In the first of our four-part series, Science Hub talks to the Professor about the strengths of Australian science, what’s missing from our scientific infrastructure, and the future for young PhD students.

In coming months, we continue our conversation about Australia’s future, and see a different side of the Nobel Prize winner as we talk mysticism, literature and complexity with Peter Doherty, experimentalist and writer.

Science Hub: Thank you for your time today, Professor Doherty.  Let’s start with a question about Australia’s scientific strengths.  What do you think they are?

Professor Doherty: We have established strengths in areas of medical research, for instance, and in astronomy and climate science we’ve got good people.  There are various elements that are pretty strong and they’re focused.

Science Hub: And our weakness?

Professor Doherty: We can’t do everything.  Incomplete funding.  The funding agencies, the ARC and the NHMRC particularly, try to do the right thing: they are properly peer-reviewed, they try to allocate the right resources to the right people.  But the last time I looked, especially on the ARC side, [the programs] were under-funded.  There isn’t strong enough support, say, for investigator – initiated project grants.

Science Hub: What kind of major scientific infrastructure do you think Australian science needs to be competitive into the future?  We can talk physically, intellectually or strategically.

Professor Doherty: Basic infrastructure in biomedicine, and so forth, is a question.  A lot of  molecular science at the high-end of technology is going into these massive deep sequencing operations.  Just how much we can hope to compete in that against say, the Sanger Centre or the Broad Institute at Harvard, is a good question.

The professional [science administrators] need to look closely and really ask where we put our resources to get our best result.  [That said,] it’s important to have infrastructure funds there so people can compete for them.

We let a lot of our infrastructure run down, in terms of buildings and so forth.  They’re going to finally replace the CSIRO research ship, which has been in pretty bad shape for a long while I think.  And you need those sorts of things, you need research vessels.

As far as management of science goes …  it really goes with talented individuals and where they want to drive it.  Governments can decide they want a lot of research in a particular area.  They can put money up for that if they want to, and some people will come…  In science, we go where the money is.  It’s a bit like robbing banks.

Science Hub: In your experience from having worked in the UK and USA, are there better systems of government-funded science programs from which we could learn?

Professor Doherty: We have our own type of system that is pretty much equivalent to the US model.  I’m not as familiar with the current UK system.  [The UK] differs a lot in the government funding because their medical research gets so much money from the Wellcome foundation.  They’re in much better shape than we are in many respects because they have their big independent body when it comes to medical funding.  We don’t have any substantial, independent body that funds, say, medical research.

I think if you look at the ARC and NHMRC, they’re basically funded much along the mechanism of the National Science Foundation and the NIH.  Of course, our ARC is pretty unusual, I don’t know if any other country combines science funding with the arts, which I think is probably a good thing.  I’m not negative about it.  It’s an unusual model.

Science Hub: You’ve made comment previously that because of our short government periods, there’s a short-sightedness in political decision-making about science, technology and basic research.

Professor Doherty: They haven’t been too bad really, to be fair to them.

The present government has been reasonably kind to science in what is a very difficult time; they would have done more if they’d had more resources.

The Howard government did put a bit more money into research – Howard could have really just starved it, and they did at least keep it going.  In fact, there was a bit of an increase for a while there.  It would have been nice to see more going in under Howard, but that’s a past era.  He wasn’t hostile to science the way he was hostile to higher education, for instance.

No Australian government has even been great about research.  In 1988, I was pretty depressed [about the funding situation], and left Australian science under the Hawke government.

I don’t have particular complaints about the way the Federal government handles it.

Science Hub: What if the world was a different place and scientists could actually drive the priorities for research?  How do you see us changing the system?

Professor Doherty: Well in some places, to some extent, they do.  If you look at the Cabinets of Taiwan or China, you’ll find that they are loaded with scientists, or engineers at least.  The same is true for Singapore.

You’ve got people who are familiar with science.  Many of them are engineers rather than research scientists, but they drive a lot of what Singapore is doing, and to some extent, Taiwan as well.

But I don’t think we can expect to see that in Australia.  Our cabinet, our government is pretty much scientifically illiterate, unless people really take the trouble to get up to speed.  Interestingly I think Kim Carr has taken the trouble, he’s put in a lot of effort.

Science Hub: One the one hand, it seems that too few PhD students are being trained to meet Australia’s future demands for skilled labour.  On the other hand, people such as yourself and others have said there are too many PhD students being trained and too few jobs for them at the end.  Would you care to comment?

