Looking ahead

Once derided as an antipodean analogue of America's Deep South, Queensland has become a vibrant locus of Deep Thought, re-badging itself as 'The Smart State', and its premier, Peter Beattie is firmly in the driver's seat, giving substance to a potentially empty epithet.

Biotechnology, medical and nanotechnology research are flourishing, and there is no shortage of believers in Beattie's ambition to make Queensland the new centre of gravity for the nation's biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

Interviewed by Australian Biotechnology News this week, a month before he flies to Philadelphia to promote his Queensland at the annual BIO conference, Beattie confessed his passion for biotechnology. "In fact, I'm quite obsessed about it," he said.

He personally took the latest blueprint for the state's economic development, Smart Queensland: Smart State Strategy 2005-2015 to cabinet this year, and says he and his team have been out selling it since its release two weeks ago.

XHEAD:Driving biotech

Beattie is greatly admired in the research community for his drive, and keen interest in medical science and biotechnology.

The state's chief scientist, Prof Peter Andrews, a pioneer of rational drug design in Australia, describes Beattie as "the man providing the leadership for the biotech industry in this country."

Last year, Queensland was the only Australian state to call the bluff of the latter-day eco-fundamentalists of the anti-GM lobby. Beattie refused to take Queensland into the southern-state lockout of genetically modified crops.

Beattie is unquestionably the most biotech-savvy of the state premiers and the least likely to be swayed by what he calls "voodoo religion". He is determined that Queenslanders will reap the health, agricultural and environmental benefits of gene technology.

Among the Smart State initiatives announced last week is a touring 'Biobus' exhibition to explain gene technology and its potential benefits to students and the general community, and to encourage rational debate on the social, ethical and economic issues that proved such fertile ground for the anti-GM movement to sow the seeds of doubt in other states.

"We're just going to continue to educate people and encourage kids to take an interest in biotechnology and the issues," Beattie said. "You can only explain the facts, but in the end, logic doesn't always win over prejudice. In a democracy, it's important that everyone has the right to be wrong."

The anti-GM movement's standard claim that rapacious, multinational life sciences will hold Australian agriculture to ransom if it adopts GM crops will have little force when Queensland begins to deploy new-wave GM crops towards 2010.

With the exception of Bt cotton, the GM crops in the state's development pipeline -- sugarcane, pineapples, banana and papaw -- are all homegrown, and the IP is locally owned.

The Smart State blueprint has provided $1 million for research into biotech-based control of the state's most loathed vertebrate pest, the cane toad -- the anti-GM movement would have difficulty convincing Queensland that a biotech solution is unacceptable.

With support from Beattie's administration, leading academics like UQ vice-chancellor Prof John Hay, and molecular geneticist Prof John Mattick, the director of UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Queensland has been actively poaching some golden eggs from research agencies in the southern states.

Beattie credits Mattick with playing a leading role developing the state's biotechnology strategy; he has also had extraordinary support from a fellow biotech dreamer, Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney.

Through his philanthropic trust, Atlantic Philanthropies, Feeney has gifted AUD$60 million towards development of the University of Queensland's Bioscience Precinct, in three $20 million donations -- one each for the Institute of Molecular Bioscience, the Brain Research Institute, and the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

He leveraged his donations to double the budget for the precinct, by making them conditional upon matching grants from the state government. Beattie readily agreed. CSIRO has also made a substantial investment.

Beattie and Feeney recently visited Vietnam together, where Atlantic Philanthropies is working to build the Asian nation's bioscience research capacity.

Feeney sees Queensland's own burgeoning expertise in biotechnology and medical research contributing to the rapid economic development of tropical south-east Asia, especially through high-tech agriculture.

Beattie describes Feeney as a romantic philanthropist. "He's very interested in things like biotech cures for disease, and improving agriculture through biotechnology.

"We're doing a lot of things in partnership -- what he sees happening in Queensland, he wants to happen in south-east Asia. His dream is very much ours -- our interests dovetail."

Emerging opportunities

Beattie plays down interstate rivalries in the biotech game -- he said Queensland is doing its own thing in biotech, and respects the right of the other states to do the same. Queensland will be happy to collaborate with the other states and New Zealand through the Australia-New Zealand Biotechnology Alliance, but it is also looking north and west to Asia.

He sees Queensland's engagement with the tropical nations of south-east Asia, and India, Korea and China, as a major driver of the state's own economy. 'We're doing a whole lot of things in Asia," he said. "A fair bit of it is agribusiness, but there are many opportunities in emerging markets in China, Japan and India.

"We have research partnerships in Singapore, Japan, Boston and Maryland. That's the future, and I don't really worry about the competition. Australia is such a small player on the world biotechnology stage that there is no room [for the states] to compete.

But the other states may need to lift their game, because the Smart State will be maintaining a cracking pace. "What we're putting into biotechnology is still chickenfeed compared with Singapore, Japan and many other countries," Beattie said.

"What I'd like to do is dramatically increase the number of researchers in Queensland. In Smart State 2, we've talked about a lot of new initiatives, and we've put in another couple of hundred million dollars for new infrastructure, new research initiatives, and building new skills." Under Smart State 2, Queensland will commit at least $473 million in new funding over the next four years to develop its biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

That figure includes more than $200 million to build new research infrastructure and support innovation, and $123 million will be allocated to an Innovation Building Fund to establish new research and innovation institutes and centres of excellence, and to fund major research equipment purchases.

A $12 million Innovation Skills Fund has been set up to attract and retain leading interstate and international researchers to Queensland, provide scholarships to promising young PhD students, create fellowships to young researchers who are developing an international reputation for excellence, and attract senior researchers who are world leaders in their fields.

A $68 million Innovation Projects Fund will support R&D and projects in priority areas such as health, agriculture, biotechnology and nanotechnology. It will match, dollar for dollar, institutional investments aimed at encouraging collaboration between local researchers and their interstate or international peers.

Other funding initiatives will fund expansion of the ethanol fuel industry, and the aquaculture industry, and $7 million has been allocated to a drug manufacture scale-up facility.