NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS
The beginner's guide to winning the Nobel Prize
9 November 2005
Professor Peter Doherty FAA
Winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology
I want to talk about my attempt to write something – The beginner's guide to winning the Nobel Prize, published by Melbourne University Press (see www.booktopia.com.au/the-beginner-s-guide-to-winning-the-nobel-prize-a-life-in-science/prod9780522851205.html). I last talked at this venue in 1997 which was the year after I shared the Nobel Prize with Rolf Zinkernagel for the work we'd done more than twenty years before at the John Curtin School of Medical Research and at that time I was still working at St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee. In fact I still have a research lab there though I'm most of the time now I'm at the University of Melbourne and at that stage we didn't have any thought of returning to Australia but as our new medical science heroes, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren are soon going to discover, the year after the Nobel Prize is very intense and it ends up with a hazy blur of celebration and over-commitment. And I learnt a lot about over-commitment.
Added to the Nobel was the complete surprise of being made Australian of the Year. That was not something that was on my horizon but the result of that is that we spent a lot of time through 1997 travelling backwards and forwards across the Pacific, speaking in all the capital cities, and meeting a lot of really fantastic and very, very dedicated people at all levels, private citizens, in government, and so forth and it changed a lot of our thinking about Australia and was the reason we eventually decided to come back.
So, that year really began my secondary career as a public advocate for science. Very much an amateur public advocate and for innovation and rational enquiry. And this has been a significant part of my life since 1997 both in Australia and internationally.
Increasingly though as I started this from a rather naïve perspective and I've been gradually learning the game and I'm a bit old and there's a bit of Alzheimer's disease, I've had the sense at times that I'm actually playing Don Quixote, that I'm tilting at windmills and it took a while to realise that windmills are just actually silos without sails and there are plenty of silos and some of them are extremely well defended and when you charge at silos you realise quickly that it's a pretty futile exercise.
And that was a lot of the pressure that decided me to write this book, because what I wanted to do was layout what I was saying, systematically, thoughtfully, in a way that would be both accessible and enduring. You know, even in twenty years time, long after this thing is pulped, someone who's on holiday in Port Fairy or [indistinct] may pick this up at a second hand bookstore and actually look at it and that's, that's a consoling thought, long after I've disappeared unless of course the article about living forever is true.
I'm not sure I'm looking forward to that.
So, even if it doesn't reach any Australian silos it's going to be published in the United States next year and a lot of other people are looking at it in different countries and hopefully it will get away to distribution.
The writing it – I was really pushed into it by Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing. Louise is married to Max Gillies and she's a very forceful character, she'd have to be wouldn't she and also the, the Grimwade Family's Miegunyah bequest was an enormous help with this and Mary Kinnane, my agent.
What the Beginner's Guide aims to do is to provide an interesting and comprehensive and an easily readable account of modern science and its practitioners for people in the boarder community. It's not a book for scientists. And it's also not primarily an auto-biography. In any case I'm not nearly as attractive as Steve Waugh or as polarizing as Mark Latham and The Guide isn't going to make me rich, that's for sure.
Because the advances that result from science and technology are so profound and has such enormous effects on how we live and work, it's important for each and every one of us to have some understanding of this vast and dynamic exercise. You don't have to be a scientist, but why would any young person want to be a scientist? Why would you be happy if your son or daughter decides to be a scientist?
It helps to know something about where scientists come from, how they train, what they actually do and what kind of people they are.
Is it a good or a substantial life? Or are scientists the mad, bad nerds and so forth that you encounter in Hollywood movies? I don't want to comment too much on that.
Young scientists taking a vow of poverty where they're setting themselves up for a one way ticket to the Northern Hemisphere?
Where's the whole thing going and what might something – someone who starts in science now be doing in twenty or thirty years time?
Science is about the natural world and though it's infinitely fascinating to the practitioner, accounts that deal only with evidence based realty can be intimidating to those who aren't accustomed to dealing with ideas, experiments, data, critical scrutiny, the things that we do for a living.
The Nobel Prizes though are about people. So relating some of my own experience and the lives of others who'd been recognised in this way helps to put a human face on what is after all one of the great human endeavours. What can be more gratifying than the search for new knowledge and improved outcomes?
There are some terrific personal stories and the Guide touches on a few of them. I also talk about current science issues like bird flu, vaccination and what is likely to happen in the areas like genomics, neurobiology and cancer therapy.