Professor Doherty: I’m not sure I’d say there are too many PhD students being trained.  There are too many with the expectation that they’ll all do research science.  PhD training is very good training for all sorts of activities and more adventurous PhDs go into a variety of activities- physicists into investment banking and so forth.

It’s always been the case in science that of the PhDs trained, only about 10% of them will ever run significant research programs.  They may be part of someone else’s program, or have a role in government or the management of biotechnology, but most of them are not going to head major research groups.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem.  That’s always been the case.  It’s true here and it’s true in the US.  It’s always been true as far as I can see.

Although in a way, it’s kind of an odd thing.  If you train 100 MDs, you’ll probably get about 70 doctors – some people get out of it, women may take more time out for children, but you’ll probably get 60 or 70 doctors for every 100 you train.  If you train 100 PhDs, you don’t get 60 or 70 leading scientists.

I don’t know if there’s any other way of doing it.  The only way of finding out whether you’re good at science and whether you’ve got the capacity to run a research lab is to do it.

You can’t tell a priori.  It’s not necessarily the ones that get the highest grades in an Honours degree.  There are a whole lot of personality and character traits, as well as an ability at science which go into it.

Science Hub: What perspectives on science and the way it works were you given by winning the Nobel Prize?

Professor Doherty: It put me in touch with a broader overview of what was going on in science at the time.  I was speaking a lot in Australia, and also because I was made the Australian of the Year in 1997, I read up a lot on biotechnology and science-based industry.  I haven’t really kept that up actually and have backed off from that a lot.

I’ve been going back and focussing on what I do scientifically.  I’ve also written a couple of books on science.  I’m trying to write a third one at the moment, that I can get out there and communicate.  It’s another type of experiment really.

Next month, in part two of our conversation with Professor Doherty, we discuss sustainability and Australia’s future.

Related articles:

• Culture – Science and Society: Professor Peter Doherty: not by words alone
• ThinkTank – State of Australian Science: Innovation nation or a hole in the ground?
• Culture – Science and Society: The Two Cultures 50 years on – Professor Peter Doherty

Australia’s ocean territories are the third largest on Earth, surrounding the Australian mainland, islands and the Australian Antarctic Territories.

They are home to immense biological diversity, commercial fish populations, marine National Parks, and major reserves of natural gas and petroleum.  Their value is obvious and the challenges of managing them huge.

The 2009-10 Federal budget recognised the importance of research into Australia’s marine world and boosted funding to the Australian Institute of Marine Science by 71% from the previous year, assigned $45 million for a new marine sciences precinct in Hobart and $120 million to a new national research facility vessel.

Over the next months, Science Hub talks to Dr Beth Fulton, one of Australia’s most lauded young marine scientists.  She is a principal research scientist at CSIRO and the developer of Atlantis, an ecosystem-modelling program evaluated as world’s best by the FAO.  In 2007, she won the Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.

Ecosystem modelling

“Australia has a good reputation in marine sciences.  We punch above our weight and do a pretty good job of exploring the big questions.  With ecosystem modelling, we’re trying to make a virtual world of the oceans.  Ultimately, what we want to understand is the best way of managing them.”

The world’s oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and encompass 300 times the habitable volume of our land mass.  They regulate the world’s climate and wind patterns and are important parts of the carbon and water cycles.

“They’re also a very beautiful environment to work in.  In a couple of weeks, I’m going to Ningaloo Reef (off the Western Australian coast).  It’s visually stunning, as well as intricate.  There are some really oddball animals out there that are amazing to watch.  And it’s interesting to understand how different things fit together.  I’ve always been someone who likes to know why things are the way they are.”

To model an ecosystem, you need to be a ‘big picture’ scientist and good at maths.  Dr Fulton and her team within the CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans program also need to analyse detailed data from many scientific disciplines, an approach that allows them to explore complex and powerful questions.

“You start with physics and chemistry of the oceans, the plankton, the different fish and reptiles, everything up to the whales and sharks at the top.  You also represent the humans in the system – how they use it and their impacts.

“The fun bit for me is not to get stymied in any one area, and not to be afraid to try something new.  It’s a reflection of the field I chose, although it wasn’t very common when I was beginning as a scientist.

“For a long time, people assumed that big models were too hard, had too much uncertainty, or that equilibrium was the only way we could understand anything.

“I much prefer playing with the big models because they toss up things you’d never see any other way – the interactions, the bouncing around, the shifting, and the sudden changes that come out of nowhere.  That’s what’s interesting.”

