreed on a circus wedding, he says.

Now I don't know whether he is leading me up the garden path ...

"Yes, we'll have a circus at the wedding," he assures me.

"And we've got the wedding ring which is also the engagement ring, which fits both of us. We're just trying to cut a few corners, you know, my turn, your turn."

Now I really don't know what to believe but if nothing else, he is certainly amusing.

But back to the Himalayas. What happened?

As the story goes, Karl was accompanying his son on a school trip to the Himalayas when one of the teachers became very ill with excruciating lower back pain. At the time they didn't know it, but she had two unrelated conditions at the same point on her spine - a prolapsed disc and an epidural abscess.

"The weird thing was, everyone who wasn't medically trained knew what was wrong and had an opinion and I was medically trained and the only thing I knew was that I didn't know what was wrong, but I knew it was serious," Karl recalls.

It took more than three days to get the teacher to a hospital where, at 11pm, a doctor told Karl they would have to operate immediately or risk her total and permanent paralysis from the waist down. The operation was successful but it left Karl thinking about Mary, back in Australia. He gave her a call.

"I was thinking, there's no point in waiting, we might as well get married and Mary said something along the lines of, 'Why didn't you marry me when when I was 18 and pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, you swine!"' he grins.

IT was by sheer chance a young Karl and his Polish parents, Ludwig and Rina, came to Australia.

It was the end of World War II and like thousands of others, the young family was keen to leave a war-ravaged Europe and start a new life.

Their intention had been to start afresh in America, but when Karl got a high fever just before they set sail, his parents panicked.

"It was no big deal but my parents were so worried because I was their only child," he says. "We got off the ship and then the ship sailed away without us and there we were sitting on the dock and the next ship that turned up was going to Australia, so we came to Australia."

Initially, the family lived at Bonegilla, a migrant reception centre in Albury, on the border of Victoria and NSW.

Then they spent a year living in Sydney before coming to Wollongong, where his parents could afford to buy their own home.

Karl went to St Therese's Catholic Primary School in West Wollongong and then Edmund Rice College. He says it was hard being the "wog kid" in schools full of "non-wogs" and he often felt ostracised.

But unlike other children of migrants, Karl was lucky his parents picked up the English language very quickly.

"My father could speak 12 languages and my mother could speak six," he says. "The weird thing is my father, the first time he learned English, could speak it so perfectly he didn't have any accent and for a while he was working in London as the interpreter for the Polish Embassy. But he lost it during the Second World War and when he picked English up the second time, he had an accent so that first part of his brain got really wiped out or rewired or damaged or something."

Karl says he grew up not really knowing what his parents, who were both concentration camp survivors, had gone through during the war.

"It was just too terrible to talk about," he says.

It was only when his mother had a stroke, much later in life, that he really learned what had happened.

"They managed to survive because my father managed to fake his death with the bribe of a tin of sardines, and my mother, because they ran out of Zyklon B gas at the concentration camp," he says matter-of-factly.

IT is obvious Karl is entirely devoted to his family.

The 2003 Father of the Year has proudly posted pictures of his three children, (Little) Karl, now 16, Alice, 14, and Lola, six, on his ABC website. The pictures (from 1998) document Lola's first moments of life, accompanied with, of course, scientific explanations such as why her feet are blue and why her skin is yellow.

Six years down the track, Dr Karl still has plenty of time for his children and despite a hectic schedule, doesn't think it is fair to disappear into his shed for 'time out'.

"That's really selfish," he says. "You've got the little kids and the big kids. The little kids want somebody to play with and big kids need help with homework. So it is selfish to say, 'I'm just going off now'."

He is also not putting any pressure on them to follow him into science.

"I just hope they're happy," he says. "My son's not going to go into science and neither is Alice, I really doubt, but just as long as they have fun and they're happy. God knows it's hard enough to be happy. If they're happy, that's enough for me."

He says juggling work and family does become difficult when the two merge.

He says people stop him in the street all the time, sometimes just to say hello, but usually to ask him a question that's been bugging them.

He says it can be intrusive, especially when he's with his family, but accepts it is all part of the package.

"It's part of the gig. I'd rather they didn't if I'm going out with my family but it's part of the price of being a public figure," he says.

"It would be unfair to benefit from it and then not give them the time."

Does he think the questions will ever dry up?

"NO! Well, people believe all sorts of crap like we never got to the moon. They believe the kitchen sink is cleaner than the toilet bowl. It's the other way around. The toilet bowl is made of vitreous china which is basically mud or clay and put in an oven and got really hot and got incredibly smooth so there's nowhere for bacteria to live whereas a stainless steel kitchen sink has been rolled on some rollers and there's all these little bumps and valleys where all the bacteria hides and it's really filthy. So you're better off preparing your food on the toilet bowl."

I'm sorry Dr Karl, you're not convincing me.

"No, I've still got problems with it ..." he replies.

Great Mythconceptions: Cellulite, Camel Humps and Chocolate Zits by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is published by HarperCollins and is on sale for $24.95.

© 2004 Illawarra Mercury

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