Largely because of events in the USA over the past few years where I still spend quite a bit of time, I took the perhaps rather too courageous step of including a chapter on science and religion. Apart from addressing a topic that intrigues me I wanted to make two points. The first is that there are many very effective scientists who also hold very sincere religious beliefs. The second is that good people who come from the world, from either of these different perspectives, can and should work together to promote human benefit. Inevitably of course there's the discussion of Darwinian evolution and creationism, but the book was finished before the current propaganda effort by the Intelligent Design people who hit Australia's shores.
As a religious believer, Intelligent Design is inevitably preferable to the flat earth creationism that insisted the world is only about 6,000 years old and that people and dinosaurs existed concurrently. ID accepts the fact of natural selection and biological evolution while adding a role for a divine creator. Science can't disprove this but the fact is that biological systems look more to be evolved rather than designed.
The sticking point between the scientists and the ID proponents is that they want it to be taught in science classes. However, a scientific theory only has stature if it leads to useful experiments and observations. After more than a hundred and fifty years of debate about this issue there is no clearly stated Intelligent Design theory that can be tested by the scientific method.
I've been glad recently to see that both the Vatican and the Victorian Government, I don't think they're necessarily closely linked, agree that – apart from the ...- agree that ID belongs in theology and philosophy classes, not in science.
Reading the letters to the editor on Intelligent Design, reinforced by conviction that educated, thoughtful people often have a very superficial understanding of how science works.
Apart from wanting to talk to the young in this book, what I wanted to do is address some of my professional colleagues in the Humanities in Universities, teachers who suddenly find themselves with responsibility for a science unit or to economists and politicians who have to vote on science issues and try to give them some understanding of how science actually works.
It's even possible that journalists might benefit from reading this book. I don't mean to be disparaging when I say that. After all who really understands any game without learning the rules and being a player. I guess that's why someone who isn't a cricket tragic might read Steve Waugh's book, to access an ultimate insider's view of how the game really works.
I haven't done that yet but I've been dipping into the Latham Diaries. Being a top cricketer was never an option for me and Mark has convinced me that I chose well by not going into politics.
The Beginners Guide also discusses both the challenge and the importance of communicating science. The visual media have the edge in some senses with programmes like Catalyst doing an excellent job.
The single media experience that gave me the most satisfaction was when I recently initiated a new sub-science of fruit immunology during the course of a televised conversation with Andrew Denton. I can thank The Enough Rope production team for that. If I'd known how effective bananas, oranges and toothpicks can be as an informational tool I would have written parts of my book a little differently and I might even have called it Fruits of Science.
Talking with journalists can be a challenge and I wondered for a time why it was that the discussion would often seem to drift off into sport idioms. Now I understand.
Some four hundred and sixty Australian journalists are accredited full time to the AFL. By contrast, the number of candidates for the Health Science and Journalism Award has increased from ten to eighteen to thirty-two over the last three years.
A conversation with an editor from The Australian recently at a dinner led us to suspect that there may be about fifteen science journalists employed full time by the major Australian newspapers.
Of course we missed out those name columnists whose insights into subjects like global warming for example clearly surpass anything that anyone in the National Academy of Scientists happens to know. So we've got to add those infallibles to the list and that brings us up to twenty or so.
I talk a little bit about science in the Guide and environmental science and suggest the idea of an international King Canute Day observance that reminds those in power that they don't have the power to control the tides and that they will be judged by history.
I've just made my first visit to South Korea and was interviewed by a senior journalist from the largest daily Dong-A Ilbo which has a circulation of about 2.2 million. That's about twice the circulation of the New York Times which is the only real national newspaper in the United States apart from Immunology – from whatever it is today that television thing that's awful.
The perceptive discussion focussed particularly on some points that I'd made years ago about the importance of reading to very young children. It was printed at length, though it was in Korean so I couldn't read it but it looked alright. South Korea has a sixty percent participation rate in higher education compared with about twenty-eight percent in Australia. Starting with nothing fifty years ago, the 50 million South Koreans built Samsung, LG and Hyundai to name their top three companies. Talking to their scientists, a lot of their research support comes from these industrial giants. If you look at the brand names in your stores, on the streets and in your households, you'll find many of these names. Think about the 1.4 billion Chinese.
Visiting both these countries over the past year has certainly not made me feel very relaxed and comfortable, in fact it's been a bit scary.
Even so, we should not despair but building on our strengths and by targetting niche areas Australia can and does compete in the high technology sector. The examples of the bionic ear, the ResMed mask for preventing sleep apnea, the anti-influenza drug Rilenza and the new papilloma virus vaccine that prevents cervical cancer in women are well known.