Atlantis and InVitro

As the world’s oceans come under increasing stress from fishing, pollution and climate change, understanding and managing the human impact on the Earth’s largest continuous ecosystem is important.  To do this, Dr Fulton collates data from many scientific disciplines and develops models that incorporate, explain and simulate manipulations of this diverse information.

Atlantis is one of Dr Fulton’s models.  It is a whole ecosystem model, and one of the first in the world to assess fisheries management from an ecosystem perspective.  In 2007, the Food and Agriculture Organisation reviewed it as the best of the world’s leading 20 ecosystem-modelling programs.  It has since been applied to over 15 ecosystems in Australia and the US.

“Atlantis does the whole thing – physics through to humans, but looks mainly at the fisheries impact for the world.  It’s almost written in mathematics that Newton would have used.

A second program, InVitro, was co-authored by Dr Fulton and a team of colleagues headed by Randall Gray and Rich Little.

“InVitro looks at all the different sectors of the marine world, and uses agent-based modelling.  This is the same kind of maths used to move Orcs around in the Lord of the Rings.  You’re following an individual and their actions rather than the whole population as a big group.

“Using the two programs, you can take two very different views of the world and get a specific idea about what’s going on.”

Applying models in the real world

When the North Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed in the early 1990s, it was a dramatic and tragic demonstration of what happens when the ocean’s resources are mismanaged.  It underlined the need for better primary data on what was happening in the sea, but also better models for examining the ocean’s interrelationships.  Using Atlantis and InVitro to investigate the health of the ocean, Dr Fulton’s team is cautiously optimistic about the future of fisheries and avoiding another disaster on the scale of the cod failure.

“You can sustainably manage fisheries.  Mind you, it’s not easy.  People like something they can tick off and then move onto the next problem.  They also like simple solutions, where there’s only one thing to worry about.

“With fisheries, and probably all ecosystem-based management, it’s constantly changing through time as the system changes.  You’ve got to keep at it.

“It’s not only about telling fishermen how many fish to catch or about making great big national parks.  It’s many different things together.  That’s what works.

“That’s good news actually.  It means it’s possible to sustainably manage fisheries as long as you keep at it.”

Add climate change as a factor, however, and the picture isn’t as clear or necessarily as positive.  The severity of its effects on marine environments is yet to be fully understood.  Dr Fulton notes that marine and terrestrial worlds won’t necessarily respond to climate change in the same way.

“That’s slightly concerning given the International Panel on Climate Change documents are mainly based on terrestrial responses, not marine ones.  We don’t know as much about the marine world as yet.”

It is known that some food fish species will do better as the oceans experience climate change.  With changing temperature and wind patterns, other species will fare worse.  Whether humans choose to reduce the exploitation of the worst affected food fish and shift to the more robust species will be an important factor.  However, climate change in itself is not what concerns Dr Fulton most.

“Acidification is the scarier part of this.  We’re not sure what that’s going to do to the ocean.  The message so far is not very positive.  It seems to change how fast marine animals grow, how robust their skeletons are, and whether they’re cueing on the right factors to get them to the adult habitat.”

The world’s oceans are separated into bioregions, defined by ecology and animals that live in them, but also by biophysical properties, such as temperature and water regimes.  Climate change and acidification will affect bioregions differently.

“At a grand scale, the animals under most pressure are the temperate species,” says Dr Fulton.  “They’ll run out of places to go as the poles get warmer.   On the other hand, tropical species will just move pole ward with the temperatures.

“At a species scale, it’s different from species to species as to how much scope they’ve got for adaptation without evolution.  Some species are quite plastic.  They’ll be able to shift even in the short term.  Others will have to evolve to keep up.  Some will tolerate large temperature changes, and others, closely related, will hardly tolerate any change at all.  They might look healthy, but won’t have reserves to produce babies.”

And the forecast?

“We’re in a very dynamic moment in science.  It’s a bit scary to think how the world might change in the future, but it’s also a time to see things that previous generations would never have had the chance to see.  I think that’s exciting.”

At this moment in science we not only have the opportunity to see new things that people of the past would never have seen, it is the final moment to see things that generations to come never will.  While Dr Fulton’s view is optimistic, her belief in our success is conditional: humans need to modify their exploitation of the ocean’s resources.

“It is possible to adapt the way we work with the world.  It is possible to rise to the challenge.  We can try to make it as good as we can – even better off, economically and socially as well as environmentally.”

Over the next months, we continue our conversation with Dr Fulton.  She’ll give students and supervisors her best advice and tell us what it’s like being a female scientist of international renown.

