Project Shelter Podcasts
2008-09-04 Chris West
In Conversation
Just over two years ago Dr Chris West left London Zoo to come to Adelaide. Why give up the directorship of such a famous menagerie to come to South Australia? Dr West explains - and describes some of their far-reaching experiments at Adelaide Zoo, including putting themselves in cages! TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation this time coming from the zoo in Adelaide, a capital city with Australia´s smallest zoo but it´s twinned with Monarto Zoo an hour away which is Australia´s largest. It´s gigantic and in charge of both of them is Chris West who left London Zoo about two years ago to come south. Some might wonder about such a move and we´ll come to that but Dr West is also editor of a major book now published by Cambridge on Zoos of the 21st Century. Well Chris, here you are settled in - how´s it been? Chris West: Oh it´s been great fun, time has flown and yet I think an awful lot has been packed into it. It´s a great team, wonderful people, lots of passion, quite a lot of eccentricity and a real focus on conservation and that´s probably been the main thrust and theme of the story over the last year or so. Robyn Williams: What do you mean - eccentricity? Chris West: Oh, just that they are so focused and passionate sometimes about a particular species or their particular part of the zoo, the closeness of the bond, the relationship say between some keepers and great apes. Is a wonderful thing but it can lead to people being slightly unworldly, other worldly. Robyn Williams: Yes I thought you meant the self caging of the humans - there´s a wonderful experiment that was done, I talked to Carla Litchfield about it where you spent some time, the human beings in cages. That was fun. Chris West: The human zoo - yes I think it was and I think it worked too because we didn´t want it to be taken as a big brother sort of stunt. We wanted it to be a way of demonstrating close kinship between us and other great apes and to inform people in a fun way, and younger people, about that but also about the threats and problems faced by great apes. And we collected a lot of money from people because we attracted a huge audience, huge media interest internationally and we are going to do it again this February because it was such fun. Robyn Williams: It´s amazing that people haven´t done it much before. Chris West: Yeah, one or two people but on a smaller scale. We like to think that when we do things we really go into them and do them properly as it were. So doing it for a month with a psychologist and with the subjects and doing it with some real science in there was different, it wasn´t just here are some people pretending to be animals in an old zoo enclosure. Robyn Williams: Yes, well we´ll come to that with Carla Litchfield. In fact the reaction to being exposed for instance to high temperatures was a surprise to some people. What about the sounds of building going on all around you? Chris West: Well we got used to it and we are going to have to be used to it for another period of time because we´re converting the old ape facility, 1970s ape facility, into a state of the art environmental education centre. We´ve got sponsorship from Westpac bank and we are very grateful and it´ll be partly a school facility, there will be a green roof, fixed tents on that roof and school students will be able to come in and have a program of environmental education. Stay overnight, enjoy the ambient sounds of the zoo and explore it which I think will be wonderful and then the other part of it will be an interpretation centre. And the way that we´ve done this is for it to be interactive, for it to be engaging but also empowering so it´s taking people through a relatively small number of interactive exhibit areas with some animal interest as well but to take people through habitats. Through the recycling of the building, through lifestyle and consumer choices that any individual can make that will help us in the world we are now in, of climate change and over population and so on. And that connection between their lives, Adelaide Zoo, conservation animals in the wild and then something about water, something about global warming and the whole purpose and point of it is not for people to go away feeling shattered, depressed, despondent, the future is awful but that there is something very precious and worthwhile and wonderful and worthy of their support and that they can do something. There has to be some hopefulness involved. Robyn Williams: How do you do that without being didactic? Chris West: Well I think the interaction is crucial so for example we have a day in the life kind of set up where people can put together rather like a story board going through choices in average Joe´s day and he or she can choose what sort of car, whether to go to work, whether to stay at home, sleep, what to eat, all sorts of everyday choices and put this together and it´s rather like electronic tiles so there´s a sequence in the story of their day. And the idea is that they put that together and what comes out is some indication of how happy they´ll be, how rich they´ll be and how green or environmentally friendly they´ll be. And really it´s to engage people with a sense of fun so they can test it, they can say alright I´m going to have to be a car, I´m going to drive really fast, I´m going to beat stuff from overseas I´m going to do all of these things and just see how happy they´ll be, or how non-green they´ll be and ring the changes and make it fun but with that message in there. Robyn Williams: I´m just wondering where the owls come in because I was involved with something at the Australian Museum in Sydney and they had way back, way back a computer program where you could manage the forest and if you made the wrong decision and knocked down too many trees you killed half the wombats. Do you have that kind of take home confrontation? Chris West: Yeah, some of it but what I´ve seen in the past with some of those computer driven interactive devices is they can be very slow and they can be just for one person. So one of the things that we´ve got which I think is very exciting is it´ll be rather like a kinetic water sculpture and it´ll allow four people or more to operate it at the same time. And essentially it will be driven by water, there will be rainfall coming into a chamber, it´s a great big thing right in the centre of the space from floor to ceiling, rainfall fills a reservoir tank and then people can operate valves which will either support the environment, so it´s like normal flow through the Murray and grass will appear and kangaroos will bounce around all done through kinetic design. Or a person can choose to run it through industry so it´ll turn cog wheels and there will be a production line and things will appear and disappear and so it´s industrial production. Or it could be through farming and so there could be sheep grazing, crops appearing through perforated plates and so on. Or it can be domestic so you can fill a bath with a duck floating in it and then empty that bath and things like that. So it´ll actually hold some sort of personal message but four or more people can operate it and can be looking at it and we would anticipate that they´ll either try to find a balance or one of them will try to hog the water so it will be a parable of a metaphor but it´ll be fun but people will go away thinking actually that´s what it is like, we can make choices individually and as a society, do we sustain the environment or do we support industry or farming, or do we continue to be profligate and extravagant with our domestic use of water. And so it´s not meant to be loaded, or didactic, or over-wordy or judgemental, it´s allowing people to explore our choices for themselves. Robyn Williams: It doesn´t sound like any zoo I grew up with way back. Chris West: No, I´m sure that´s true but I think that if we see ourselves as a conservation organisation that is indivisible from being an environmental organisation and having a real society and community and human care and concern to all of those things are intertwined and if we don´t get the ecology and biodiversity right and the environmental stewardship right and the human use of resources right then everything´s stuffed, it is an unholy mess. So I think it´s better to make an explicit linkage between the survival or otherwise of animals in the wild and how we control natural resources and ecology. Robyn Williams: Who´s helping you with that because obviously if people have grown up with zoos and professionals they´re vets, they are looking after the standard stuff whereas that seems to be a sophisticated education and also you are involving lots of other concepts. Are you doing it on your own or with consultants? Chris West: We are getting advice from people who´ve worked with museums but also in the entertainment field but also we´ve recruited and have set up an interpretation department and so that is really following through on the fact that a modern zoo is an education centre; but we want that education to be inter-active and engaging and fun. Another thing we are working with Carla Litchfield on as well as the human zoo is conservation psychology and that´s trying to understand what people think, why they think what they think, and how we can work with that to actually make them change behaviours and be more concerned about environmental conservation issues. And one of the things that´s coming through from research that´s been done largely in the state is you need to have an emotional