These Australian inventions were all made when our business, science, venture capital type strategies were much less evolved than they are now. This is a developing area and it's going ahead very quickly.
We should also take note of the fact that biology is much more complex than electronics. Simplistic solutions don't necessarily work. As entrepreneurs in the USA have discovered, the biological and biomedical sciences that will drive a great deal of discovery and innovation through the twenty-first century are often idiosyncratic and unpredictable. They're not necessarily susceptible to just throwing enormous amounts of money at the problem.
As I discussed in the Beginner's Guide, much of what is happening for instance in the US drug industry results from discoveries in university research laboratories funded by Federal investigator, initiated grants. This leads in turn to the development of small biotechnology companies, the best of which are often absorbed by the industry giants. Increasingly, big farmer is simply buying the intellectual property and spinning off its own biotechnology operations.
We can compete in this world of developing the initial intellectual property and when it comes to building new devices, we certainly have the right engineering and electronic skills to construct specialised equipment.
Did you know that the highest rating ABC TV programme isn't Denton, it's The New Inventors. The breadth of innovation in this country is impressive and it certainly isn't at all the case that it's all at the high technology end of the spectrum.
In addition, we have in the medical sciences a well established and expanding clinical trials capacity while our publicly funded health system provides a terrific data base.
Given our national strength in molecular science, the translation research based in understanding protein/protein interactions, to promote drug development is one area where we have a very good chance of being highly competitive.
The new Synchrotron will be a very key factor in this enterprise.
Despite the small size of our population and our manufacturing base, Australia is very much in the race to build a substantial knowledge based economy. We currently have two universities that rank within the top one hundred worldwide. Some of the others are not so far behind. Everyone in the education research community looks forward to the time when the current tensions between universities and government have been substantially resolved and we again move forward to increase investment, both public and private, in these institutions that are so important for our future.
Competitive investigator initiated peer reviewed research grants are a proven way of promoting excellence in universities. The two principle Australian granting agencies are the Australia Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.
I got a first hand look at the ARC from being a member of the soon to be defunct advisory board and am very impressed with the professionalism of the operation. The NHMRC is adopting a somewhat similar organisational structure. Both are doing a terrific job of networking the Australian science community nationally so that we get the biggest bang for the buck from the available dollars. This is one thing that we've done in Australia incredibly well and I think we've done it better than any other country.
The ARC and the NHMRC benefited from an effective doubling of their budgets during the tenure of the Howard Government. Clearly nothing happens in Australian Federal politics without a Minister who champions the cause and the full support of the man who may just be the most powerful ever Australian Prime Minister. Apart from John Howard we have to thank Brendan Nelson and Robin Batterham for seeing through the ARC increase and they followed the earlier efforts of Michael Wooldridge and Peter Wills with the NHMRC.
The consequence is that Australian research remains internationally competitive and though we're still well down on the OECD tables for when you take the total research budgets in this country. We need to continue to upward momentum and to be much more proactive in our efforts to expand the knowledge and innovation sector.
The media has to be on side if there is to be any substantial change. Perhaps the best comprehensive statement I've read concerning the need for Australia to invest more in higher education and innovation was made by Rupert Murdoch. In the inauguration he gave in honour of his father the fiesty journalist and newspaper proprietor Keith Murdoch. He gave the first of those orations. I was privileged to give the second which was what caused me to read what he wrote and it was extremely good. It would be great to see the Murdoch press promoting his education and innovation message through particularly the tabloids that reach so many Australians.
Science is about opportunity, both for people and for society. As a grandparent, what concerns me more than anything else is the thought that we could possibly fall into the trap made by many rich countries through history of failing to invest enough in our people and our long term infrastructure. Largely due to the extraordinary economic expansion in China we have been enjoying a time of enormous prosperity. This won't go on forever but it does give us the breathing space to enhance mechanisms and opportunities and cultural dynamism that will encourage the most able young Australians both to achieve and to develop their full potential here.
I don't think there's anyone who could possibly wish otherwise, no matter what side of the political spectrum they find themselves on.
This is a great and fortunate country but there are no guarantees. Surely none of us are happy with the idea that the long term Australia scenario could be to be a mine, a farm, a surf beach, a tourist destination, and a golf course for powerful neighbours to the north.
Though we may set up the biggest investment fund in the world, we will ultimately fail if we do not also foster our human capital. It's surely better to seize the day and to invent our own future than to be victims in someone else's game. Read my book.
