In a previous article published by Science Hub Australia, Professor Barry Marshall, Nobel Laureate and immunologist, commented on the untapped resources of Australian science’s workforce.

We continue our conversation on the strategic strengths and weakness of Australian science and Professor Marshall gives Science Hub his recommendations for the future.





Science Hub: Other than our need to develop more flexible employment opportunities for Australian scientists, what kinds of infrastructure does Australian science need to be more competitive in the future?  We can talk physically or strategically.

Professor Barry Marshall: If the Australian government wants to keep some of the substantial benefits of biotechnology in Australia, it really needs to pump in more support.  Australian researchers have a higher cost base and the government needs to provide services and tax-breaks so investors can see an advantage in biotech.

We [also] need the infrastructure to administer this.  Presently, the Australian government seems hell-bent on obstructing the free progress of the science process by overloading it with layers of regulatory committees.

Our Gene Regulator wants at least 200 working days for a release application to be reviewed.  That sort of time span is appropriate for the TGA, where you’re going to have a product on the market at the end of it, but to spend a whole year waiting for something to be signed off on in the early-stage of a research project is a very heavy burden to pay.

A second example was the inhibitory regulation we had in Australia for embryonic stem cell research.  I was on the stem cell and human cloning review committee in 2000; virtually no embryonic stem cell work was able to be done in Australia for 6 or 7 years.  Most of the really hot stuff we had in Australia has now connected so much with the US in California that we might not see it develop here.

A third obstruction I see is related to animal research, because the Animal Ethics Committees have been over-loaded with regulations from the various state governments.  In Western Australia there are inadequate resources from that government to administer animal research, so our state biotechnology effort suffers when bad publicity sticks – for example, to the live sheep trade – which shares the same infrastructure.  Funding to beef up the animal research support infrastructure should be strategically placed into the relevant institutions that participate in the research.

Finally, let’s discuss problems with intellectual property and the ownership of biological materials. These issues were sorted out ten or 20 years ago in the UK and United States, but in Australia, we are still breaking new ground.  I’ll give you an example.

If I harvested a gene, as part of my approved research program, from a cancer patient in a public hospital, I would need to ask, “Well, who owns it [the gene]?”  The government would say, “Well, we own it, or the health department owns it, or the hospital owns it, or you own it,” but nobody really knows who owns it, so I can’t really use that gene for my new cancer treatment.  I would go to America and extract that gene from a donor over there.

Science Hub: So whatever is holding Australian science back is administrative and legislative, rather than our intellectual capacity, ideas, or physical or laboratory resources?

Professor Barry Marshall: Yes, exactly.  This type of infrastructure [administrative and legislative] is just as important to our success as electricity, water and communications, but it is way down on the list of priorities…

Governments are wasting time making decisions – or not making decisions – about new developments that everyone agrees we should have.  Some of these things are what I would call “no brainers”.  You know that in the 21^st century, “new” technologies need to be purchased and made available to the scientific community in each state or each country.

We expect the government to supply us with electricity, water, and communications, so why shouldn’t we expect them to provide us with, say, a human genome centre?  These big new facilities need millions of dollars and an ongoing commitment, starting now.

[Personally,] I can’t afford to spend my time campaigning and creating political pressure.

Victoria led the way by deciding we needed a synchrotron and deciding that they wanted it in Melbourne.  I want Western Australia to have the same ‘just do it attitude’.  I think it should just happen, because we need it.

One of the concerns is that politicians come from a broad spectrum of the community – you can’t expect them to have [an understanding of] every technology at their fingertips.  They do need to have smart advisors with a bit of clout.

Governments change far too often in Australia –with crucial elections every 3 years or so.  I think Australia should move to a 5 year election cycle, like the UK, so you can actually finish something.  At the moment, with the 3 year cycle, elections introduce all kinds of inefficiencies about which we can’t do anything.

Science Hub: Do you think we have a problem with our current granting system, in that it takes such a long to get funds for research?

Professor Barry Marshall: In Australia, I think we want to have a 6-month cycle for the funding stage.  For instance, have the NHMRC allocate more resources [to the selection process] so it runs faster, with less soul-searching.  In the US, I believe there are at least two funding deadlines for the NIH, June and December.

And you do need [to fund] some people, who, like me, have a short attention span, because they often have very original ideas and aren’t particularly interested in following what everyone else is doing.

Medical and scientific research funding should be doubled – do I need to say that?

Science Hub: Not to us…  And our last question is about the national science curriculum.  When it was published last October [2008], you were pleased that the document recommended children be taught to be sceptical about science, among other things, because you made comment that very few Australians were now looking for evidence for their opinions.

We’ve been traditionally known as a sceptical nation, a nation of ‘knockers’, if you like.  What do you think happened? Why have we become less sceptical and less questioning?

Professor Barry Marshall: I would like to see more scepticism and debate in the media about things that are happening with technology.  Much of what you read in the news is sponsored so you don’t really see both sides of the story.

Then take education as an example … if things didn’t make it to the curriculum, they either don’t exist or they’re not credible.  A big part of the curriculum should be to encourage scepticism toward new technologies.

A healthy level of scepticism means people who are self-starters, who are going to generate real data about their technology are the ones who are going to make it over that barrier…  If you have the right balance of scepticism and then [communication] pathways where the definitely proven and validated technologies and information can reach the media, then that will be more successful.

Photo credit: Frances Andrijich

Read more about Prof Marshall’s new biotech venture, Ondek, here.

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• Fiat Lux: Creating opportunity for Australia’s scientists – after the Nobel Prize with Professor Barry Marshall

The brief, 22-page report made in response to the parliamentary inquiry titled Building Australia’s Research Capacity, explicitly addressed each of the paper’s 38 recommendations on Australia’s research future.

Significant decisions for Australian scientists relate to the recommendations on research funding and support for postgraduate students, early- and mid-career researchers.

In the coming weeks, Science Hub Australia will be reviewing the Government’s response and reporting in detail on its importance for Australian scientists.  In the meanwhile, find more information on the commissioned reports and Government positions at the following links.

Reviews:

• Venturous Australia — Building Strength in Innovation: Review of the National Innovation System (the Cutler Review, Jan-Aug 2008)
• Review of Australian Higher Education (the Bradley Review, Mar-Dec 2008)
• Building Australia’s Research Capacity (Inquiry into research training and research workforce issues in Australian universities by the House Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation, Apr-Dec 2008)
• The Government also invited public contributions to Australian policy through the Australia 2020 summit, which featured one specific agenda (Productivity) focused on education, skills, training, science and innovation.

Government responses:

• Preliminary response to the Bradley Review[4 Mar 2009]
• Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System: a formal response to the Bradley Review [12 May 2009 concurrent with 2009-10 Budget]
• Powering Ideas: an Innovation Agenda for the 21^st Century: a formal response to the Cutler Review, also drawing on the final report of the Australia 2020 summit, Collaborating to a Purpose: Review of the Cooperative Research Centres Program, the Final Report of the Pharmaceuticals Industry Strategy Group, the Final Report of the Review of Australian Higher Education and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation’s Inquiry into Research Training and Research Workforce Issues in Australian Universities, Building Australia’s Research Capacity [12 May 2009 concurrent with 2009-10 Budget]
• Australian Government Response to Committee report: “Building Australia’s Research Capacity” [17 Sep 2009 and in conjunction with the Research Study on the Future Supply of and Demand for Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Qualifications]

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
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• Culture – Science and Society: The Two Cultures 50 years on – Professor Peter Doherty

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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