AUSTRALIAN FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, 2005

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

Welcome
Professor Suzanne Cory, Director, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Thank you, Mr President. That was very strange, because this conference is all about you and the young people in science, in the emerging technologies in Australia, and this conference which the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute is very proud to be a host of today is in fact the President’s brainchild, modelled shamelessly as he says on what the National Academy of Science in the US does.

I think it is a wonderful opportunity for the emerging leaders of science in this nation to get together and to talk across disciplines and, hopefully, ferment new sparks that will generate collaborations going on to the future, one discipline of science informing another.

So it is a very exciting initiative, this Frontiers of Science symposium. You should all be proud to be part of it and, I think, challenged by it to create something quite new and different than you usually experience in a symposium.

This symposium features some of the young scientists who have won prizes offered by the Australian Academy of Science and others in the last couple of years the Moran Medal, the Malcolm McIntosh Prize, the Gottschalk Medal, the Fenner Medal, the Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year, and the Dorothy Hill Award. So you are all here, and those young prizewinners were challenged to put together the conference. They chose the topics, the chairmen and a speaker to follow them in their session. So it is your conference to make the most of.

So I want to warmly welcome you here, wish you an exceptional conference, and remind you that in fact the whole conference is going to be recorded and transcribed, like the proceedings of Parliament, and will be published on the Academy’s website. That is an opportunity for you all not only to highlight your own science but the discussions, I hope, will also be recorded and the new ideas that emerge by a meeting of the minds from one discipline to another will also be recorded.

Let’s get on with the show!