The voice of reason

Professor Ian Chubb has used his considerable reach as Australia’s Chief Scientist to speak up for the importance of science on our future prosperity and wellbeing.

Australian Life Scientist: How was it that you first became interested in science while growing up on a farm in rural Victoria?

Professor Ian Chubb: Growing up in those early years, when it is just you and your dog and a few adults, you look at the world around you and you wonder why are things like they are? Why do ants do what they do, in the way they do? How well do they do what they do? My parents encouraged me to be curious about how the world worked. In essence, if you’re thinking about how the natural world works, there’s only one place for you to go: science.

ALS: What drew you specifically into neuroscience when you started studying in the 1960s?

IC: It was partly the excitement of the time. It was like we were standing at the front door of house with a long corridor, but we still haven’t got to the back door yet. We still don’t know how the brain works. We still don’t know a lot about how the nervous system develops and how so many things work so well, so often, for so long.

For a person who was encouraged from an early age to be naturally curious, and to question, this was a great unknown. Then I met people whose interests were in neuroscience and whose enthusiasm infected me, probably still to this day. Although, of course, I’m now a real amateur. I’m a long way from the frontier.

ALS: What do you enjoy about the process of discovery?

IC: The enjoyment is really the pitting of your ideas and your interpretations of evidence against the ideas and interpretations of others. I’ve said many times to students: there’s nothing quite like the thrill of designing an experiment that works how you want it to work and reveals something being seen for the first time in the world.

You’re accumulating evidence, you’re unpicking it, you’re questioning it. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking like that; that you don’t take too much at face value so you question it. The basic enjoyment of the hunt is trying to learn more, trying to understand better, trying to be as accurate as you can, as careful as you can.

But not being too risk averse. My view is that good scientists take risks, but they understand and manage the risk. They don’t just sit back and say ‘I won’t do this or that because it mightn’t work.’ You try to get better at making sure it does work.

I also enjoy the process itself. The constant questioning of data, of information, of evidence. Of not taking things as they’re presented to you until you understand how they were determined. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking like a scientist in whatever it is I’ve been doing. I hope my colleagues agree!

ALS: After two decades working in the lab, you made your move into academic administration. Do you ever yearn to get back into the lab?

IC: The answer to that is: no. Basically because I’d be a very sad old man by now if I were lamenting that move. But I do like talking to people who are still in the lab. And I still like to see the fire in the spirit of the young researchers who are coming through and who are looking at the world as I look at it, or used to.

I also like to engage with even younger people who are looking at the options that are available to them. I was talking to a group recently at the National Youth Science Forum - they’re in senior secondary school - and these are bright, talented, interested young people who want to do something good. And that’s good for Australia: when people are really engaged with the issues and want get into the substance of them. It’s a bit like reading a book: you read all of each chapter, not just the chapter headings. But there are a lot of people in this world who read the chapter headings and think they know everything there is to know.

Talking to these young people is one of the great starts to the calendar year. I’ve done it for 10 years or so and I’ve always enjoyed it. You get buoyed and boosted by seeing such levels of enthusiasm and I enjoy talking to them and encouraging them.

ALS: Why did you undertake the move from the lab into more administrative roles?

IC: I’m happier when I’m being stretched. I like thinking: can you do that, can you reach that, can you do better? I remember sitting in my backyard in Adelaide when I was turning 40, and I said to my wife that life had to be harder than this. I had a job teaching medical students, and medical students were for the most part highly intelligent and highly motivated, so they were easy to teach. I had a good research lab, I had a lot of funding. So I can indeed remember saying life has got to be harder than this. And I found that to be true, if still enjoyable.

Shortly afterwards there was a job advertised for deputy vice chancellor at the University of Wollongong. At the time I was at Flinders and had taken on more roles, such as chairing the research committee, and had grown up through the library committee and the various other roles academics accept.

The University of Wollongong had one of the very best vice chancellors that Australia has had - Ken McKinnon - and he was looking for someone like me. He was the best mentor I could have had at that stage of my career. He offered me the job, I did it, I grew and, basically, here I am.

ALS: You have made a number of public comments about scientific literacy and science education. How important is it to have a scientifically literate population today?

IC: I think it’s critically important. People are being asked to make increasingly important choices within increasingly complex issues. I’d feel much more secure if we had people who were making better informed choices. You can think of a whole host of things, from vaccination, to medical advice, to advice from the pharmacist etc, where we are better off both individually and as a community if we can sit back and make a reasonably informed decision.

