Skilled technician was a master of his craft
Noel Call, a member of the technical staff of the University for 35 years, died on the Queen's Birthday weekend in June. For the past six years he had been a senior technical officer in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Faculties. He was 57. Noel was a remarkable man. With no formal training beyond the leaving certificate, he made himself into one of the best histologists and histochemists that any of us in the old Zoology Department had ever encountered. His work was characterised by an infinite capacity for taking pains, meticulous recording, a willingness to help all those who came to him for assistance, and an ability to solve practical problems brought to him by frustrated academics and graduate students. His approach was one of quiet concentration while he listened to the person with the latest difficulty. At the end he would ask a few pertinent questions and then, with an "I'll see what I can do" withdraw to his laboratory to return, a day or two later, with an exquisite preparation and all difficulties resolved. A voracious reader, Noel was a man of great scholarship. He published three papers in the scientific literature, was acknowledged in very many others and spoke at conferences in the late 1970s. Although he was encouraged to enrol for a postgraduate degree he decided against this, preferring the mental stimulation of the varied tasks that were set before him. In his later years, he branched out beyond the microscope and established techniques in organic analysis, spectrophotometry and gas chromatography. He was a considerable scientist who could have gone much further had circumstances and his inclination permitted. Noel was born in Lismore on February 25 1941, and grew up on the north coast of New South Wales. On leaving school he spent three years at the Commonwealth Health Laboratories at Lismore where he began to acquire the skill and artistry that make a good histologist. He came to the University in 1963, when he was appointed histologist in the Department of Zoology, and within very few years he became an acknowledged master of his craft. He was an excellent technician and had an enormous fund of knowledge of the science of histology and histochemistry which he used freely for the benefit of staff, and especially graduate students, of the University. Even while participating fully in the social life of the Zoology Department, Noel was a very private man. He was not assertive but, when he got going, he could argue with the best, from the head of department down. He had an idiosyncratic, quirky sense of humour which carried him through the personal and physical difficulties which plagued the later years of his life. In recent years he had several stays in hospital for medical problems but he kept returning to work when many others would have given up. He is sadly missed by his many friends in the Faculties. C. Bryant and P.A. Janssens Faculty of Science