AUSTRALIAN FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, 2005

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, 12-13 April

Closing remarks
Dr Jim Peacock, President, Australian Academy of Science

So why does the Academy run these Frontiers of Science meetings?

The main reason is that we want to help you celebrate the contributions and excellence of younger scientists in Australia. And we do that not only through these things. As you would know, many of the speakers here have been recognised through awards, by winning medals and such things as that.

Secondly, we are hoping to provide you with an opportunity to be exposed to top-performing scientists in disciplines other than your own, hopefully in talks that are readily understood. I think there have been some wonderful examples of that through this meeting.

The idea there is that maybe we will catalyse some collaborations, multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary, that otherwise might not have happened but might be very useful. I couldn’t help thinking, for example, during the last talk: I have been exposed recently to some of the immensity of the computing problems if we are to manage water in Australia, as well we might have to. And it seems to me it is trivial in comparison with what I heard just now. So there is maybe hope that we will achieve that.

Thirdly, we hope that you might become more aware of the Academy, that it exists in Australia and what it does. We do more than just to recognise outstanding contributions to knowledge by scientists. We try and do that, and we do it to the best of our ability, but we do have other objectives. In the discussions and over dinner and so on you have probably heard some of them.

One of our objectives is to increase the recognition of the importance of science and technology in our present and future lives in this country and in the world. We have an objective of trying to increase the engagement of our children and future citizens in science. We believe that that is of critical importance if we are to evolve a truly scientifically literate society, as we think there must be. And then we feel a duty to try and provide information about science and scientists where it is needed in Australia.

At one level, if you go into our website and have a look at Nova: Science in the news, you will see that we have some 80-odd topics there that school-children and many other people access in order to get information on a huge variety of topics in science and the way we use science in our societies. It is very popular indeed, and we think we are really helping a lot of people that way.

But we also try and provide top-level information, and an assessment of a situation from that information, based on the evidence that is in front of us. We provide that sort of counsel to the policy makers of Australia, in a range of topics: we encourage the various government departments who are charged with making policy on different topics to come to the Academy, and we show them that we can probably nominate some people who are likely to know more about those particular topics than anyone else in Australia. We can bring them together, we can have them interact with other people. And out of the workshops and so on that we organise, we hope we contribute to an increase in the quality of policy making in this country.

I really congratulate all of the speakers, and those of you who have participated so well in this Frontiers of Science meeting. I hope you enjoyed it. We certainly did. And I hope we see more of you engaged in the business of the Academy.

I would like to thank the people from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, who have helped us so much in the running of this meeting and have helped make it run without a hitch.

Thank you all very much.