Chair: Thank you very much Professor Doherty. As usual we have some questions from our media members. The first today is from Simon Gross.
Question: Simon Gross Science Media and The Canberra Times. I'd like to harp back to Nobel Prizes and other research perhaps in the past, done in the past rather than the future. As you're probably aware the John Curtin School where you and Rolf Zinkernagel did your work, over thirty years ago now I just, I realise, is to be knocked down within the next two years. I gather from my conversations with Professor Frank Fenner, the former Director of the School that there's a bit of a growing notion to preserve or conserve something to do with the School. I wonder if you could talk about, think about, anything that you see worthy of preserving from the building and perhaps to put it in context could you discuss or compare and contrast the molecular biology lab of the past and what you see the molecular biology lab of the future will be?
Peter Doherty: Well, the building itself has always been a terrible building actually. It was jerry built and the guy who built it left the country shortly afterwards. It was so bad that when they first turned on their innovated air-conditioning system it blew everything off the benches and they never used it again. So it was unheated and uncooled and all the – it was heated but uncooled. It was a real struggle to keep it going so bringing it down is very good decision. It's got a lot of asbestos in it and all sorts of things. Unfortunately there's not necessarily the money to fully rebuild it at this stage. We'd love to see more funding coming from government, from philanthropy, wherever it can come from to really rebuild it to its magnificence. I'm not talking about its physical magnificence, I'm talking about its intellectual magnificence.
What they could preserve from it, I'm not sure. Our, our little lab was right opposite the ladies toilet I recall and it, it didn't change in twenty years. I hadn't seen it for twenty years, I went back and nothing had changed. It's a different style of research. It was the style of research where someone worked with one or two people and that was it. Now we work in much bigger groups. So it's really ancient history.
What could we preserve from it? That's a very good question. There's a very nice staircase at the front which has these vertical bars, that could be preserved. And there's a picture of me and Zinkernagel behind that staircase so that you look through the bars to see us and someone said at last they got those bastards behind bars. So I'm not sure what you'd preserve but there are, there are some iconic things. There were little corells in the library where I wrote the papers that won us the Nobel Prize for instance.
Chair: .molecular?
Peter Doherty: Molecular biology. Well it's science, it's change. We just built the new Bio21 Institute in Melbourne where the whole floor is one enormous laboratory. Not little boxes that are all closed off and people like to work in these spaces. They're very interactive, very flexible. You need flexibility in modern science, things change very, very quickly indeed. One of the problems with the John Curtin School structure was it was like an H and each of the Professors sat at one of the arms at the ends of the H and if you, if you started to walk down one of the corridors you almost feel you needed to carry a weapon to defend yourself because you were trespassing into alien territory and it was not a good building for interaction.
Chair: Next question's from Hedley Thomas.
Question: Professor Doherty, Hedley Thomas from the Courier Mail. You mentioned earlier the need for structural reform in public health and I just wondered if you were Australia's Prime Minister where would you start?
Peter Doherty: Well I'd get some very good advice because it's an extraordinarily complex issue and I'm not suggesting he doesn't have good advice but the problem is of course the division between the State and the Federal responsibilities which is problematic for some many things that we have in Australia and it's you know goes back to the nature of our, of our democracy really. It's – I'm not as informed as I could be on those issues. One of the things that's problematic is for instance the enormous financial pressures that hospitals now find themselves under and one of the difficulties is maintaining the medical research activity in those hospitals and what we really need to be able to do is for the research institutions, the research departments and universities and the research institutes to be actually able to buy back the time of the young medical practitioners in those institutions, otherwise we're going to lose a lot of our medical scientists of the future. So that's an issue that needs to be addressed and I'm not sure, quite sure how we'd do it. You could do that through NHMRC budgets though for instance. Actually co-ordinating the whole system and bringing it all together? I'd look forward to reading your articles on it Hedley.
Chair: A question from Robert Drane.
Question: Professor Doherty, Robert Drane from Focus Magazine. Are you happy with the way the progress if that's what it is of the Avian flu pandemic if that's what that's become, is being reported?