Related articles:

• Skills – Supervision: Dr Beth Fulton on being a mentor
• Pavlov’s Epilogue: Dr Beth Fulton and her advice to young scientists
• Ex situ – Balance: Dr Beth Fulton – “Try to find a happy life-balance”
• Skills – Communication: Advocacy, objectivity and talking to your grandmother
• Skills – Negotiating the Workplace: Dr Beth Fulton on being a female scientist of international renown
• Fiat Lux – Significant women of science series

In the second of our four-part series, Professor Doherty talks to Science Hub about climate change, Australia’s future and choices being made on our funding priorities.

In coming months, we continue our conversation about Australia’s future, and see a different side of the Nobel Prize winner as we talk mysticism, literature and complexity with Peter Doherty, experimentalist and writer.

“What do we owe to the people who come after us? “We’ve never had to think in those terms in the past. We’ve never had to think that we’re stealing from the future, if you like.

“But when you talk about running down non-renewable resources, about destruction of habitat and the destruction of arable land, then we’re running down the future. What’s our ethical position? There’s no serious school of ethics, as far as I know, that looks at what we owe to future generations.”

As the only Nobel Prize winner trained in veterinary science, Professor Doherty received his professional baptism as an outback vet, working for the Queensland government in the 1960s. It was experience that sensitised him to the land’s carrying capacity and more recently, to the problems of climate change and accelerating environmental degradation. For a scientist studying biology at the microscopic level, he is gifted with seeing and understanding the whole.

The Professor’s interests are reflected in his ongoing program of viral immunology, but also the themes that have engaged him outside the lab. As the 68-year old scientist continues his research career in laboratories on two continents, the questions of sustainability and Australia’s future have absorbed him.

Building more sustainable societies was his topic of choice when invited by Australia 21 to pose his next Big Question. Climate change was the underlying theme of his second book, A Light History of Hot Air, and in two lectures at the University of Melbourne, one in 2008 and one in 2009, he touched briefly, and then in more detail, on the subjects of climate change, cultural change and the transformation of Australia into an innovative, green nation.

“Australia does have obvious advantages. We’re only 21 million people, we have a vast land mass [and] very substantial natural resources, particularly resources of metals,” said the Professor in his address as keynote speaker to the University of Melbourne’s 2009 Festival of Ideas.

Australia’s challenges, however, are making our sprawling coastal centres greener, developing the appropriate infrastructure to serve our large and scattered inland population, and choosing wisely when it comes to how we frame the nation’s future.

“We’re far too over-reliant on our natural resources, but it’s hard to see that equation changing,” he told Science Hub.

“We’ve been systematically de-industrialising, and that’s been driven by the removal of tariffs. It’s hard to see that changing either. Some new, innovative types of industry may potentially emerge, in areas like software and biotechnology. But it’s very hard to see how you hold onto those, without foreign interests just grabbing hold of them.”

In his 2008 lecture, ‘Thinking about Australia’s Future’, Professor Doherty outlined what he saw as Australia’s alternatives. We could continue our reliance on mining, tourism and financial services, and relegate ourselves to being a “hole in the ground and an interesting place to visit”. We could maintain a reliance on our resource-based economy and develop novel niche industries, or we could transform ourselves into a nation of innovators, contributing technology to generate new industries and new resources.

If Australia is to develop into a more innovative, more environmentally aware nation, it is a change that has to be backed by political will, financial support and industry involvement.

In March 2008, a month after the preliminary call for submissions by the Cutler Review of Innovation, Professor Doherty criticised Australia’s lack of an innovative research industry in his lecture at the University of Melbourne, and particularly the lack of support for innovative research by private enterprise.

And while the Cutler Review, delivered later that year, supported universities in their demands for government to fully fund research, Senator Carr, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, responded by saying that the funding aspirations were beyond government finances: contributions from the business world would always need to be maximised.

“There’s been talk in the past about trying to involve business more, but of course business is all down,” comments the Professor.

“There’s been talking of trying to involve superannuation funds. I don’t think any of those things are going to work in the present [economic] climate. It seems to me the only way we’re going to get more money into Australian science at the moment is either for it to come directly from government, or from some industries as a mandate from government.

“For instance, it always seems to me that the energy companies here spend very, very little on research, but they take pretty big profits out. And I don’t know whether you can change that equation. They’re not conscious of research, I think.”

And in this observation, the themes of our conversation converge on fossil fuel, as in the real world when considering the interrelations among climate change, the re-birth of innovative culture, and social, economic and environmental transformations.

