AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Bob Williamson Bob Williamson became Professor of Molecular Genetics at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, Imperial College London, in 1976. He worked there until 1995 when he moved to Australia as Director of the Murdoch Institute and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Melbourne. He retired in October 2004 and is now Honorary Senior Principal Fellow and Professor of the University of Melbourne. He has over 400 refereed career publications, including about forty in Nature, Nature Genetics, Cell and Lancet. He worked on the identification of the genes for cystic fibrosis, Friedreich ataxia and Alzheimer disease. More recently, he has taken a major interest in national science policy and ethics. He Chairs the OECD Committee on Pharmacogenetics, and has worked extensively for the World Health Organization. He has been a member of many editorial boards, including that of the Journal for Medical Ethics for the past twelve years, and edited several books on genetic engineering and on ethics and the new genetics. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Royal Society, and an Officer of the Order of Australia.

What is the situation here in Australia? Many of us have worked in other countries and are very familiar with the situations there. I have worked in the United States and Britain, in both Scotland and England, and in France, and the situation in Australia is a little different. The number of people who get a PhD each year in Australia, a research higher degree – PhD or MD – is around 3000. So we are creating roughly 3000 highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated young researchers each year.

You cannot believe the extent to which, to those of us who are Deans or senior professors, you all look the same when you get your PhDs. You all have two or three papers, you are all really bright. There are going to be roughly 300 jobs a year created in academia and research institutes and universities. So the ratio of new, highly skilled, wonderful, intelligent young researchers that we are training to the number of new jobs is roughly 10:1. (Even if we assume that half those people go somewhere else, it is still 5:1.)

Who succeeds? My experience over the past 50 years is that success is not determined primarily by how bright you are, because the truth is that you are all bright. At the end of the day, what determines the people who win, in my experience, is much more the 'other peripheral skills'.

Here is an example of some of the other skills. I just want to mention two or three of them.

One is media skills. Last week I heard someone who – I am sure – does really good work in medical research. I know a bit about medical research, but I could not understand a word this guy was saying. He had 2½ minutes on Channel Nine to tell us about what Channel Nine regarded as an exciting piece of work, and you couldn't understand a word that this guy said. I thought to myself, 'What a missed opportunity.' The public pays for us to do research. We are passionate about our research. And this guy doesn't even have the media skills to say what he is doing in a way that I as a medical researcher can understand, and I am certain that the average person in the community could understand even less.

Take another example, politics. Because I was active in left politics, everyone assumes that I think everyone should be active in left politics. That's not true. But I do think that if you are interested in it you should think about being active in politics when you are young. What does politics teach you? It teaches you how to deal with difficult and passionate people. That's like a definition of a university, or a research institute: 'difficult and passionate people'. And so the skills you acquire – and it doesn't matter what kind of organisation it is, it doesn't matter whether it is left or right, whether it is an issue organisation or not, you will learn the same important skills.

Think of another issue, gender equity. In research as a whole, half our colleagues are women. And in my field, in biomedical research, roughly 70 per cent of the researchers are women. Do they get a fair shake? Just look at the faculties. Look at the people sitting on the professorial committees. Of course not.

One of the things I am most proud of is that the Murdoch Institute, which I was Director of, is employer of choice for women. But as a nation we should notice that the Murdoch Institute is the only medical research institute that is an employer of choice for women. And it is not that hard to be an employer of choice for women, let me tell you. You only need to do one or two little things in order to achieve it.

So these are some ideas on skill acquisition, but I do want to make two points. First, not everyone has to acquire every skill. And the other is that the perception is that if you step off the ladder you are going to fall and never get back on it. My experience has been that it is incredibly rare as a dean or professor to interview someone who has done something different. You look at them and you think, 'Wow, that person actually did something different, they did something interesting and exciting.'

One of the people I work closely with – not actually one of my own students but a student in the Institute – was invited to join [Senator] Natasha Stott-Despoja for a year as her science adviser. And the senior staff, to their discredit, advised her that if she did that for a year she would never get back on the academic ladder. I think that's totally untrue. We have got to get out of this. The reason for my question to Kim Carr was to make the point that we have to have ways of breaking down those silo barriers.

I think there are two kinds of mentoring. Some mentoring is professional and has to be provided by line managers. For instance, if you are a postdoc and you join a group, the senior person in the group should be teaching you how to write a paper, teaching you about health and safety, those sorts of things. And I think that kind of mentoring, to be honest, is usually done fairly well.