experience or some sort of value driven experience and that will act as something transformational and after that we can do the factual, rational discussion. But if you don´t offer people something that makes them go wow, or their heart rate to go up, or really be thoughtful about something beautiful, then I think it´s a very passive and transient experience. Robyn Williams: Tell me Chris how much is known about the way in which other people in other countries feel quite differently about animals because I remember if you look back at the history of where you grew up in Britain, I think it´s only 200 years back going back to Black Beauty that people cared at all, an awful lot to make people bother about these creatures whether they are elegant or not. Chris West: I guess the way I tend to look at things and I don´t pretend to be either some sort of social scientist, historian or well versed in cultural diversity across the world now. But my sense is that quite often concern about animals, intrinsic concern about animals in terms of welfare, their ability to suffer or whether as populations or species they are going to survive can be really regarded as something of a luxury. So if you´re living in a wealthy, developed, educated society then you have the time, ability and the where-with-all to have that concern. If you´re living in an environment and have a livelihood that´s marginal then I don´t think that animal welfare or conservation actually has - there´s no space for it. So I suspect going back two or three hundred years into pre-industrial societies there would have been cultural differences but there would also have been less room in people´s lives for that concern. Robyn Williams: Yes, but there are some examples where friends of mine perhaps if they see the picture of the gorilla with the arms and the feet cut off being hauled on some sort of pannier and asked whether they would prefer the gorilla to live or the poachers to live would be quite happy to see the poachers perish. Now that´s not surprising is it these days? Chris West: It isn´t, I don´t know where that sort of thinking leads because I think we have to adopt an approach of you want the poachers to not have to poach and that there is something very valuable and proper and about supporting human existence too. So there was a period when conservation organisations actually were working in a way that was adverse to human rights and tribal rights if you like; and I think we have to move beyond that to balance and sustainability. Having said that the root cause of all of the problems just about that we have at the moment is there are just too many blooming people. Robyn Williams: Six and a half billion yeah. Now in from of me is your book Zoos in the 21st Century and it says catalysts for conservation? That being the thing. You edited this with a number of other people, what´s the main theme of the book and the future? Chris West: The main purpose of that book which followed an international symposium was to do two things. One was to challenge zoos because it´s very easy to have a rhetoric that says we do conservation but do we? Can we measure that, how do we demonstrate that, how authentic is that claim? So part of the purpose is to demonstrate they can be authentic and there are ways of doing that. Another part of it was to tune in to a relatively new world zoo and aquarium conservation strategy which stems from conventional biodiversity and what goes with that. And that had within it the real impetus to shift zoos from a focus or a tradition of looking after animals in captivity in terms of breeding programs and so on, to being a much more integrated partnership and right across the spectrum doing solid science, major education programs, but also supporting work in the field, in the wild because the conservation definition that we used in the book had to do with conservation being achieved in the wild. And that again is an overused phrase but it´s a sort of paradigm shift thing to say zoos are about conservation and conservation is in the wild. So the thrust of that book is to provide the context and the case material across a range of disciplines to do with emerging infectious disease and wildlife epidemiology right the way through to conservation psychology and the genetic reservoir, the basis if you like of zoos, across the whole thing and somewhere integrated and take a zoo audience and community into that cutting edge space and to also demonstrate to skeptics who might be either conservationists, or in the wider world as it were that zoos are serious. Robyn Williams: How do you get on with the skeptics these days because there´s some people who think that zoos should not belong in the 21st century? Chris West: I guess my response is to say and actually we are fellow travellers, we are conservationists and we are about environmental stewardship as well. So we don´t look at zoos in that historic fashion as menageries and purely for recreation and entertainment. Look at zoos as in some may call the wrong reasons because these things are going the wrong way, the wild is shrinking and biodiversity is collapsing, ecology is facing catastrophes left, right and centre. Look at zoos as two things - one a field hospital to try to secure some future for these dwindling populations of critically endangered animals and do research on them. And the other thing is really a centre for public awareness, many zoos are in urban centres and they have a huge audience and if they can help transport that audience´s attitudes into some semblance of empathy and concern about the natural world then that possibly is the greatest service that zoos can provide. Robyn Williams: Yes, but services cost and the worry is in Australia if you look at museums and some zoos the scientists that you require to do all this stuff are remarkably absent. You know you´ve got the displays and you´ve got the front of house stuff which costs a lot of money to get the people in, to look after them, and getting the scientists in to do more than a token bit, costs a few quid. How are you going to fund that? Chris West: Well I can speak for Zoos South Australia initially anyway, we are expanding and extending our scientific programs and we do that by looking at projects that are of real value, they are of applied value for conservation but they are of science value too. We act as an industry partner for linkage grants with local universities, and lots of local universities so the number of joint grants that we´re receiving is going up year by year. We are developing a critical mass of scientists who are part of our team who will range from clinical psychology and reproductive physiology right across into ecology and applied ecology in the field. So yes, it´s difficult to muster the money for that but I think that there is a case to be put to people who own land and manage land whether they´re resource companies, pastoralists, whether they are fellow organisations if you like that the application of strong science to the ecological management in this area is going to be critically important and there is a value and need for that. And one area that I think is fertile and we´re exploring is how to look at ecological health, wildlife disease, the cross over issues between wild and domestic animals, these are not a potential of concerns like bird flu. Robyn Williams: Yes when you catch zoonosis, when you catch something from animals. Chris West: Hendra-virus. Robyn Williams: Caught from horses yes indeed. Let me just ask you about some animals before we get too theoretical, very fond of your cheetahs at Monarto whose diet and separation from the males and females turned out to be such a wonderful thing that enabled them to procreate. That was a story two or three years ago, how´s it going now? Chris West: To be honest it´s stuttered slightly and the younger females when they first have litters sometimes they do eat their young and we´ve had a couple of episodes of that sort of false start. That´s no unusual, that can happen in the wild if they are disturbed as well. We don´t think we disturbed them but I´d have to say that that aspect of breeding specifically of cheetahs it´s not on hold, we are continuing to have the males and the females apart and to do that breeding program. In the meantime we´ve bred painted dogs which are extremely endangered in Africa. We´ve got a little group of hyenas and they came from overseas and the sexing of hyenas is very difficult, the genitalia............ Robyn Williams: Famously so. Chris West: Very similar, they came in in a mixed group and so they bred and that was inadvertent and so we are continuing with breeding programs. That´s at Monarto and one thing about Monarto is that 40% plus of the animals that we look after there are actually off show and they are endangered Australian species so the black flank rock wallabies, waroos, bilbies, batongs of various sorts, we are doing all of that and that´s kind of unsung, unnoticed, perhaps a little unglamorous because there are not exotic, and yet that´s the real hearts and guts of what we do. So we are going to interpret and share that with people far more. Robyn Williams: Yes for those who don´t know South Australia too well it´s about an hour out of Adelaide and it´s the biggest zoo in the country isn´t it, it´s this huge area, vast. They can really range long, you can get lost there wonderfully and the cheetahs can run fast. What about the pandas in China, did they survive the skirmishes? Chris West: They survived the earthquake at Wolong in Sichuan province which was very close to the epicentre. We had a worrying time but of course it was a human catastrophe too, I think one panda in the Wolong Centre actually was killed by a falling building. Wang Wang and Fu Ne who are our little couple who will be coming over next October 2009 were fine and are fine and we´ve obviously been in close contact with Chinese colleagues and will be working out exactly how best we can look after them, how best we can look after them to get them to breed and how we can exchange staff and set up exchange research programs. Robyn Williams: What´s the trick in making pandas breed? Chris West: Synchronisity . Robyn Williams: Alright it sounds like humans. Chris West: Yes, get them compatible and then the female as an oestrus period when she´s receptive to the male for about four days every year and you can track the hormones. Robyn Williams: Every year? Chris West: Yes, but the funny thing is when I talk to people about that you can see the guys smirking then the follow up is then the males only have a testosterone peak of about two days every year so you need to make sure that the male and female interest is at the same time. Robyn Williams: Isn´t it amazing how nature seems to make life really difficult for some creatures, I´m think of the Kakapo for example where you´ve got berries up tress which are fruiting only once every two years and you´ve got to climb up and get them cause you´re flightless. Why would nature make things so hard especially for creatures like Pandas? Chris West: I guess there´s a trade off because in a pre-human runaway human pest species world their adaptation meant that they weren´t really competing in terms of an ecological niche, what they ate in particular bamboo with other species, so that was for them security in a world where they could wander far and wide and not trip over humans everywhere. In a world now where their habitat has shrunken down to a few mountainous areas then they are perilously vulnerable because if there´s a die off of bamboo or some other event like an earthquake then the wild population of about 1500 to 2000 animals is very vulnerable. Which in a way underscores the value of having insurance populations around the world in zoos. Robyn Williams: Chris West you´re obviously having fun, this will be my last question, having come from the great London zoo what do you feel when you go back there occasionally, any remorse? Chris West: No, no because with modern technology it´s possible to keep up with colleagues and friends there, it´s an international community, it´s an international science based community and there´s a real critical mass of thinking and science and activity in this part of the world. So actually I don´t miss it and I think the integration, the field conservation and zoo based work and science in Australia has a lot to teach other parts of the world. Robyn Williams: Well isn´t that good to know. Dr Chris West is chief executive of Zoos South Australia and the book he edited once again is Zoos in the 21st Century published by Cambridge University Press. Well next week, still in South Australia I shall be in conversation with a geologist who can tell us perhaps why there is one human race, how an absolutely humungous volcano blew up 70,000 odd years ago causing the earth to go into a freeze, killing any number of mammals including most of us. The few who survived led is what now one, and only one human race. That´s Professor Martin Williams next week at this time. Production today by Nicky Phillips and Charlie McKune, I´m Robyn Williams read less
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2008-09-04 Chris West
Wed September 03 2008
Just over two years ago Dr Chris West left London Zoo to come to Adelaide. Why give up the directorship of such a famous menagerie to come to South Australia? Dr West explains - and describes some of their far-reaching experiments at Adelaide Zoo, including putting themselves in cages! TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation this time coming from the zoo in Adelaide, a capital city with Australia´s smallest zoo but it´s twinned with Monarto Zoo an hour away which is Australia´s largest. It´s gigantic and in charge of both of them is Chris West who left London Zoo about two years ago to come south. Some might wonder about such a move and we´ll come to that but Dr West is also editor of a major book now published by Cambridge on Zoos of the 21st Century. Well Chris, here you are settled in - how´s it been? Chris West: Oh it´s been great fun, time has flown and yet I think an awful lot has been packed into it. It´s a great team, wonderful people, lots of passion, quite a lot of eccentricity and a real focus on conservation and that´s probably been the main thrust and theme of the story over the last year or so. Robyn Williams: What do you mean - eccentricity? Chris West: Oh, just that they are so focused and passionate sometimes about a particular species or their particular part of the zoo, the closeness of the bond, the relationship say between some keepers and great apes. Is a wonderful thing but it can lead to people being slightly unworldly, other worldly. Robyn Williams: Yes I thought you meant the self caging of the humans - there´s a wonderful experiment that was done, I talked to Carla Litchfield about it where you spent some time, the human beings in cages. That was fun. Chris West: The human zoo - yes I think it was and I think it worked too because we didn´t want it to be taken as a big brother sort of stunt. We wanted it to be a way of demonstrating close kinship between us and other great apes and to inform people in a fun way, and younger people, about that but also about the threats and problems faced by great apes. And we collected a lot of money from people because we attracted a huge audience, huge media interest internationally and we are going to do it again this February because it was such fun. Robyn Williams: It´s amazing that people haven´t done it much before. Chris West: Yeah, one or two people but on a smaller scale. We like to think that when we do things we really go into them and do them properly as it were. So doing it for a month with a psychologist and with the subjects and doing it with some real science in there was different, it wasn´t just here are some people pretending to be animals in an old zoo enclosure. Robyn Williams: Yes, well we´ll come to that with Carla Litchfield. In fact the reaction to being exposed for instance to high temperatures was a surprise to some people. What about the sounds of building going on all around you? Chris West: Well we got used to it and we are going to have to be used to it for another period of time because we´re converting the old ape facility, 1970s ape facility, into a state of the art environmental education centre. We´ve got sponsorship from Westpac bank and we are very grateful and it´ll be partly a school facility, there will be a green roof, fixed tents on that roof and school students will be able to come in and have a program of environmental education. Stay overnight, enjoy the ambient sounds of the zoo and explore it which I think will be wonderful and then the other part of it will be an interpretation centre. And the way that we´ve done this is for it to be interactive, for it to be engaging but also empowering so it´s taking people through a relatively small number of interactive exhibit areas with some animal interest as well but to take people through habitats. Through the recycling of the building, through lifestyle and consumer choices that any individual can make that will help us in the world we are now in, of climate change and over population and so on. And that connection between their lives, Adelaide Zoo, conservation animals in the wild and then something about water, something about global warming and the whole purpose and point of it is not for people to go away feeling shattered, depressed, despondent, the future is awful but that there is something very precious and worthwhile and wonderful and worthy of their support and that they can do something. There has to be some hopefulness involved. Robyn Williams: How do you do that without being didactic? Chris West: Well I think the interaction is crucial so for example we have a day in the life kind of set up where people can put together rather like a story board going through choices in average Joe´s day and he or she can choose what sort of car, whether to go to work, whether to stay at home, sleep, what to eat, all sorts of everyday choices and put this together and it´s rather like electronic tiles so there´s a sequence in the story of their day. And the idea is that they put that together and what comes out is some indication of how happy they´ll be, how rich they´ll be and how green or environmentally friendly they´ll be. And really it´s to engage people with a sense of fun so they can test it, they can say alright I´m going to have to be a car, I´m going to drive really fast, I´m going to beat stuff from overseas I´m going to do all of these things and just see how happy they´ll be, or how non-green they´ll be and ring the changes and make it fun but with that message in there. Robyn Williams: I´m just wondering where the owls come in because I was involved with something at the Australian Museum in Sydney and they had way back, way back a computer program where you could manage the forest and if you made the wrong decision and knocked down too many trees you killed half the wombats. Do you have that kind of take home confrontation? Chris West: Yeah, some of it but what I´ve seen in the past with