The Modern Laboratory · People

A career in Adelaide. Colin Douglas Matthews began his career in Adelaide in the early 1970s. He went on to lead the Reproductive Medicine Unit of the University of Adelaide's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, retiring in 1998.

Donor insemination first. His early papers, from 1978 to 1984, describe a donor insemination programme using frozen semen. They looked at the best timing of insemination, the screening of donors, and the results of a multicentre Australian study. In 1984 he was among the authors, with John Kerin and others, of a report on the hospital's IVF and embryo transfer programme.

A unit at the microscope. Through the 1990s his unit worked at the frontier of micromanipulation. It published the results of its first 100 cycles of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in 1994. The same year, in The Lancet, the team reported determining the sex of embryos from a single cell, a step towards preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and later work tested single-cell methods for cystic fibrosis. Matthews was the senior author of the 1997 Human Reproduction study, led by Dianna Payne, that filmed 50 eggs after ICSI and watched the pronuclei form and meet.

Recognition. In the 2013 Australia Day Honours he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, for distinguished service to reproductive medicine, particularly through the establishment of donor insemination and IVF programmes, research and academic work. In 2014, accepting a South Australian technology award shared with his son Jonathan, he was praised in the state parliament for helping to set up the legal framework for reproductive technology in South Australia. He was also a founding member of Repromed, a university-owned IVF clinic in Adelaide.

The IVF Museum · The Modern Laboratory · People
Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.