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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE WORKSHOP 2008

Enhancing the quality of the experience of postdocs and early career researchers
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 14–15 February 2008

Mentoring and skills acquisition: An essential component of Australian health and medical research, but how do we achieve it?
by Professor Warwick Anderson

Warwick Anderson is the current Chief Executive Officer of the National Health and Medical Council. His previous appointments include that of Chairman of NHMRC's Research Committee, Head of School of Biomedical Sciences at Monash University and Deputy Director of The Baker Institute. Professor Anderson has a science degree from the University of New England, and completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide. He spent three postdoctoral years at the Harvard Medical School in the USA, before returning to the University of Sydney and The Baker Institute. He has published over 150 scientific papers and has made significant contributions over many years to the community, research societies and numerous boards and committees. For his service to health and medical research, Professor Anderson was made a Member of the Order of Australia in January 2005.

Thank you, Philip, for mentioning that I was once a scientist before I had a change of career and became one of the things that my two daughters call, disparagingly, 'A public servant'. I have to say that the Public Service is actually quite good at mentoring, as compared with the university sector, with both formal and informal ways of doing it.

I am here to speak on behalf of the research funding bodies, but Margaret Sheil [Chief Executive Officer, Australian Research Council] will give you a learned, amusing, erudite speech at dinner so I have a chance just to ramble on a little bit.

First of all I want to say a couple of things about the National Health and Medical Research Council, because for about 35 years and probably rather accidentally it has taken the view that it has a mentoring role in Australia – not the one that we are talking about here, really, but to build a cohort of outstanding medical researchers outside the university sector. This has been a view held generally in the organisation, so at the times of stagnation in our university recruiting opportunities, if I could put it that way, the NHMRC built the research fellowship schemes separately and has itself, if you like, mentored a capacity for research in Australia that I am very proud of.

At the moment we support over 320 research fellows, sort of equivalent to level C and above; 250 mid-career research fellows, whom we call career development fellows; and several hundred postdoctoral, early-career fellows, including our famous C J Martin and Neil Hamilton Fairley scheme, which for, again, 30 years has provided support for international postdoctoral fellowships immediately post PhD, and then a secure two years back here in Australia. I think they are things that this organisation is pretty proud of.

Is there anything particular about mentoring in health and medical research – other than to try to choose Bob Williamson? Well, I suppose the first thing is navigating the complexities of the National Health and Medical Research Council's funding schemes; that is something you certainly need a little bit of help with.

There are some particular things when you work in health and medical research which are more acute than elsewhere. They are really around ethics - animal ethics, human research ethics. These are really quite important things such that, in a lack of true mentoring, some terrible things can happen.

Of the other two things about health and medical research, which are not unique to it but are probably stronger, the first is teams. That is true everywhere now, but it is probably true earlier and true more universally than it used to be. The age of simple reductionist science in health and medical research has served us well but is coming to an end, I think, and so the teams that put you together not just with great molecular biologists and cell biologists but with functional biologists, modellers, engineers, are where a lot of the excitement is. That then requires you to be aware of the ethos and discipline, the way things work not only in, say, cell biology, but in these areas as well. The previous speaker spoke about some of the ethos differences in these areas. I have to say that I think molecular biology is very like physics, in that there is a post human genome program, a sort of an expectation that you put what you find up on the web and in databases so that everybody else can use it, and it is a wonderful thing. It is not so true in, say, public health research.

So what should the NHMRC do about it? I think basically it should fund people, but we have some other roles as well. I suppose the main recognition of our role is in our Act, to set standards, including in ethics. So, if our main role is to set the standards, probably the most important document is one which is published by us, the Australian Research Council and Universities Australia, the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect and it needs to evolve, but it at least sets out that appropriate training is part of doing research. It is not an optional add-on extra for any of us. The document particularly emphasises the culture of openness and sharing and professional development that there should be within research groups, and makes it clear not only for institutions that they have to provide whatever is needed for that to occur and reward that sort of behaviour, but also that it is a responsibility for each and every individual who works in research.