I think the sort of mentoring that is not done well in the system – and I hope that you, in your discussion groups, will come up with ideas on how to do this – is what I call 'mentoring across'.

If you are a postdoc and you join a research group, whether it is in astronomy or chemistry or biomedical science, you join that group because you respect and like both the person in charge of the group and the quality of the work they are doing. And then, in three or four years' time, you want to become an independent competitor of the very person whose group you joined because you respected him or her and liked them and wanted to work with them. How do you engineer that transition from dependence to independence as part of growing up scientifically? I personally think that this kind of mentoring has to be offered by people who are independent, helpful and confidential.

Let me just make the point, because the point is often missed, that everyone needs mentors. Professors need mentors, presidents need mentors, everyone needs mentors. We often think of how do we mentor people who are new postdocs? But how do we mentor directors, how do we mentor professors? How do we ensure that mentoring is available? If you don't need mentoring, you have stopped learning, you have stopped participating.

One of the interesting things for those of us who look abroad is that the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and the NSF [National Science Foundation] in the United States have now made mentoring a key issue for any grant. So if a grant application does not describe how they are going to deal with mentoring, that grant is marked down and will usually not be awarded.

There are great resources. The new Australian Code of Conduct [for the Responsible Conduct of Research] for the first time makes it clear that responsibility for conduct – which includes mentoring, which includes skills acquisition – rests with the institution, rests with the professional society, rests with ARC [Australian Research Council] and NHMRC [National Health and Medical Research Council], rests with all of us. And it is a much more cooperative and responsive document, and I hope that people are using it to build their own mentoring and skills acquisition policy.

But there are other resources. The Howard Hughes [Medical Institute] and Burroughs Wellcome [Fund] have issued a great book, entitled Making the Right Moves. It is a bit American, so it is a bit heavy, but a good reference book. Women in Cell Biology is a wonderful little set of essays. Anyone who has not read this really should. The first article is about the 'impostor syndrome', when you wake up in the moment and think, 'God, I'm no good! And they're going to find out! They're going to find out. They all tell me how good I am, but it ain't true. I'm actually terrible, I'm totally…' – the impostor syndrome. Everyone should read it.

A new problem that has arisen is that many of you, those who are younger than 30 or so, may have never actually read a journal; these days my post-docs just have a computer program that pulls up the articles for them But the worst aspect of not reading journals is that some of the best stuff is not in the scientific articles, but in the News, the Views and the ancillary material. In Science, does anybody ever look at Science Careers? Science Careers has these wonderful little vignettes which are terrific for mentoring.

Who should do it? Is it the boss? The university? CSIRO? Is it the department? Is it the funder – ARC, NHMRC? A lobby group, like the Australian Society for Medical Research? A national group, a peak body, like the Australian Academy of Science? Or is it you? To what extent is it your responsibility to guarantee mentoring?

The purpose of creating an environment where mentoring is the norm is not to create another group of people who operate over and above the research. When I started doing research, you didn't have research offices, with all the attendant bureaucracy. If the outcome of this meeting is to create another bureaucracy, we have failed. I don't want still more people who have never done research telling people who are doing research what to do. That's not the idea.

What we do need, however, is a cooperative system which allows young researchers, and mature researchers, to expand their skills to meet new needs. I've retrained three or four times in my career. Every one of the young people who are here will need to retrain during your career. You are not going to be doing, in 40 years' time, what you are doing now. If you are going to be able to deal with that, you have to master new skills, you have to be able to accept mentoring, and you have to mentor yourself.

So that's the purpose of the meeting, and we hope that from it we are going to have a plan for the Academy to put forward to ARC and also, if we may, to NHMRC to see a way forward from the point of view of a better future for Australian research over the next 20 or 30 years.

Discussion

Question: Out of interest, what were the three or four times you retrained, and what did you do?

Bob Williamson: I started in chemical engineering, and then theoretical chemistry. Although I was a chemist for a while, I actually found that I didn't particularly like the absence of humanism, the absence of personal involvement. So I moved into biochemical genetics. In biochemical genetics I then worked in protein chemistry for quite a while, in protein synthesis, and I retrained as a geneticist when it became obvious that molecular cloning of DNA was going to be possible.

And after working for 20 years as professor at St Mary's Imperial College and then moving here, for a variety of reasons, I changed direction again. You know, when I started being a geneticist, no-one was trained as a geneticist. And now everyone's a geneticist; so I retrained as an ethicist – and no-one's an ethicist, even today, so that's okay.

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