Indonesian student wins Young Inventors Award

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE, Australia (JP): Many Indonesians believe that, if a certain fortune has been "assigned" to you, no matter what happens, it will eventually be yours. What happened to an Indonesian Ph.D student, Mulyoto Pangestu, in December 2000, seems to reinforce this notion.

Mulyoto won the gold for the Young Inventors Awards, a combined endeavor of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) magazine and Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific, for his invention described as "a simple, low-cost technique for the long-term preservation of biological materials at room temperature".

When The Jakarta Post visited his home and later his work place, the award winner was still unbelieving that it had happened. In fact he nearly missed the closing date, which was on Oct. 14, 2000.

FEER had sent the information about the awards to all universities in the region. Mulyoto does not know when the envelope reached the main administration office of Monash University, but by the time it had completed the "tour" of the faculty and department administrations, he and his supervisor Jillian Shaw only saw an announcement about the awards on the notice board on Oct. 12. Shaw was not very interested at first. There was not even an official application form.

Fortunately for them, on Oct. 14 -- the closing date -- after a short discussion, they decided to give it a go. Shaw then typed up a synopsis of Mulyoto's research and his invention, then and there, and showed it to him.

"I read it quickly and agreed with the content. So we sent it away by e-mail. We were banking on the fact that there was a time difference of three hours between Melbourne and Hong Kong. It was not quite the end of the day yet in the FEER office."

To their delight, at the end of November, Shaw received a letter from FEER, notifying them that Mulyoto's entry had placed him on the list along with 20 other finalists.

According to FEER, they received 298 submissions from Japan, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, and New Zealand. "It was an impressive lot, and one from which it was not easy to pick a list of finalists," wrote Philip Revzin, editor and publisher of FEER in the magazine's Dec. 14 issue.

Receiving the letter, Mulyoto and Shaw tried to remain sober, and not to celebrate too soon. They even joked that the prize might be a day trip in Melbourne. However emotion did crescendo, because the reality of having to submit a photograph and a biographical note kept stirring the atmosphere. There was no time to have a professional photo taken, because the procedure through the university bureaucracy would have taken several days. So they used the department's newly acquired digital camera. An "amateurish" number, taken by Shaw, was then sent to the Hong Kong office of FEER. Two days later, they received a letter via e-mail, telling them that Mulyoto had won the gold. They were overjoyed, prize or no prize.

So what was the prize?

A computer system and a trip to California to visit the Hewlett-Packard plant, and a US$7,500 grant to Monash University.

The Pekalongan-born 37-year-old Ph.D candidate owes his passion for animal husbandry to one of his lecturers whose personality and manner of teaching made the subject attractive and exciting. "And I always got good marks for that subject, too," Mulyoto laughed.

Mulyoto is not a stranger to Melbourne. In 1993 he received a scholarship from the Australian government to study for his Master's degree in reproductive science, which he completed at Monash University in 1995.

An Asian Development Bank scholarship brought him, his wife and son back to Melbourne in 1998. He chose sperm preservation as the topic for his doctoral thesis.

Mulyoto explained that in his science, he observed what happened in nature and then tried to simulate it. "The life of sperms or embryos can be suspended. Let's take for example, sea- monkey powder. This is actually embryos. When we put the powder in water, they will grow into sea-monkeys (a type of shrimp)."

He went on to describe his work: "In 1998 a sperm-preservation scientist from Hawaii practiced a freeze-drying method using a freeze-drying machine. My supervisor suggested I follow that up further with my own research. However, when I requested for one of those machines, the head of the department informed me that they could not afford the $30,000 price tag. So we had to look for cheaper alternatives. We tried several methods. Drying the sperm with air, we found, allowed it to remain intact but after we injected it into the egg cell, it was unable to fertilize it."

Mulyoto finally tried nitrogen in plastic straws. "Plastic straws have been used in animal husbandry to store sperms and embryos," said Mulyoto, "but in a freezing condition. The trick was to maintain the materials at room temperature."

Mulyoto coated the inside wall of the straw with a thin layer of sperms, then flushed the inside with compressed nitrogen. The straw was then manually sealed with a heat sealer. He discovered that the sperms disintegrated after some time because oxygen managed to penetrate the straw. He tried putting the sealed straw into a bigger straw then sealing it.

As the double-sealing still did not work satisfactorily, Mulyoto looked around and tried triple sealing it with a 15 centimeters wide aluminum foil pouch which was also sealed manually. "I knew that the longer the sperm remained untouched by oxygen, the longer it remained intact," he said. The triple- sealing method worked.

The advantages of Mulyoto's invention are numerous. It is no longer necessary to have a bulky nitrogen-filled cabinet which needs a specifically designed vehicle to transport it in field- work. The transport of the cabinet itself makes it a particularly expensive exercise. The straws only cost around US$0.1 each. For field work, researchers will only need to carry a nitrogen gas tank, plastic straws and a heat-sealing machine. One tank holds enough gas to dry and fill 1700 sperm-coated straws.

Mulyoto has used his method to fertilize the eggs of mice and successfully delivered normal baby mice from the sperms he dried and stored for six months.

However, if we look behind all these achievements, we will see the quiet determination of Lies Lestari, Mulyoto's wife, a university graduate who voluntarily put her own career on hold to accompany and keep house for her husband and their son Galih. Lies also works as a kitchen hand at Monash University, while Mulyoto himself works outside office hours, to earn some extra pocket money.

"So you see, when I am not messing around with mice in the laboratory, I play 'percussion music'," Mulyoto joked. "Percussion music" is student speak for washing pots and pans.