some of those computer driven interactive devices is they can be very slow and they can be just for one person. So one of the things that we´ve got which I think is very exciting is it´ll be rather like a kinetic water sculpture and it´ll allow four people or more to operate it at the same time. And essentially it will be driven by water, there will be rainfall coming into a chamber, it´s a great big thing right in the centre of the space from floor to ceiling, rainfall fills a reservoir tank and then people can operate valves which will either support the environment, so it´s like normal flow through the Murray and grass will appear and kangaroos will bounce around all done through kinetic design. Or a person can choose to run it through industry so it´ll turn cog wheels and there will be a production line and things will appear and disappear and so it´s industrial production. Or it could be through farming and so there could be sheep grazing, crops appearing through perforated plates and so on. Or it can be domestic so you can fill a bath with a duck floating in it and then empty that bath and things like that. So it´ll actually hold some sort of personal message but four or more people can operate it and can be looking at it and we would anticipate that they´ll either try to find a balance or one of them will try to hog the water so it will be a parable of a metaphor but it´ll be fun but people will go away thinking actually that´s what it is like, we can make choices individually and as a society, do we sustain the environment or do we support industry or farming, or do we continue to be profligate and extravagant with our domestic use of water. And so it´s not meant to be loaded, or didactic, or over-wordy or judgemental, it´s allowing people to explore our choices for themselves. Robyn Williams: It doesn´t sound like any zoo I grew up with way back. Chris West: No, I´m sure that´s true but I think that if we see ourselves as a conservation organisation that is indivisible from being an environmental organisation and having a real society and community and human care and concern to all of those things are intertwined and if we don´t get the ecology and biodiversity right and the environmental stewardship right and the human use of resources right then everything´s stuffed, it is an unholy mess. So I think it´s better to make an explicit linkage between the survival or otherwise of animals in the wild and how we control natural resources and ecology. Robyn Williams: Who´s helping you with that because obviously if people have grown up with zoos and professionals they´re vets, they are looking after the standard stuff whereas that seems to be a sophisticated education and also you are involving lots of other concepts. Are you doing it on your own or with consultants? Chris West: We are getting advice from people who´ve worked with museums but also in the entertainment field but also we´ve recruited and have set up an interpretation department and so that is really following through on the fact that a modern zoo is an education centre; but we want that education to be inter-active and engaging and fun. Another thing we are working with Carla Litchfield on as well as the human zoo is conservation psychology and that´s trying to understand what people think, why they think what they think, and how we can work with that to actually make them change behaviours and be more concerned about environmental conservation issues. And one of the things that´s coming through from research that´s been done largely in the state is you need to have an emotional experience or some sort of value driven experience and that will act as something transformational and after that we can do the factual, rational discussion. But if you don´t offer people something that makes them go wow, or their heart rate to go up, or really be thoughtful about something beautiful, then I think it´s a very passive and transient experience. Robyn Williams: Tell me Chris how much is known about the way in which other people in other countries feel quite differently about animals because I remember if you look back at the history of where you grew up in Britain, I think it´s only 200 years back going back to Black Beauty that people cared at all, an awful lot to make people bother about these creatures whether they are elegant or not. Chris West: I guess the way I tend to look at things and I don´t pretend to be either some sort of social scientist, historian or well versed in cultural diversity across the world now. But my sense is that quite often concern about animals, intrinsic concern about animals in terms of welfare, their ability to suffer or whether as populations or species they are going to survive can be really regarded as something of a luxury. So if you´re living in a wealthy, developed, educated society then you have the time, ability and the where-with-all to have that concern. If you´re living in an environment and have a livelihood that´s marginal then I don´t think that animal welfare or conservation actually has - there´s no space for it. So I suspect going back two or three hundred years into pre-industrial societies there would have been cultural differences but there would also have been less room in people´s lives for that concern. Robyn Williams: Yes, but there are some examples where friends of mine perhaps if they see the picture of the gorilla with the arms and the feet cut off being hauled on some sort of pannier and asked whether they would prefer the gorilla to live or the poachers to live would be quite happy to see the poachers perish. Now that´s not surprising is it these days? Chris West: It isn´t, I don´t know where that sort of thinking leads because I think we have to adopt an approach of you want the poachers to not have to poach and that there is something very valuable and proper and about supporting human existence too. So there was a period when conservation organisations actually were working in a way that was adverse to human rights and tribal rights if you like; and I think we have to move beyond that to balance and sustainability. Having said that the root cause of all of the problems just about that we have at the moment is there are just too many blooming people. Robyn Williams: Six and a half billion yeah. Now in from of me is your book Zoos in the 21st Century and it says catalysts for conservation? That being the thing. You edited this with a number of other people, what´s the main theme of the book and the future? Chris West: The main purpose of that book which followed an international symposium was to do two things. One was to challenge zoos because it´s very easy to have a rhetoric that says we do conservation but do we? Can we measure that, how do we demonstrate that, how authentic is that claim? So part of the purpose is to demonstrate they can be authentic and there are ways of doing that. Another part of it was to tune in to a relatively new world zoo and aquarium conservation strategy which stems from conventional biodiversity and what goes with that. And that had within it the real impetus to shift zoos from a focus or a tradition of looking after animals in captivity in terms of breeding programs and so on, to being a much more integrated partnership and right across the spectrum doing solid science, major education programs, but also supporting work in the field, in the wild because the conservation definition that we used in the book had to do with conservation being achieved in the wild. And that again is an overused phrase but it´s a sort of paradigm shift thing to say zoos are about conservation and conservation is in the wild. So the thrust of that book is to provide the context and the case material across a range of disciplines to do with emerging infectious disease and wildlife epidemiology right the way through to conservation psychology and the genetic reservoir, the basis if you like of zoos, across the whole thing and somewhere integrated and take a zoo audience and community into that cutting edge space and to also demonstrate to skeptics who might be either conservationists, or in the wider world as it were that zoos are serious. Robyn Williams: How do you get on with the skeptics these days because there´s some people who think that zoos should not belong in the 21st century? Chris West: I guess my response is to say and actually we are fellow travellers, we are conservationists and we are about environmental stewardship as well. So we don´t look at zoos in that historic fashion as menageries and purely for recreation and entertainment. Look at zoos as in some may call the wrong reasons because these things are going the wrong way, the wild is shrinking and biodiversity is collapsing, ecology is facing catastrophes left, right and centre. Look at zoos as two things - one a field hospital to try to secure some future for these dwindling populations of critically endangered animals and do research on them. And the other thing is really a centre for public awareness, many zoos are in urban centres and they have a huge audience and if they can help transport that audience´s attitudes into some semblance of empathy and concern about the natural world then that possibly is the greatest service that zoos can provide. Robyn Williams: Yes, but services cost and the worry is in Australia if you look at museums and some zoos the scientists that you require to do all this stuff are remarkably absent. You know you´ve got the displays and you´ve got the front of house stuff which costs a lot of money to get the people in, to look after them, and getting