As fossil fuel resources diminish and climate change pressures force a decrease in their use, Professor Doherty foresees tension between the older, non-innovative companies rooted in mining and fossil fuel, and new industrial development, based on scientific entrepreneurship.

“You need to unleash entrepreneurial activity,” he told the Festival of Ideas. “You need to unleash the activities that lead to new solutions that come out of people’s heads – that aren’t centrally controlled. It’s a very bad mistake to pick areas to back. You have to let the whole thing go and see what will come out of it, which is what works in science anyway.

“You have to ask yourself how much research goes on in our large mining and fossil fuel companies. I think you’ll find it’s very little indeed.

“And the tension is between those sorts of companies and new science-based industrial development, new entrepreneurial development. Of course, the big companies have the wealth and the power, and the ear of the politicians. That’s a big issue. It’s going to be an interesting struggle over the next few years to see how those things are achieved and what’s acceptable.”

The Professor also observes that previous Australian governments weren’t particularly supportive of innovative research, a situation that drove Professor Doherty himself away from an Australian-based career during the 1980s. It is a problem suffered acutely by researchers working on renewable energy solutions, and an issue that has pushed other talented scientists overseas, stifling Australia’s capacity to grow these industries for the future.

“I still don’t understand why [that was]. There must be a political reason why we’re so committed to coal, and not putting a lot more effort into renewable energy the way the Germans and Spanish having being doing, particularly solar.”

“[Personally,] I’d really be putting a lot of effort into renewable energy, especially solar given our situation, and given we’ve got an enormous continent that’s not used for much else.”

As both a scientist and concerned citizen, the far-reaching consequences of the human experiment in climate change have led the Professor to examine the climate science literature carefully.

He points out that the 2007 IPCC report explaining the case for, and consequences of anthropological climate change was wholly based on scientific, peer-reviewed studies and that over 50 countries signed and accepted the report.

By contrast, the scientific literature denying climate change is incomplete, and climate change deniers among the expert scientists working in climate science are a small minority.

The weight of evidence for anthropological climate change has forced Professor Doherty to question the ethical position of those denying climate change, and he’s begun asking whether the future will judge them similarly to those denying HIV infection leads to AIDS.

On these issues, and others facing society today, the difference between believers and doubters is not only intellectual, but moral. Continuing in a damaging course of action, when all evidence points to a better solution can be dangerous and short-sighted.

And so we return to Professor Doherty’s first question of what we leave for future generations.

What of the alternative futures will Australians choose, and how will this choice affect the environmental and economic stability of Australia in the years to come?

Will our choices ensure the security of food, water and arable land, safe-keep our biodiversity and energy resources, and ensure we develop the right tools to manage climate change and the increasing population?

Will our choices create economic security for Australia and provide new, wealth-creating industries and job opportunities for Australians?

We should hope so. Transforming Australia into a cleaner, greener and cleverer country and mitigating climate change with clever, cleaner industries is nearly in everyone’s interest.

In his address to the 2009 Festival of Ideas, Professor Doherty invited listeners on a thought-experiment, and gave them a final peek into the culture of scientific thought.

He explained that in his type of science, biomedical research, scientists do experiments to investigate why things are. Researchers test animals, or humans, to explore the mechanisms of viruses or drugs. Before being allowed to conduct these experiments, their work has to be reviewed and approved by a university ethics committee.

In climate change science, he told the Festival, we’re doing an enormous experiment with all humanity.

“The experiment we’re doing is to see what happens with the whole of humanity living in this thin layer of atmosphere when we ramp up gas levels: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide relating to our industrial activity, our travel and all the rest of it.

“Now, if you think about that, if you put an experiment like that up to a university ethics committee, and said we’re going to take the whole of humanity and just stick more gas in and see what happens, do you think it’d get through? I don’t think so. I don’t think we’d get to do that experiment.

“But of course, we are doing it and it’s a dangerous experiment and we need to stop it… We need to face up to the realities of climate change and renewable sources of energy. Until we do that, we won’t get anywhere. And we won’t find the wisdom to meet the challenges at hand.”

Next month, Science Hub talks to Professor Doherty about Australian science, our strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and what it would be like if more scientists ran the political show.

This article was based on an interview between Science Hub and Professor Peter Doherty in May 2009; and on his seminars, ‘Thinking about Australia’s Future’, presented March 2008 at the University of Melbourne, and ‘Climate Change/Cultural Change’, presented as keynote address in June 2009 at the University of Melbourne’s inaugural Festival of Ideas.