Peter Doherty: I'm pretty happy the way, about the way it's being reported. Of course we have various types of media in this country, some of which depend on, to getting attention, they depend more on sensationalising things than others. On the whole it's been reasonably responsible. From what I've seen I've been interviewed many times about it. We work on influenza. I've spoken in various formats, I've spoken Monday at a format of the Lowy Institute in Sydney where they were trying to do it strategic economic mapping on the effect of the possible outbreak. Extremely difficult to do because of the enormous variability and possible scenarios. On the one hand we have predictions that you could have enormous numbers of deaths. On the other hand there's the possibility that nothing will happen at all. I think it's been very well handled in Australia. I think we got early into stockpiling drugs. We're moving very rapidly to develop a vaccine. There's been a lot of discussion. The Minister Tony Abbott has been, has gained everyone's respect for the way that he's involved himself with this issue. I think we've done it very well. We just don't know what'll happen though. I mean it requires a mutation or a reassortment of the virus before it starts to spread in humans. We don't know that that will happen. But we just have been able to look at the 1918 and 1919 virus which killed at least 40 million people worldwide in a situation where we had no jet planes and a third as many people on the planet and reconstructing that virus from people who were frozen at that time because we couldn't isolate the virus but they've reconstructed the people – the virus from people who were frozen up in Alaska and so forth – we find that it's probably an Avian virus, a bird virus that's mutated. So, and there are at least two other instances through the last century where the major strains have come across into the human population from birds. So it's a risk. It's a real risk. I think it's being taken very seriously. Partly it's being taken very seriously because of what's happened with SARS. You know SARS cost for 800 deaths, SARS cost at least 20 Billion dollars in lost economic activity in the various countries.
Chair: Laurie Wilson
Question: Laurie Wilson, I'm a Director of the National Press Club. You mentioned the two universities, or there were two universities that are in the world's top one hundred, one of those of course is the ANU and it continues to be praised for the standards that it's achieved and maintained. There've been suggestions at a very senior political level that perhaps we should move towards an amalgamation of the ANU's research activities and the CSIRO. The CSIRO of course is in an ongoing sense a point of contentious discussion about whether it's really heading in the right direction. I'm wondering what you think about the suggestion of a possible amalgamation and what you think generally about the CSIRO and how it's going?
Peter Doherty: I – they are rather different cultures with rather different mandates. The CSIRO has its problems, I mean it's been given an increasingly applied mandate and a lot of the things that it did in the past of sort of monitoring the Australian natural environment and so forth have been very much put on the back burner. I think what is good is to site CSIRO laboratories on university campuses or right next door to them and have very good interactions. My personal perception about research institutes and most of my career has been spent in research institutes is that they are better independent and not controlled by a university but in the ambit of the university so that they have access to graduate students and the university has access to their resources for teaching both at the graduate and under graduate level. You don't have to formally amalgamate them. I would think it's not a good idea to formally amalgamate a university with a CSIRO lab but I think having them work together and co-operate is very good. I don't believe in mega constructs in general. I think, I have a much more or I would have thought it was a sort of a liberal view of the world that, that smaller interactive units are much better than topped out administered rigid structures and one of the problems with CSIRO has always been its administrative structure.
Chair: Peter Levelle.
Question: Peter Levelle from ABC Health on Line Professor. I wanted to ask you is it a problem that these days so many of our scientific and medical studies, research studies, are funded by and underwritten by, pharmaceutical companies who may or may not have the right or the ability to interpret the results of these studies and have a say in how and where they're published? Is this something that we should be considering?
Peter Doherty: It is an added level of complexity but the fact of the matter is that we're never going to bring a drug to market or get it adequately tested without the pharmaceutical company. There's no way that you can afford to bring a drug forward. It costs at least 500 Million to a Million – to a Billion dollars now to get a drug licence from discovery to, to application. I think the drug companies must be watching that very carefully and making sure that they're behaving well including – considering what happened with the [indistinct], the Vioxx and so forth. Because if it's found later that somebody in some process in science skewed the data or wasn't completely up front and then it results in a disaster then the financial implications for those companies can be enormous and so, it is a tension, it's a tension I find in, just in the normal research activity whereas we used to just call up Fred and Merc or somewhere and they'd send us a bit of drug or they'd send us something, now we have to get agreements between the two institutions because all the institutions believe, the research institutions believe somehow there's going to be some intellectual property that's going to earn them vast amounts of money, usually nonsense in fact. But it's become much more complicated. I've often actually sort of instituted interactions with someone in a drug company and then by the time we got all the approvals through we both lost interest in the project and it's never done.
Chair: David Rowe.