the scientists in to do more than a token bit, costs a few quid. How are you going to fund that? Chris West: Well I can speak for Zoos South Australia initially anyway, we are expanding and extending our scientific programs and we do that by looking at projects that are of real value, they are of applied value for conservation but they are of science value too. We act as an industry partner for linkage grants with local universities, and lots of local universities so the number of joint grants that we´re receiving is going up year by year. We are developing a critical mass of scientists who are part of our team who will range from clinical psychology and reproductive physiology right across into ecology and applied ecology in the field. So yes, it´s difficult to muster the money for that but I think that there is a case to be put to people who own land and manage land whether they´re resource companies, pastoralists, whether they are fellow organisations if you like that the application of strong science to the ecological management in this area is going to be critically important and there is a value and need for that. And one area that I think is fertile and we´re exploring is how to look at ecological health, wildlife disease, the cross over issues between wild and domestic animals, these are not a potential of concerns like bird flu. Robyn Williams: Yes when you catch zoonosis, when you catch something from animals. Chris West: Hendra-virus. Robyn Williams: Caught from horses yes indeed. Let me just ask you about some animals before we get too theoretical, very fond of your cheetahs at Monarto whose diet and separation from the males and females turned out to be such a wonderful thing that enabled them to procreate. That was a story two or three years ago, how´s it going now? Chris West: To be honest it´s stuttered slightly and the younger females when they first have litters sometimes they do eat their young and we´ve had a couple of episodes of that sort of false start. That´s no unusual, that can happen in the wild if they are disturbed as well. We don´t think we disturbed them but I´d have to say that that aspect of breeding specifically of cheetahs it´s not on hold, we are continuing to have the males and the females apart and to do that breeding program. In the meantime we´ve bred painted dogs which are extremely endangered in Africa. We´ve got a little group of hyenas and they came from overseas and the sexing of hyenas is very difficult, the genitalia............ Robyn Williams: Famously so. Chris West: Very similar, they came in in a mixed group and so they bred and that was inadvertent and so we are continuing with breeding programs. That´s at Monarto and one thing about Monarto is that 40% plus of the animals that we look after there are actually off show and they are endangered Australian species so the black flank rock wallabies, waroos, bilbies, batongs of various sorts, we are doing all of that and that´s kind of unsung, unnoticed, perhaps a little unglamorous because there are not exotic, and yet that´s the real hearts and guts of what we do. So we are going to interpret and share that with people far more. Robyn Williams: Yes for those who don´t know South Australia too well it´s about an hour out of Adelaide and it´s the biggest zoo in the country isn´t it, it´s this huge area, vast. They can really range long, you can get lost there wonderfully and the cheetahs can run fast. What about the pandas in China, did they survive the skirmishes? Chris West: They survived the earthquake at Wolong in Sichuan province which was very close to the epicentre. We had a worrying time but of course it was a human catastrophe too, I think one panda in the Wolong Centre actually was killed by a falling building. Wang Wang and Fu Ne who are our little couple who will be coming over next October 2009 were fine and are fine and we´ve obviously been in close contact with Chinese colleagues and will be working out exactly how best we can look after them, how best we can look after them to get them to breed and how we can exchange staff and set up exchange research programs. Robyn Williams: What´s the trick in making pandas breed? Chris West: Synchronisity . Robyn Williams: Alright it sounds like humans. Chris West: Yes, get them compatible and then the female as an oestrus period when she´s receptive to the male for about four days every year and you can track the hormones. Robyn Williams: Every year? Chris West: Yes, but the funny thing is when I talk to people about that you can see the guys smirking then the follow up is then the males only have a testosterone peak of about two days every year so you need to make sure that the male and female interest is at the same time. Robyn Williams: Isn´t it amazing how nature seems to make life really difficult for some creatures, I´m think of the Kakapo for example where you´ve got berries up tress which are fruiting only once every two years and you´ve got to climb up and get them cause you´re flightless. Why would nature make things so hard especially for creatures like Pandas? Chris West: I guess there´s a trade off because in a pre-human runaway human pest species world their adaptation meant that they weren´t really competing in terms of an ecological niche, what they ate in particular bamboo with other species, so that was for them security in a world where they could wander far and wide and not trip over humans everywhere. In a world now where their habitat has shrunken down to a few mountainous areas then they are perilously vulnerable because if there´s a die off of bamboo or some other event like an earthquake then the wild population of about 1500 to 2000 animals is very vulnerable. Which in a way underscores the value of having insurance populations around the world in zoos. Robyn Williams: Chris West you´re obviously having fun, this will be my last question, having come from the great London zoo what do you feel when you go back there occasionally, any remorse? Chris West: No, no because with modern technology it´s possible to keep up with colleagues and friends there, it´s an international community, it´s an international science based community and there´s a real critical mass of thinking and science and activity in this part of the world. So actually I don´t miss it and I think the integration, the field conservation and zoo based work and science in Australia has a lot to teach other parts of the world. Robyn Williams: Well isn´t that good to know. Dr Chris West is chief executive of Zoos South Australia and the book he edited once again is Zoos in the 21st Century published by Cambridge University Press. Well next week, still in South Australia I shall be in conversation with a geologist who can tell us perhaps why there is one human race, how an absolutely humungous volcano blew up 70,000 odd years ago causing the earth to go into a freeze, killing any number of mammals including most of us. The few who survived led is what now one, and only one human race. That´s Professor Martin Williams next week at this time. Production today by Nicky Phillips and Charlie McKune, I´m Robyn Williams read less
2008-08-28 A commitment to science
Wed August 27 2008
Over fifteen years ago Dr Julia Horsfield was working on a way to disrupt the defensive coat of HIV, the AIDS virus. Her approach is only now bearing fruit. She describes how much patience, commitment and even passion are needed to make science work. She has long been outspoken about the need for proper funding for research in New Zealand where she lives. TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation, this time coming from a very chilly Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand. And that´s the centre of some really top rate scientific research, interesting in a town of just about 20,000 folk not too far from the South Pole. Well, closer to it than most places. Fascinating to see how great scientific centres grow and flourish. Princeton in New Jersey that reminds you of The Sopranos, the Universities of Arizona, both of them down in the red desert, Cambridge in England in the icy fens and the University of Otago, as I said, one stop before Antarctica. Julia Horsfield is based there; she´s a pathologist and has a recurring association with fish, as you´ll hear. Julia you´re not actually from here are you, where did you grow up? Julia Horsfield: So I grew up just north of Wellington in a place called Partanui, a kind of a lifestyle block situation, and my folks grew herbs and I had a pony and it was all very idyllic. Robyn Williams: Herbs I see, reminds me of the 60s - New Age? Julia Horsfield: Yes, if you like basil and oregano it´s more like salad ingredients than any other I guess. Robyn Williams: Nothing to do with medicines or pathology? Julia Horsfield: No, not at all but it was my Dad who convinced me that I should be a scientist so, 'you must do science', he said, so I did. Robyn Williams: Did he have a background directly in science at all? Julia Horsfield: He was a marine engineer to start with and had a sort of strong maths and engineering background and he is a very inventive guy actually. If you go up to central Otago you see some salmon farms there and hydro canals and my Dad designed and partially built those rafts that you see there today and started that company. So he´s a very innovative guy. Robyn Williams: Without being distracted from you of course, what did he decide to do about all the sludge, all those terrible noxious substances that come out of fish farms and turn people off? Julia Horsfield: Well what actually happened