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Emeritus Consultants Biographies
John Holt was born in 1925 in Bristol England, the son of Herbert Holt, a schoolmaster, and Alice nee Elliott. He graduated MB ChB from the University of Bristol in 1947. In 1953 John married Margaret nee Ellison and they have three sons; all did medicine at UWA and the two eldest are orthopaedic surgeons. John was appointed Consultant Radiotherapist at the Royal Perth Hospital in 1961. He was also Medical Director of The Institute of Radiotherapy and Oncology of WA. He retired in January 1984. John served in the Army from 1948 to 1951 and was in charge of the Families Hospital at Trieste. He held the rank of Major. He has had more than thirty papers published, including a report on the first bone marrow transplantation following whole body irradiation to take place in the Southern Hemisphere. John Holt was the first person to treat Hodgkins disease using extended (mantle) fields and this technique which he first used in 1962 was taken up by Stanford University in 1968 without acknowledgement. In 1973 he proposed the theory that cancer cells are electrically different to normal cells and demonstrated that ultra high frequency currents at 434 MHz interact with cancer cells by non thermal resonance which creates a big increase in the cancer's sensitivity to irradiation. John also proposed that cancer was a disease of defective glucose metabolism and a paper on this appeared in Medical Hypotheses in 1983. Other interests include small boat building and sailing. John is also a keen scuba diver. |