Most people won’t be as expert as a professor of clinical medicine, but if they can ask the right question - like why are they recommending this one and not that one - it is a step towards making the community better for all of us. I think we’re letting ourselves down by not pursuing that broader education early enough in our education process.

Not that I want everybody to study science. I think it would be horrible to be in a world populated exclusively by scientists and engineers and mathematicians. I like the fact that there are people who engage with the social sciences and the humanities who are also contributing to questioning, advancing knowledge through information and evidence and rational debate.

ALS: Does science education today imbue students with a critical eye as well as it does the more technical aspects of science?

IC: The science students themselves need to have their content, or technical, knowledge put into a context. The context is the process of science - how it is conducted, how it is based, its ethics and the like. The content is important, but it is thinking like a scientist that the individual carries through their life - long after much of the content knowledge has been replaced by newer information, evidence and knowledge.

Overall, I don’t think we do it as well as we should, for the community. The fact that we don’t do that well is illustrated by the way science is questioned by people without a science background. They ask why scientists can’t give them certainty. Well, any self-respecting scientist will always be talking about a probability, because they know in the experimental observational sciences we very rarely deal with certainty. There’s always room for questioning.

You accumulate evidence and you work with an increasingly high level of probability, and it’s not wrong, it’s not weak. It’s not throwing great doubt onto an issue simply because a scientist says it’s highly likely that climate change, for example, is caused by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that it comes from human activity. That will always be a probability. We will never get to 100%, but if the experts agree that it’s better than a 95% chance, we should listen.

To see two people having an argument about that last 5% does not mean that one is wrong. That’s how science works. There’s evidence, you draw your conclusions, somebody else draws a slightly different conclusion, but it’s still based on evidence rather than belief or hearsay. And they will debate that, sometimes quite robustly. I think that’s good, and that should happen, and it should be obvious that it does happen. The public needs to understand that it is a part of the scientific process.

ALS: What are some of the hurdles to overcome in making science attractive to high school students?

IC: I think we need to make it interesting. All the evidence I’ve read shows that we, like many countries, have tended to focus a lot on the content and much less on making the process obvious. My view is that science ought to be taught more like it’s practised. The practice of science is compellingly interesting. The teaching of science can be unbelievably boring - memorising the elements on the periodic table is not the most intellectually stimulating thing you can do. However, students like field work, or laboratory work, or practical science. In a way I was doing field work from the age of three.

Part of the public debate hints that if you teach science interestingly, you’re dumbing it down. That’s ridiculous. If you teach science interestingly, you’re encouraging people to engage with science. Some of them might not go on to become a scientist, but they’ll know how science works. When they see an argument about climate change or vaccination or antibiotic resistance, they won’t be an expert in the field, but they’ll understand why the debate is taking place in the way that it is.

A recent survey done by the Australian Academy of Science showed that a vanishingly small proportion of students not studying science thought it useful to their future. About half think it’ll never be of use. Yet they put down their smartphone they paid for with plastic - card or banknotes - to answer the questionnaire. Science is everywhere, and there are a whole lot of people who think it’s nowhere. That is sad.

ALS: University funding has long been a contentious issue in Australia. Do you think universities are sufficiently funded by the government?

IC: Government does have a role to play. It gets down to the fact that anyone with talent should not be denied the top level of education they can achieve. And you can’t leave that process to individuals.

Australia has spent too much of its early history not sufficiently supporting public access to education of high quality. The idea that if you want it, you can pay for it is not where I would like it to go. That’s to our country’s disadvantage.

I think that people with talent should be able to achieve at the highest level, and it ought not cost them an arm and a leg to get there. That’s a real part of government responsibility to make sure that price does not preclude.

ALS: What legacy would you like to leave after your tenure as Chief Scientist?

IC: I’d like to see science up front and centre in the community’s mind. I would like to see people pushing their local politicians and reminding them of how important science is to Australia’s future. How important science is to Australia’s place in the world.

When we talk about food security and engagement with our region, a lot of that engagement will be through work of our scientists. I’d like to have the work we do educating people from countries in our region much more front and centre.

I’d like to think that some - maybe even most! - of the advice we give has been adopted, and that there are changes through our science that position Australia well in a sometimes hostile world. And if I thought I had no influence, I wouldn’t be here.

Professor Ian William Chubb, AC, was appointed Australia’s Chief Scientist on 19 April 2011. He has an MSc, DPhil (Oxford), Hon DSc (Flinders), Hon DLitt (CDU), Hon DUniv (ANU), Hon LLD (Monash). He has served as the Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University, Vice Chancellor of Flinders University and Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor of Monash University. He has also worked as a research scientist in the neurosciences with over 70 publications to his name.