was that the native trout and salmon tended to eat all the waste and when Dad was setting up these farms there was a bit of an outcry from the Fish and Game Council, oh you know, the waste will poison the rivers. But it turned out the waste increased the fish stocks so much that the fishing up there is really good now and there´s plenty of good fish to catch in those rivers. The rate of current movement through those canals is up to 2 cumiecs which is cubic metres per second so it´s pretty fast so it carries away stuff pretty quickly. So there´s not much sludge around I don´t think. Robyn Williams: Well I mention it not simply because it´s always been a problem that people bring up when they mention aquaculture but it just so happens a couple of weeks ago on the Science Show I did an interview in northern Queensland to talk about ways in which algae, certain ones they are using as sort of biofuels, love fish sludge -- the more noxious and ghastly the better -- they just gobble is up, and out of it comes the kind of fuel that is very useful but doesn´t require land, so there´s no competition between the land use and so on. So there are ways developing for the use of stuff out of fish farms and I was just fascinated to hear your example as well. What is your father doing now? Julia Horsfield: So right now he´s part-owner of a cinema and I believe he´s working on a book, so yes, watch this space. Robyn Williams: Do you imagine that you´d have gone into science if your father had not convinced you it was a good idea? Julia Horsfield: I don´t think I would have, actually. I don´t think I quite went the way he wanted me to though so I´m very much in favour of basic science, discovery for discovery's sake, in a way, and I think my father would have wanted me to have a more of an applied mind, to do something with my science and make a buck, essentially. Robyn Williams: Be more directed. Now I think plenty of people have shown that there´s evidence that most of the best applications come from basic science rather than the kind of applied stuff directly. Julia Horsfield: Yes, well that´s what I really believe and there´s plenty of examples of that. But I only have to look back on say my own PhD experience to see evidence of that. I started my PhD at the University of Otago in 1992, working on a pioneering method to disrupt the replication of the HIV virus and, 15 years later, finally there´s a drug testing system in place to see if we can find drugs to interfere with that process. And it´s a delight to come back to Otago University and see they are so close to being a marketable and useful tool in medicine but it took 15 years to get there and it was really from basic scientific discoveries that this is what emerged. Robyn Williams: Tell me what the problem is, HIV is so incredibly cunning, it´s always one or two jumps ahead -- how did you think that you might be able to pre-empt it somehow and vanquish the creature? Julia Horsfield: Well this research comes primarily from Professor Lauren Tate´s interest in how messengers that encode proteins are actually translated into the proteins that are necessary for viral replication. So in the HIV virus the messages are compressed so that two proteins can be made from the same message, whereas usually genes encode one message which gets translated on to one protein. So HIV has messages that overlap, so you get two proteins from the one message and the production of these depends on a shift in the reading frame of the message, so that you get these two proteins that are produced. And it´s a hallmark of viruses such as HIV that are retroviruses, the premise was if we could interfere with the frequency with which the two proteins are produced from the one message then we could prevent HIV from replicating properly and producing the right ratio of proteins. The premise hadn´t even been tested when I started in the lab and so really that was the first thing to do. Now it´s actually been proved that you can alter the frame shift efficiency to produce different amounts of proteins and that completely disrupts viral replication. Robyn Williams: At what stage though does it disrupt it when it´s not yet done its damage? In other words can you use it to stop the thing taking off in the body? Julia Horsfield: What it does is it stops it making the right number of coat proteins per replicated particle in the virus. So if you think of a virus as a little teapot and the coat proteins are like a tea cosy that goes around the teapot, if you disrupt the ratio then you might have a lot of teapots about the place but no tea cosies to go around them, or not enough tea cosies. And it´s only the ones with the tea cosies that can get out of the cell and replicate. The way the virus is set up so that it makes exactly the right number of proteins that would make a tea cosy for one and every teapot that makes the virus. Robyn Williams: So 15 years later someone has actually helped crack the story that you tried to set out to tell? Before we talk about the rest of your life, when is there going to be a drug or some sort of therapy the stems from this work? Julia Horsfield: So right now there is, as I understand it, there´s a viable platform on now which these drugs can be tested because it´s not really possible to predict what certain drugs might do. You need a large high through port format to test different compounds as they come along to see if it´s going to affect the ratio of the proteins. And to do that you need a really viable system and it´s taken 15 years to set up that system. Maybe it will take another 5 years or more before effective drugs are found but the reason I wanted to talk about this is that it just illustrates how long it can take from an original idea to develop into something that is saleable at the bench or be turned into a drug that will help people. And so when we think about targeted research we shouldn´t be thinking in terms of 3 years or even 5 years, we should be thinking in terms of 20 years or maybe even 50 years before we get revolutionary outcomes. Robyn Williams: Even though during the war, the Second World War of course with penicillin it took them about three but they were concentrating pretty hard. After your PhD then what happened? Julia Horsfield: I´ve always had a long standing interest in developmental biology and I chose to do a post doctoral fellowship in the lab of Rob Saint and Helen Richardson who were working at the University of Adelaide at the time in drosophila genetics in the cell cycle. What I really got interested in there is how the cell cycle is co-ordinated with the animal development such that cell division in developmental processes need to be controlled together so you can get a whole animal from a single cell during embryonic development. Robyn Williams: Getting that story out has been one of the world´s great challenges hasn´t it? How one blob that´s pretty much the same manages to divide and produce slightly different blobs with the same DNA in each cell. Some decide to become brain cells, some decide to become stomach cells, I was going to say blood but of course blood cells, red blood cells don´t have DNA in the middle, they dispense with it. So where did that take you? Julia Horsfield: I´m really still interested in the actual concept, in fact it drives my research even today and Rob and Helen´s lab are really interested in how cell cycle regulators -- that is factors that control cell division -- per se can be integrated with developmental signals that tell the cells what to be. So when an embryo develops there are certain developmental signals that a switched on at certain times and they tell an embryo where to put the head, where to put the arms and the legs, and it turns out that these development signals have to speak to cell cycle regulators to tell a cell to either keep dividing, we don´t need you to be anything yet, or stop dividing it´s time you were a fingernail or something. Now I´m actually working on kind of a reverse pathway where cell cycle regulators themselves are feeding back to development signals saying well I have divided, I´m waiting for information to tell me what to do next. But I believe I think that cell cycle regulators have frequent duel functions and telling cells whether to divide and also informing developmental processes. This is something that has been emerging in recent years I think. Robyn Williams: Well let me just ask you the question, I have a picture, just imagine an organ, the heart, there might be from what you say a kind of mission control where the instructions come out. Now I was told by Dennis Noble, who is one of the great heart researchers in Oxford, that this is absolutely not the case, that you do not have heart cells being governed from a kind of centre bit...and so it´s almost mind boggling frankly when you think of the trillions of cells have all got to be developed at roughly when they are supposed to be, you know as you grow up you get juvenile cells and then there are massive signals going out to mature and become sexually adult in all sorts of ways. And all this co-ordination is going on and yet there is no in each organ mission controls -- so how does it work? Julia Horsfield: That´s a very good question and I think a lot of energies are going in to finding out how these sorts of things work. Some of the things you are describing can be applied to regeneration research and things like tadpoles or even fish -- you can chop off fins and they´ll grow a completely normal fin back, or a limb back. And what people are trying to understand is how the