Question: David Rowe from The Age Professor. Thank you for your fascinating address. Our stem cell, and, or I should say our reproductive – our cloning and embryo research laws are being reviewed at the moment by the Lockhart Committee. It looks as if the real hot spot is going to be the question of whether or not we allow therapeutic cloning as distinct from reproductive cloning. This seems to have good backing from the States but it might get a rougher time in the Federal arena. We know that some of our Senior Ministers, Federal Ministers oppose it quite strongly. What would you urge those Ministers to do?
Peter Doherty: Well you know as a scientist I'd go ahead with them because that's the way I see the world. I wouldn't presume to advise, advise politicians on this, apart from purely giving the scientific advice that I might have if I was specialised in that area. These areas are so sensitive that we have to have input from the whole community from the religious groups, from ethical people and so forth who often happen to be identical through religious groups it seems, but I think we need broad community input. I think there is potential in the whole therapeutic cloning area but I'm not specialised in that area. In fact I'm very glad to work on infectious disease which is much less contentious and most people are happy to not die from pneumonia or something. And also I think the other thing one has to bear in mind with stem cell research is that this is a very, very long term prospect that we're talking about. If we take Ian Fraser's papilloma vaccine which is a very straight forward technology, it's taken fifteen years to bring that out to be a product. So if we're talking about the support that Australia's giving to stem cell research, we're thinking about a very long term strategy indeed.
Chair: Sheryl Taylor.
Question: Sheryl Taylor from Channel Nine News Professor. You mentioned that Australia's well down the OECD league table for research. To what extent and how much more do we need to spend in Australia? What does it mean that we are not at that level? What is Australia missing out on?
Peter Doherty: Well Australia – where Australian misses out in research spending particularly is in the research stemming from the private sector. And that's because we simply don't have a very big high technology private sector and that's where we lose out a lot. So the question is really if we're going to compete – where do the dollars come from? And it does tend to always fall back on the public sector. So what you see in Australian public sector funded research is a lot more effort to try and get practical outcome than you would for instance in the United States or in Europe where you've got much more industry development. So it's a difficult act, but I think it's well spent money no matter where it comes from and I hope we can get resources in, more resources in from the Government. There is, I think, the Grant Report on medical research that looked very closely at what we were doing and what could be spent and what would actually bring us up. I think it's actually the public sector research level in that area. But I'm not expert on medical research funding. I haven't been following it tremendously closely of late. I've actually been talking about bird flu ...and trying to sell my book.
Chair: Next question's from Mark Metherall.
Question: Mark Metherall from The Sydney Morning Herald Professor. You spoke about what you saw in China as being scary, so what scared you? And then later referred to our need to be more, develop a more knowledge based community or education process. Are these two things linked? What is scary in China and does that link to.?
Peter Doherty: Well China, I mean it's a massive country and if you take the overall country of course they're starting from overall from a lower base but they are putting enormous amounts of money into expanding their university sector and if you talk to the young people, there's enormous enthusiasm for science and science related activity. We are getting very good at science graduate students for instance at the University of Melbourne so there are certainly a number of young Australians who are still committing to science careers. But I think it's just the amount of energy and drive that's going into that sort of area and I think it fits particularly well with their culture as well. That also is the case in South Korea. I think the dynamic driven very focussed type of activity fits with their way of life. Singapore also. I mean Singapore is a country that has no natural resources whatsoever. We had a discussion recently, Singapore science policy is driven by people with engineering qualifications who are well in the science type area. We had a discussion recently in Melbourne where, where one of the men that's driving that said we're going to put, I forget how many Billion dollars it was, into molecular science. And someone said well aren't you worried that it may not work for you? And he said well yeah that's true but what else would be do with the money.
I think we should be very careful about what we're doing. We should look and use very targetted types of research delivery models. I think investigator initiated peer review grants are a very good way of doing it. That's probably some of the best reviewed and best spent money that Australia puts out from the public sector. I think also we can plan to be very active and effective in some targetted areas and we're doing a lot of that sort of strategic planning and so forth. In their overall analysis we can no doubt do with more resources. But the Australian science enterprise is, is boiling along quite well. What worries me a bit is young people getting started out as independent scientists and also I think we've still got far too many bright young Australians out of the country who can't see long term career prospects back here. We've done well with some of those people, bringing them back on Federation scholarships and, but, we could do a lot more of them.
Chair: Next question's from Danielle Cronin.
Question: Professor, Danielle Cronin from The Canberra Times. I just wanted to ask you who you thought was the greatest Australian researcher not to win a Nobel Prize and why they deserved it?
