A giant of Australian biotech who developed therapies for the world

June 18, 2026 — 5:25pm

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HUGH DAVID NIALL AO, MD, DMedSci (honoris causa) FRACPAugust 15, 1937 to April 11, 2026

I was six years old and very pleased to have a baby brother when Hugh was born on August 15, 1937, the fourth child and second son of Connie Niall (nee Gorman) and Dr Frank Niall, cardiologist.

I remember Hugh as always determined to do what the older siblings were doing, never to be left behind. And to test things for himself – as when he burnt his hand quite badly after being told not to touch the hot stove in the playroom.

My clearest memory of Hugh as a personality comes from an evening when we older children were sitting in the study reading or doing homework while our father did his phone calls reporting to GPs and checking his public patients with interns at St Vincent’s Hospital.

Hugh was then just about walking and learning to talk – under two or so – and he was bored by being left on the floor with some age-appropriate toys. He staggered to the bookcase, pulled out one of the medical books and dropped it heavily on his father’s knee – saying with the intensity of one learning a new word: “Talk it!″⁣

Hugh learnt to read early, but he liked to be read to, or even better to have his father’s nightly invention of a comic saga involving our neighbours, the Maher family, six kittens and a domesticated giraffe. This was Wild Life in Kew.

When Hugh was choosing his career path in 1954, all the signposts seemed to point to medicine. Frank Niall had died in 1952, aged only 53, at the peak of his career. Hugh, who felt his loss profoundly, knew enough about his father’s work to understand its pleasures and rewards. Frank Niall was a gifted........

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