positioning information of a cell instructs it what to be. So while there is no centre control in a cell telling it that it´s part of an arm or a leg or a fin there´s something to do with the environment that the cell is in that then instructs it how to behave and how much to proliferate and then what to do once it has finished proliferating. And I think there´s another whole area of research that is going into discovering how do limbs know how big to be -- so if we grow arms, legs and hands how do they know when to stop growing and be a particular size. They are all in quite good proportion and nobody really knows why that is. A great many researchers are trying to find that out. I´m not one of them but it´s a very interesting area. Robyn Williams: I don´t remember seeing someone whose one arm is gigantically bigger than the other arm, somehow most of the time it seems to work, doesn´t it? Julia Horsfield: Yes, that´s right so it´s really fascinating. So while we often think we´ve discovered a lot about biology and that we know a lot of developmental processes that control it, there´s a whole lot we don´t know that´s really, really fascinating, I think. And also in regenerative biology it´s very important to understand that process so that maybe some day we can figure out ways to heal things like spinal injuries or grow back hands or limbs or bits of organs that we´re missing. Robyn Williams: And that being isolated and focused shouldn´t be that difficult. Julia Horsfield: Oh I don´t know but I think you´d be on to a winner there if you could actually grow teeth. Robyn Williams: A third generation of teeth. OK well that´s where your mind was working over this broad area of how bodies work. What are you focusing on now? Julia Horsfield: The last eight years before I started my job at Otago I spent in a Zebra fish lab with Phil and Cathy Crozier at the University of Auckland, and that lab is particularly interested in blood development and how proliferation and differentiation are balanced in blood with regard to diseases like leukaemia. So we really wanted to understand the basis of normal proliferation versus leukaemia using the zebra fish as a model to do that. I started out there doing a genetic screening of the fish. So what this means is that it means randomly mutating genes in a fish and then looking at the blood to see if you can see changes that might reflect leukaemia or changes on the patterns of where genes are expressed; so as to inform whether you´ve done something to blood development. So the screen took a number of years and I found a mutation that when the mutation was homozygous in the fish these fish lacked blood and they also distinctly lacked expression of a particular gene that´s necessary for blood development but only in a certain time and in a certain place. And the same gene is involved in leukaemia --then the hunt was on to find out what was the mutation that I´d created in these fish. And what it turned out to be was a mutation in a cell cycle protein, so back to the old cell cycle and development story again. And the cell cycle protein is a protein that´s involved in holding chromosomes together when cells replicate, so when a cell replicates it´s like you have pairs of socks and each sock is a chromosome. When you want to separate the sock it helps if you have them all paired up in the first place, so if one person grabs one sock and one person grabs the other sock, if you have seven different coloured pairs of socks then each person will have a sock of the right colour. Robyn Williams: I think you´ve heard of the blind man conundrum? Julia Horsfield: Yes, that´s right so I´m stealing that. Robyn Williams: Yes, the a professor in Oxford posed the puzzle in fact I´ve broadcast it on the Science Show where these two blind men go out to buy socks and for some reason their wives, as he said it, his story, their wives insisted that they get different coloured pairs and for some reason the woman who was serving them in the shop got terribly confused and separated, well in fact had them -- not in each blind person´s bag, you know, a full set each -- instead they were all mixed up. And so the puzzle was how do you make sure that these blind men are able to choose on their own, without any guidance, without there being anything different about the socks, a full set of each colours. And of course the answer is that you´ve got this connecting bit at the top and each blind man gets hold of either end of one pair and pulls and this pulling represents exactly what happens in cells during cell division. And of course the little bit at the top is the key thing that was being investigated. OK so that´s the story as was told -- now back to your story. Julia Horsfield: So I´m afraid to say it´s the same story but it´s such a nice analogy that I thought I´d steal it and the bit at the top, the socks, is actually the same protein that I´m studying in my lab now. And it turns out that this protein not only has a role in the chromosome or sock separation, it has a role in animal development and gene expression as well and recently, just a couple of years ago now, human syndromes were found to be associated with mutations and the components of these proteins or the ability to stick them onto chromosomes in the first place. These human syndromes aren´t merely as a result of not being able to divide your cells properly; they seem to have specific defects that reflect specific developmental abnormalities. And the feeling is in the field that these developmental abnormalities arise as a result of mistakes made during development as a result of certain genes not being turned on or off at the right time during development. The question now is what´s chromosome glue essentially, or sock clips, what to do with animal development and how on earth can these proteins regulate these different genes during development. And so my group is using the zebra fish as a role model to try and understand what these proteins are doing because in fish we have a distinct advantage that we can see the animal develop so it starts as a single cell inside of a transparent fish, and can grow this into a fully patent animal in about 24 hours so we can see all of that in real time under the microscope which makes it a very powerful tool for studying such things. Robyn Williams: And of course these parts of life are pretty much the same whether a cucumber, a human being, a fish or whatever, presumably what you learn in the fish could be understandable for people. Julia Horsfield: That´s right. Invertebrate development in all animals a lot of the same processes are reused over and over through evolution to instruct fish how to develop. The same as flies, with mice and people but because the next best model being mammals we can´t really observe them developing in real time because they are developing in utero, so it´s really helpful to use fish and amphibians because you can see them developing outside the mother and you can use a number of different tools to visualise their process and see what goes wrong. For example if you disrupt chromosomal glue and see what sort of malformations happen and why they are happening. So what we are trying to find out is what genes are going wrong are not being regulated properly when this chromosomal glue molecule is missing aside from this normal processing cell division. Robyn Williams: And of course that´s basic science but who knows where it might lead. What does your father now think of the work you are doing? Julia Horsfield: I still have frequent arguments with him. Robyn Williams: He understands the fish but he doesn´t understand necessarily the rest. Julia Horsfield: Yes, I think when I started out in science I knew a lot less and I think humans in general knew a lot less than we do now. I think it´s staggering the ground that we´ve covered in the last 20 years and I´m absolutely thrilled to be part of that process but I fear that we needed to keep talking about it and passing on those ideas to our mums and dads so they still understand what we´re doing. Robyn Williams: As well as young people. Now you do a tiny bit of science communication and it´s a struggle because some of the concepts that you describe -- what is a gene, what is cell division, you use the words homozygous just now which I didn´t bother to catch you up on because the story was quite plain but those sorts of things are hard to get across, especially to young people who get restless. How have you found the response to be amongst young people say here in New Zealand? Julia Horsfield: Generally people really do want to know what we are doing as a scientist. I think the onus is on us, the scientists to find effective ways of communicating our science to people and I´d like to think that we can learn to do it in a more direct and more accessible fashion than we do now. And it´s a learning process, like you said, it´s very, very difficult to find the right words to describe something but I believe that young people really are interested so earlier on in the year I ran a course for hands on science which is a sort of summer course for high school students that come to Otago University and the learn about science. It´s a wonderful experience on both sides because these kids are smart, they´re keen, they´re excited and it´s a joy honestly to be teaching them and it´s challenging because half the words that you´d use in a normal sentence to a colleague, these kids couldn´t possibly understand. But you had to remember that these kids are smart, you can´t talk down to them and you can´t dumb it down but you