Back home in Australia after his wartime adventures, Mark Oliphant turned his mind to creating a scientific elite in a country more famous for its fine wool and champion cricketers.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant

It has to be said that Mark Oliphant and his like-minded colleagues seemed to be content to work on the bomb, knowing that it would be capable of mass destruction.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant

For Mark Oliphant, the most exciting time of his early career was when he won a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, in whose Cavendish laboratory British scientists first split the atom.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant