One of the winners of Australia’s most prestigious science award has warned that the nation could lose its best and brightest minds to scientific institutions overseas, due to funding cuts.
The concerns were raised by Professor Ingrid Scheffer, who has been awarded the Prime Minister’s prize for science along with her colleague Professor Sam Berkovic for advances in the treatment of epilepsy.
Both researchers are neurologists specialising in the debilitating condition that affects about 50 million people worldwide.
They have linked gene mutations to various forms of epilepsy and then used their discoveries to develop better targeted treatments for their patients.
But Professor Scheffer’s excitement and delight over receiving the award was tempered by her concern about the state of science in Australia.
“Not having a minister for science speaks volumes in itself,” she said.
“The cuts in grants really are a major problem for all the people I work with and I mentor.
“I think this is a huge issue and one that our government needs to address.”
She said cutting funding was “cutting our nose to spite our face” because scientific discoveries saved billions of dollars in the health budget if they led to improvements in care or even cures.
“Undoubtedly science will be curtailed by lack of funding,” Professor Scheffer said.
“We’ll be losing using those bright young minds and growing them into great scientists that make a difference to not just Australia but the whole world.
“(They will) leave science or go overseas to work because they can’t get funding here and they don’t have a good career pathway.”
Science should be our strength: prize winner
Professor Berkovic, from Melbourne University, said Australia was a clever country that already “punched above its weight” in terms of scientific discoveries and that would increase with more funding.
“There’s a lot of great science happening around Australia at all levels and we have the capacity to do a lot more and that should be one of the strengths of our country,” Professor Berkovic said.
“I’m not a financier or an economist, but in terms of competitive strength with other countries I think Australia could do very well by leveraging off its science infrastructure and the ability of its scientists.”
He said the Medical Research Future Fund was “a great initiative” but he was concerned it was tied to the Medicare GP co-payment, which had not yet received crossbench support.
“They should be disengaged as two separate political issues,” he said.
“I would like to see it funded but I think the concerns about a disincentive of people going to the doctor to get their basic healthcare is a real concern, and my own view is that’s not the way to do it.”
Professor Scheffer said that as clinical scientists, they could see how much their own research could help transform patients’ lives.
“We started in an area where people didn’t even think that genes were that important and suddenly we know that genes are really important and we’re still at the tip of the iceberg of what we know there’s so much more to learn,” she said.
“It’s incredibly special and I feel very privileged to look after the families that I look after.
“When you tell a mother of a 28-year-old who has a severe disability, ‘we’ve got the answer’, that mum has been living that for 28 years and she starts crying – it’s really important.
“But I’m really pleased that it’s often beginning to change the way we treat that patient and therefore maybe make an improvement to their outcome.”
Professor Berkovic added that their research into particular genes had also been able to remove the guilt and distress felt by parents who questioned whether they had done something to cause their child’s epilepsy.
He said this was particularly evident when they were able to dispel concerns about ‘vaccine encephalopathy’ – epilepsy seemingly caused by vaccination in infancy.
Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said he understood concerns among researchers about funding.
But he said the Government needed to address the tight budget situation as a result of debt inherited from the previous government.
“Funding in the industry portfolio for science has not been cut and we have continued to expand the opportunities for scientists to be a major part of industry policy,” Mr Macfarlane said.
“In fact we’ve brought science to the centre of industry policy… our goal is to have scientists embedded in industry.”
Mr Macfarlane said while the “headline figure” of a $111 million budget reduction for the CSIRO did exist, the Government had put money back into the organisation and in areas the CSIRO had a strong interest in.
He added that once the budget was back into surplus, there would be more money for science.
“The key for us is to use the scientific smarts that we have in Australia and look at better ways of connecting industries with our universities and our research agencies to find new ways of capitalising on industry strengths,” he said.
Scientists prove vaccinations do not cause epilepsy
Professor Scheffer and Professor Berkovic discovered a gene which causes a severe type of epilepsy called Dravet’s Syndrome, proving that it was not caused by vaccinations but was inevitable for those children with the wrong genetic signature.
“The idea that vaccination could cause this type of epilepsy… created enormous guilt in those families and it actually led to a backlash against vaccination broadly which was bad for society,” Professor Berkovic said.
“There were outbreaks of pertussis (whooping cough) and things like that which were bad, so cracking that problem I think was a very important thing that I’m quite proud of.”
He said he also believed that in the future, they might be able to diagnose epilepsy before the first seizure occurred and prevent them from ever happening.
“The technological advances that have happened in genome science have been absolutely spectacular in my academic lifetime,” he said.
“We have about 3 billion bases, or signals in our DNA, and just one of those 3 billion changes can cause disease if it’s in the wrong gene.
“And finding that one in 3 billion in kind of like finding one brick in (the whole of) Melbourne and you can do it… and now you can do it very very rapidly and that’s incredibly exciting.”
Prize for industry transforming crystals
The four other prize recipients were Professor Ryan Lister, who was named the life scientist of the year, teachers Geoff McNamara and Brian Schiller who received prizes for excellence in science teaching in secondary schools and primary schools respectively and the CSIRO’s Dr Matthew Hill, who received the prize for physical scientist of the year.
Dr Hill did not want to comment on the CSIRO’s budget cut of $111 million but said Australia could look at other high-tech countries like South Korea for inspiration.
“South Korea is a great example of a country that didn’t have all of the natural advantages that we have and it invests about double what we do in research and innovation,” Dr Hill said.
“If you go to South Korea you see Samsung, LG and all of these large tech companies and they’re quite a prosperous nation, so it’s a good model for Australia to consider.”
Dr Hill created crystals which could transform industry.
“They are called Metal Organic Frameworks – or MOFs – and essentially they are … the world’s most porous materials,” he said.
“Just in one teaspoon of these crystals there’s an entire football field of surface hidden inside of it, so if you can imagine you had a sponge and you wanted to soak something up you can soak up amazing quantities of substance into a smaller area very, very quickly.”
Dr Hill said as much as 40 per cent of the energy that was used in industry was devoted to some kind of separation, and the crystals could be used as an efficient filter in a large variety of processes.
“We started in the automotive industry but you can imagine this being used in water purification, defence applications, there’s even some things we’re looking at in space right now for these materials,” he said.
“These are all multi-billion-dollar industries that we’re talking about playing a part in, who knows how big that part’s going to be.
“Some of the very first things that we’re doing are on timelines of around three years to produce products but more likely it’ll be a few years after that before you’ll see widespread applications of these crystals.”