Peter Doherty: There are two in fact that we always talk about. There's Don Metcalf from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for his work on the colony stimulating factors. An enormous amount of work, very systematic, has had very big commercial application but unfortunately we were so unsophisticated at the time he was doing that work that Australia didn't capture the intellectual property and we don't get much return from it. And that's talked about constantly and we're certainly not going to make that mistake again. So he's, he's someone, I would, all of us would have loved to see get the Nobel Prize. He won every other prize but you know there are so few Nobel Prizes. There's only one a year. We've had – Australians have shared in five of the ninety-five Nobel Prizes in medicine which is a pretty good record.
The other person is Jacques Miller, also from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute who we, many of us thought would win the Nobel Prize for the work he did on finding out what the thymus does, the organ in the neck that, canalizes the immune system and that hasn't happened. We still keep nominating him in fact and we'd love to see it happen but it may be just getting a bit late.
There are not many Nobel Prizes. I mean if you take it over the years, over more than a hundred years, eight hundred individuals have shared in Nobel Prizes and that's in all categories and if you take the Gold Medals that were taken home from the Athens Summer Olympics, there were three hundred taken home from that. So you know, Nobel Prizes are a bit of a lottery really.
Chair: The next question from Peter Phillips.
Question: Professor Doherty, Peter Phillips one of the Directors of the National Press Club. Excellence in Journalism Awards, Nobel Prizes, nation building and chest swelling stuff but as you alluded to on a couple of occasions during your address, national heroes and indeed national anti-heroes still tend to reside in the person or people, persons or people like Steve Waugh and Shane Warne and Mark Latham. I won't specify in which category any of those resides, but this leads into the question. You're addressed it in part already in speaking in reply to Mark Metherall's question. Does the Australian Government, does any Government in Australia do enough to stimulate or to promote or to recognise innovation and excellence particularly in health and in health related research? And on an occasion such as this when we're only six, eight, may be ten weeks away from the commencement of another year's .process and when you've got Parliamentary Secretaries here and people of the ilk of Christopher Pine who will carry these sorts of messages obviously through Ministerial colleagues towards the expenditure of due committee process, if you could get people in Government to listen, what would you say to them about what more and if so how Governments could do? What sort of advice would you give them in terms of the advice which they should get from you about research and.?
Peter Doherty: Well the advice they're getting from the medical research community is we'd very much like to see the recommendations of the Grant report implemented, that's very straight forward and it's all out there. As to increasing awareness about areas like science. I mean Government does what it can. It's the, there are the Prime Minister's prizes, they were extended to the Prime Minister's prizes for science teachers for instance which is a marvellous initiative. We could do more about the universities. We'd all like to see more resources going to the universities but there are various structural problems in the universities that have to be resolved and a lot of that is very difficult. Universities are complex organisms and, and I think, I'm in favour of Brendan Nelson's idea that basically we need to have universities be more specialised, to do somewhat different sorts of things. This is normally the structure in the university system, if you take the University of California system which is the top tier system in California and then you've got a California State system below that, then you've got another system below it so I think specialisation is important. As far as the perception of science in the boarder community goes. I mean I think Government does what it can do but it's got to be much broader than that and it's got to happen through our various cultural type activities, through our media. That's why I've been jumping up and down and trying to keep science on some sort of agenda. A look of people work very hard at that. Very hard at times to get stuff into the media. Sometimes in some ways it's may be it's getting a little bit better. We'd like to see a lot more things in the tabloids for instance and may be we could work a lot harder at that in talking to the editors and the journalists to make sure that the material that they need in the way that it's written is made available to them. But in the end analysis, you know, this year we won Robin Marshall – Robin Warren and Barry Marshall won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. This is the biggest award in science okay. They are the first time that two Australian born citizens have every won a Nobel Prize. It's the first time in thirty years that Australians working in Australia have won a Nobel Prize. And those of you who are in journalism I would ask you how much coverage did this get in your newspapers? Now just think about. Now I know it was covered in the Herald quite nicely and The Age and The Australian. But what happened in that? I don't read all these other papers. What happened? How much was said about it? I have the impression that the horse that came last in the Melbourne Cup and a rather dim lady that they'd bought out here who seemed to be as thick as a plank, got more coverage than they ever did. And you know that's the nature of Australian media. Now the media may say to you well this is what people what to read and we've just seen this big controversy about David Williamson for daring to suggest that may be a little encouragement might be given to people to lift their intellectual horizons just a tiny bit but that's not a proper message to send. They crucified Williamson.
Chair: The next question's from Rohan Baker.
