Robyn Williams
Robyn Williams is a science journalist and broadcaster. He has hosted ABC Radio National's The Science Show since 1975.
This is the somewhat outrageous way I opened The Science Show late last year:
“Let me ask you a question that I’ve annoyed dozens with over the years. What did Henry Sutton do in Ballarat in 1885?”
The answer? He invented television. Wow, say some in response, that’s amazing! Others are disbelieving. I was somewhat at first. So, I sent the question to Mark Dodgson, Professor of Innovation at the University of Queensland and Imperial College in London. His answer:
“I have no hesitation in claiming Henry Sutton is Australia’s greatest ever inventor and is indeed one of the greatest inventors the world has ever seen.
“The range of his inventiveness is extraordinary, including in lighting, batteries, telephony, and wireless telegraphy, photography, flight, microscopy, and car engines, yet he remains shamefully unheralded.
“Admired and befriended by some of the greatest scientists of his time, such as Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell, his achievements are largely unrecognised.”
And the issue, the incredibly important one, is not just Sutton, but scores of scientists in Australia, doing work that changes our lives for the better, are shamefully unrecognised by the public. So what?
Well, there is always a bigger story involved in each case. For Sutton you need to ask “why would Alexander Graham Bell” want to sail from the USA to see a fellow in regional Victoria and why, if Sutton was world famous then is he unknown now? The answer is Sutton did his work for the public good as most scientists do – there were no patents, accolades or statues set up. It was good work for the community.
Much the same could be said for most of my Top 100. So why list them? Why not leave them in their ancient mists of modesty, while we just make the most of our alternative celeb culture, festooned with it as we are? Lots of reasons:
- We are submerged in fake news, some a result of the electronic towers of Babel drowning us in data, some from mischievous and crooked trolls. It’s the observation of the Cosmos newsroom that people tend to give greater trust to work done by scientists they know of personally.
- The best scientists always have an interesting aspect of their work that helps us recall it usefully. Think Sutton’s offering it gratis; think Sir John Cornforth, NSW’s only scientific Nobel Prize winner who was deaf from birth. Courage!
- Amid the dire examples in the daily news of misery, murder and mayhem, scientists have a constant record of achievement. Remember that resounding standing ovation of the 2,500 crowd at Wimbledon last year when it was announced that Professor Sarah Gilbert of Oxford who led the team producing the first effective COVID vaccine was in the front row? Remember David Flannery of QUT in The Science Show revealing he was one of those steering the Mars explorer in search of life? Magnificent!
- These are the role-models we need to inspire our youngsters to do well at STEM. Beyond the poor funding, apparently tough academic path, we need to show excited, fulfilled human examples whom kids can emulate.
But aren’t scientists just dweebs in dark rooms shuffling strange numbers and stranger hieroglyphs? Compared to whom? What does dynamic James Bond do when not killing people or breaking speed limits unnecessarily? He smokes, gambles, and talks tosh. Bond’s name, by the way, comes from an ornithologist in the West Indies where Ian Fleming lived. If only Bond had stuck to real birds! Just look at those boffins Attenborough talks to: cheerfully diving, flying, cuddling koalas.
Then there is the crucial question of real wealth creation. Did you see one of my Top 100, Professor Martin Green of UNSW, accepting the million-dollar prize for engineering from King Charles in 2023? Green has held the solar cell efficiency world record for over 30 years! But where are the cells manufactured for your rooftop? Not in Australia.
That is why Professor Michelle Simmons is insisting that quantum computing mustbe developed here. She and Green, by the way, are known as the “silicon twins”, as both did their PhDs in that element. And both, in separate ways, look like bringing trillion-dollar industries being set up to make the world a much better place, not least to give young Australians jobs and a hope of progress.
Why should knowing your boffins make a difference? Well, because it did in China. In brief: it was a fluke of history when Cambridge biochemist, Joseph Needham, was sent to China in 1943 as a diplomat. He had no set role, so he just wandered about, discovering in the process, that in each province visited (rather like the Ballarat example) the locals had invented something vitally important. But no one else knew about it.
Needham returned to Cambridge after the war and wrote a 1000-page book: Science and Civilisation in China. It wasn’t enough – so he wrote six more books! The summary of this work reached China when Deng Xiaoping was leader. It signified the end of the ‘century of humiliation’, from the opium wars through to the end of the civil war. No longer a basket case. Deng recognised his nation had the talents to change and flourish. All this is recorded in Simon Winchester’s thrilling work Bomb Book And Compass.
Could Australia experience the same renaissance if the nation realised its heritage? We can but try. And you don’t have to memorise and recite my improvised list. Just try naming three top scientists where you live.
In my own area, on the south coast of NSW, you wouldn’t imagine there would be many world beaters – but just look at Bert Roberts, Gordon Wallace and Pia Winberg.
Who?
Well Professor Bert Roberts and Professor Zenobia Jacobs, with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, explored a cave that showed the first signs of human habitation in Australia. They did the analysis and dating: 65,000 years before present! That figure has gone around the world. It changes utterly our view of who we are.
Professor Gordon Wallace, at the Innovations Campus, University of Wollongong, does 3D printing of body parts. They export ears to India where hundreds of babies are born without them; they print corneas and the scaffolding tissue for muscle and nerves which can thus be repaired. Gordon was named NSW Scientist of the year in 2017.
Dr Pia Winberg takes the carbon dioxide waste from an E10 petrol factory in Bomaderry and bubbles it through two big ponds of water from the Shoalhaven River to grow seaweed. This goes into foods such as muesli and pasta AND is sent to Prof Fiona Wood in Perth to integrate into her skin treatments.
One small part of this deeply scientific continent. And, just think: if Tom Cruise saved 12 lives in his last Mission: Impossible movie, then Australian Nobel laureate Howard Florey, from Adelaide, saved 400 million. At least. Yet hardly any students at ANU, which he helped set up, have ever heard of him.