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• Featured: Q & A with Professor Peter Doherty

Dr Betty Meggers is one of archaeology’s most recognised and respected scholars.   After nearly 70 years of research into the pre-Colombian cultures of Latin America, she continues to work each day at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.  Her career has been prolific and not without controversy.

This month, she has been kind enough to talk to Science Hub.

“Accustomed as I am to the tropics, I have my office a little warmer than my colleagues,” says Dr Betty Meggers as she welcomes us to the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.  We find ourselves in a cosy room, among old maps, scientific papers, samples from the field and on the wall, dozens of degrees and other acknowledgements of her research.

She is a quietly-spoken, slight woman with an enormous reputation and a career spanning seven decades.  Her work as an archaeologist began at a time when field studies in the Amazon were difficult and scientific careers for women were still unusual.  In more ways than one, she is a pioneer.

“Having grown up in a scientific family – my father was a physicist – I was encouraged to pursue any interests.  It didn’t occur to me there would be a problem in pursuing a career as a woman,” she says.

“There were a number of women before me, ethnologists such as Margaret Mead and Gladys Reichard, and archeologists, such as Marie Wormington.

“During high school, I volunteered in the Division of Archeology at the Natural Museum of Natural History and when I went to the University of Pennsylvania, I also volunteered in the Registrar’s Office.  I expected to work in the same capacity, but was encouraged to an academic career.”

Her career continues to be a highly productive and controversial one.  She is best known for evidencing pre-Colombian, trans-Pacific contact between Asia and the Americas, and for rejecting the idea of an ‘El Dorado’, a large, wealthy city in the Amazon.  The ongoing debate among scientists over its existence, and over the carrying capacity of the Amazon rainforest basin continues to inform management practices for tropical ecosystems.

“Look for evidence for your theories,” is her best advice to those working on controversial topics.  “Just present the evidence.  Periodically, I write a rebuttal and otherwise I try to ignore the criticism.”

She has produced nearly 400 articles, book chapters and presentations publicising her findings, many co-authored with her husband, the late Dr Clifford Evans.  It was only after he died that people saw her as an equal contributor to their working partnership.

“Our collaboration was ideal.  He was excellent at technology and the management of projects.   I was better at theory and had the skills to draw maps, rim profiles of the pottery from our digs, and even some decoration for publication.

“When I got married, I had been working for a while.  After that, most of my income went to taxes.  Since we could live on Cliff’s salary and had enough research work for the two of us, that’s exactly what we did.

“One interesting result was that people assumed that I was just a handmaiden to his work.  It was only after he died and I carried on our programs that I got the credit I deserved.”

At the conclusion of our interview, as we prepare to leave, she dons her dust jacket in readiness for her day’s work in the archives.  At 87 years of age, her passion for archaeology and the intellectual rigour of science are obvious.

“I come in here every day,” she says.  “I don’t have a computer at home, and if I stay there, I’m tempted to do household chores.  More to the point, I still have a lot to do here, a lot of unfinished work.”

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On the one hand, highlighting women who achieve as special cases suggests that women only rarely make a difference in the discipline they’ve chosen.  But of course, we know that women succeed just as well, and just as often as men when given their chance.

On the other hand, the sad fact remains that women with long and distinguished careers in science, or who reach senior scientific roles, are a minority.  While the tide is turning – Professor Penny Sackett has recently been appointed Chief Scientist for Australia, and Dr Megan Clark as the head of CSIRO – somewhere between BSc and CEO, scientific women disappear into the ether.

Why is this?

Science Hub is aiming to find out. Each month, Science Hub will be talking to science’s significant female achievers, and asking what made a difference for them.

In this issue, we feature a young Australian scientist called Dr Beth Fulton, and look overseas to Dr Betty Meggers, whose prolific and ongoing career has spanned seven decades.

As the only Nobel Prize winner trained in veterinary science, Professor Doherty received his professional baptism as an outback vet, working for the Queensland government in the 1960s.  It was experience that sensitised him to the land’s carrying capacity and more recently, to the problems of climate change and accelerating environmental degradation.

In the second of our four-part series, Science Hub talks to the Professor about sustainability and Australia’s future.  Coming soon.

Related articles:

• Culture – Science and Society: Professor Peter Doherty: not by words alone
• Fiat Lux: Q & A with Professor Peter Doherty
• Culture – Science and Society: The Two Cultures 50 years on – Professor Peter Doherty