Question: Dr Rohan Baker from the Australian Society for Medical Research and also a Medical Researcher for John Curtin School. Professor Doherty you've alerted a few times to the time lag between when research is done and when the application comes out, whether it be the reward of a Nobel Prize or the taking of the drug from basic research and to the market. Do you think people who formulate policy on medical research funding, perhaps government medical research funding have an appreciation of that time lag or not? And do you think that influences the way that they fund medical research looking for short term outcomes or do they fund enough .longer term medical research?
Peter Doherty: The people I've talked to most in sort of Government are more at the State level actually, the Beattie Government, the Bracks Government in Victoria. I think that's certainly built into their thinking. I expect it's also built into the thinking of our nation Government. I think everyone realises that it's a long term strategy but Governments naturally enough want to see short term solutions. There are some areas of course where you may get much more rapid short term solutions. In the devices area for instance, in diagnostics, vaccine development – you get a much more short term solution. The current influenza vaccines against the H5M1 influenza virus will go from really from starting out to being in production in a year or two should see that through, even with the clinical trials because they're being fast tracked. So, there is a tension between those expectations obviously and of course the nature of our democracy and in fact all the democracies is that the politicians aren't there forever and they may not necessarily be that interested in what happens. So that's why I suggest this Canute Day observance that we can convince them that history is going to judge them. Okay. You know what happened to Oliver Cromwell, Charles II came up the back? I think they, I don't know if they actually did it but he wanted him disinterred and hung, drawn and quartered long after he was dead. You know what politician wants to suffer that?
Chair: Professor Doherty, we have a group of potential Nobel Prize winners from the Canberra Grammar School at the back of the room and they've nominated Bradley Carinarthur to ask you a question.
Question: Bradley Carinarthur from Canberra Grammar School. I'd just to hear a bit about what you see is the future particularly young science students throughout Australia. What branches maybe do you recommend and.?
Peter Doherty: Well, I mean I know biological science much better than .biomedical science. The excitement in biomedical science and molecular science is simply enormous and the potential seems to be limitless and in fact the drug companies in the United States are almost suffering, not so much the drug companies the biological companies like [indistinct] are suffering from an excess of product that they don't necessarily know what to do with. But I think there are also tremendous, tremendous potential for further discovery. There's tremendous potential for working on biological problems say like insect control and all sorts of other things that are not in the medical science area. It's a very exciting time in science and all sorts of people – you shouldn't feel say out of the idea of doing biomedical science if you don't like blood and green stuff and brown stuff and yukky things for instance because we've got biomedical scientists who are now spending all their life in front of a computer screen doing computer – doing rational drug design for instance. There's enormous potential. As to the potential in Australia, it really depends on how much we can build that science business culture. It depends on the support we get from Government and so forth. But there is the fact though that science is an international and globalised activity and there always has been. You know we've got a million Australians outside Australia now, that includes many extremely talented people. We'd love to get a lot of them back. I don't think necessarily that taking a training in science now is necessarily a one way ticket to the northern atmosphere. We have a number of very good people who've made their whole careers here and I think it's – though it is, it is an activity with a degree of risk, I mean if you want a much more risk free life then you become an accountant. It's just the possibility that you might get a bit bored.
I meant there are highly creative accountants but they do tend to end up in prison.
Chair: We've got a lot of them in gaol. Let's go back for a final question today from Simon Gross.
Question: Professor Doherty, I'm going to ask you a personal question on a point of clarification. In your speech you seemed to refer to yourself as a religious believer. That doesn't fit with the text that you handed out. I just wanted to ask you to clarify where you sit on this big issue.
Peter Doherty: I'm not, I expect that when I'm dead I'll be dead, quite frankly. I was brought up in a religious context and went through a religious phase and so forth and I value a lot of the things that I got from that upbringing and I think we're to some extent missing something in society that people don't any longer get a lot of that activity because it did cause people to think about other things than just simply material success and material benefit. But I couldn't at this stage claim to be a religious believer. The way I fake my way out of this is I say that the definition in the First Epistle of St John is God is love and we all believe in love and that's a very satisfactory definition, but my religious friends tell me that doesn't get me into the club at all.
Chair: Thank you very much.
Peter Doherty it's been great to have you back. Thank you very much for this past hour and especially for your contributions to these awards which promote many of the causes that you support and agree with. We'd like you to come back whenever you like. Here's a membership card to get you through the door.
Peter Doherty: Oh! Marvelous. Thank you.