We also reward successful mentoring, perhaps slightly indirectly, in this fellowship scheme. One of the selection criteria, one of the things that applicants for appointment to our fellowship scheme have to address, is what they do in terms of mentoring and research training. I am told that there is a wide variety of approaches to that, and I suppose that is the other theme that has come up today: that this is, in a sense, an intensely individual and human sort of activity.

I have had four main mentors, although one of the great things about the job I am currently doing is that there is an informal group of other heads of medical research funding bodies around the world. We meet every six months and get quite a lot of mentoring out of that, I have to say. We just recently had here the Director of the NIH [National Institutes of Health], in the US, who has become a kind of informal mentor that I appreciate very much.

I have had a wide variety of mentors. The first two were surgeons, so that was pretty interesting. Those of you who have ever had involvement with surgery, from either the receiving end or the working-with end, would know that surgeons have a certain set of personalities. With the first one, I was lucky: John Ludbrook told me, 'This is a really enjoyable thing to do, so enjoy it. Really, unless you enjoy it, go and do something else.' The second one was a sink-or-swim professor of surgery at Harvard – sink-or-swim with a few carrots like international trips and a few electrodes applied if you didn't get it right – but there was something about that that sharpened the mind.

The third one was the professor of physiology at Harvard, Cliff Barger. He was a wonderful man, and why I liked working with him is that he talked about why it mattered, why understanding this bit of science really mattered. For somebody with a social conscience and so on, that really connected, and I suspect that he saw that in me and worked out that was an important motivation. He also taught me about team work.

And then from Paul Korner, who was director of the Baker and a member of this Academy, and a wonderful, wonderful human being, I learnt two things – one of them quite surprising. The first is that it is about total honesty. This is a really important message in 2008, I think, where in society, near enough to the truth is regarded as good enough. In science, as we know, that 'ain't so'. So that's an important aspect to learn, I think.

Only two or three people in this room would know Paul Korner, who was a Czechoslovakian refugee before the Second World War and quite a stern character, but the other thing he taught all of us at the Baker Institute was that we had a responsibility to explain to the taxpayer what we did and why it was important. That is a theme that Bob mentioned and a really important one, not just in health and medical research but everywhere.

I think universities have the key role in setting the scene here, and it is rewarding to hear about universities and departments and faculties here and there around the country now supporting this in a more important way. I think in our own sector the great big medical research institutes are also terrific at it, but some of our research institutes are too small and so it is a bit hard for a perspective to be taken, and there I encourage people to work with their affiliated university.

Just a last couple of gratuitous observations, I suppose: I told you about my mentors, but that is not going to work for most of you in this room – as Bob pointed out, those who are sitting more up at the back. The world has changed; Generation X is different. You will be looking for more flexibility in your careers, doing more things, being part of the world, not just Australia – admittedly, that's not so just for the last few years, but it is a much more connected-up world and people expect more flexible careers. So one of the challenges for the NHMRC and, no doubt, for other funding bodies is to make sure we don't set up our structures for selecting fellows, for example, in such a rigid way that that's not possible. We must not just assume that you are going to get a PhD and then a postdoc and then another one and so on. We have to have our systems more flexible than that.

As my younger daughter says to me often, 'Dad, everybody's different,' meaning that when she did whatever it was, it was because I had done the other thing. But it is true, and I think it is eventually a very personal thing; as mentors, as mentored, we have to understand that this is fundamentally a personal interaction and that people indeed are different.

The type of mentoring will change. At the moment the NHMRC is trying hard to build an Aboriginal health research work force, and the mentoring that is required there is rather different, as you can imagine, in communities with no history of education or higher education, and different cultural demands on people – there are very different things that need to be added to the mix.

Finally, as I said earlier, I think science is changing too. Although the research group is still the core of it all, we now work with many, many people in different disciplines across the world. That is an aspect that I think is increasingly important.

I would like to congratulate the Academy on choosing this topic for today. Probably very little is more important, really, if Australia is to grow the quality and the quantity of our research into the 21st century. Thanks for inviting me.

Philip Kuchel: Thanks for those words of wisdom and advice, Warwick. That Aboriginal initiative is a fantastic thing.

To sum up: we have had three very eminent Australians talking about their own experiences, and some generalities. I would like you to join me again to thank them for their contribution.