have to figure out how to communicate it effectively. So, so far the feedback we´ve hand from hands on science, myself and other people is extremely positive and there were huge waiting lists to come to the course. I think it´s something that Otago does pretty well on the whole but I´d like to see us do more of it and I´d like to see us cast a wider net and really engage with the public. Because I think everything is understandable, it´s just whether we can explain it adequately really. Robyn Williams: A final question, and that´s really something that was brought up by one of your colleagues here at the University of Otago and that is the way young people are so involved with IT so you don´t actually talk about ideas you Google them and you see billion of bits and somehow not only is your knowledge base fragmented but the practice in taking about these things is also somehow stymied -- are you finding that a problem from what you say or not? Julia Horsfield: I actually really don´t know, I suspect you might be right, people are generally well informed out there but the information is presented to them in a quite fragmented fashion so it´s whether it can be absorbed to understand a certain platform or point of view or not. Robyn Williams: The test is whether they can articulate it themselves. From what you say the young people were pretty forward. Julia Horsfield: Yes, I think today that people studying too bring a lot more to the classes than I remember doing when I was a student. I remember just turning up and being told to do things or else, and sitting tests and never complaining about the grade I got or anything. But if people don´t think you´ve done something right as a tutor or teacher they´ll tell you these days so it´s a lot more forward from the student´s point of view. Whether we can engage in a dialogue when students, our students, or the wider community on the basis of what we know now I really don´t have a feeling for just yet, but hopefully we´ll find out ways to effectively engage people in the process. Robyn Williams: And she´s doing just that in Dunedin at the University of Otago. Dr Julia Horsfield, Senior Lecturer in Pathology there. And if you want to look up that blind men with their socks conundrum you can actually find it on line in the Science Show website in a program dated 15th March this year with Professor Kim Naismith. Next week at this time I shall be in Conversation with Dr Chris West, Director of the Zoo in Adelaide and coming up in Catalyst in two minutes from now you can join Jonica Newby in Cambridge with mathematician Daniel Lightwing who has Asperger´s syndrome and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who says Asperger´s is an excessive expression of maleness. That´s ABC1 at 8 o´clock - I´m Robyn Williams. read less
2008-08-21 Tropical brains
Wed August 20 2008
The relatively new vice-chancellor at James Cook University in Townsville is a scientist-turned-to-business. Professor Sandra Harding reminds us that over one third of Australia is tropical and yet only one major university in this country, apart from Charles Darwin in the NT, is properly equipped to handle the range of topics so important to the north of our region. And, unlike some, they also have a successful campus in Singapore. TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation, tonight coming from the north and here´s a question I sometimes lob to the unwary - how much of Australia do you think is tropical? Well the answer is 38% - a lot, and so all those considerations that apply to the tropics a different kind of medicine, lively weather, coral reefs with huge tourist connections, all this and much more needs to be handled with expertise at a university. And we have only two up there, Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory and James Cook, both in Cairns and Townsville. Now James Cook University has a superb reputation as a centre for research and a relatively new Vice Chancellor, she´s Dr Sandra Harding, once of Brisbane and a scientist now in northern Queensland. Professor Harding when you came up here any surprises? Sandra Harding: It did surprise me, it was a very welcoming place, it surprised me particularly around the intensity of the relationships within the university and between the university and the region. Robyn Williams: So it´s actually connected to where it is both in Cairns and Townsville? Sandra Harding: It is connected and I think what was most interesting is that people within those broader communities are looking for more, they are looking for the university to play a major role in the social and economic development of the region. And that´s a role we are very happy to play. Robyn Williams: Now looking back at the history, is it 50 years ago that the first intention back in 1958 was manifest? Sandra Harding: It is, it was in the 50s when that occurred, a lot of local advocacy, vigorous argument about where the second university in Queensland should be and ultimately the Townsville community won the day. Robyn Williams: What were the choices then being mooted? Sandra Harding: I understand that it was looked to be put in Toowoomba actually, the second university in Queensland, but ultimately the Townsville community I think made the point quite appropriately in my view that Toowoomba was rather more accessible to Brisbane than Townsville could be. Robyn Williams: So when did the Cairns campus come to be? Sandra Harding: Oh that was in the 90s when we began to express our presence in the Cairns area in particular and the Cairns campus is going very well as well. Robyn Williams: So you´ve got those as well as a campus in Singapore. Now I think it´s perfectly well known that sadly the University of NSW which intended to open a campus there then pulled out. How did you come to be so successful? Sandra Harding: The university started in Singapore in 2003 and I think it started really quite quietly with very little fanfare, it was working with a partner and that partner was part of the Singapore government in order to very slowly build its presence and look to attract students certainly but also to do research on campus as well. The university chose very carefully the programs we gave there and the most popular program is psychology and it´s done very well. Robyn Williams: That´s a surprise, how come? Sandra Harding: Well I think it´s interesting, when you think it through where a lot of universities do business in IT in locations in south east Asia and indeed north Asia for that matter, when you think about it mental illness, mental health issues have not been recognised well in Asia more broadly. And so programs in that part of the world associated with psychology, there are relatively few of them, and this was a particular market need. So it´s been interesting for us that this has been incredibly popular. Robyn Williams: So you´ve got about a thousand students? Sandra Harding: We do have about a thousand students across the programs and we are moving to a new location because we´ve grown out of our existing location and we are shortly to move into a new campus. Robyn Williams: So are you just about the only Australian campus there or are there others? Sandra Harding: Other universities play a role in the Singapore education sector but they often do it through franchising arrangements and you´ve got a number of universities now that have been seriously looking at working in the same way that we are, or as close as they can I suppose, Curtin University, Newcastle University of course are working there with a partner too. So there is some that are trying to work into this market and into this Asian world city, it´s a fantastic place to be, but I think it´s fair to say that we are the only group doing research there. Robyn Williams: Now the interesting thing about James Cook University is that you´re smack in the middle of the tropics and 38% of the Australian land surface is tropical and so you´ve got this huge remit. What does that tropical association mean to you? Sandra Harding: This goes to the heart of what our university ought to be focusing upon. From the early 60s when the Universities Commission of Australia determined that the University College of Townsville would become a university in its own right they wrote on their report that this should become Australia´s National University for the Tropics. And while of course we were here to meet local labour market needs and to meet the needs of the northern Queensland community for education programs and research activity, I think it was with a lot of foresight that those early people who were involved in setting up the university could see the importance and the strategic nature of having a university in a developed country in Australia but looking at issues of relevance to the tropical world. So in that report it said that we should become Australia´s National University for the Tropics and I think that is exactly what we should be. And indeed, what we have done for a long time at the university now is determine to clearly and sharply focus on this going forward. Robyn Williams: How does that manifest in what sort of areas? Sandra Harding: For us there are a number of areas that we are looking to develop our interest in teaching and research and now across the spectrum. Of course as we are all aware the university is very well known for its marine and tropical biology, we will continue working in those areas of course. In addition tropical health and medicine is an area of growing importance and we have a medical school and we have a veterinary school. We have growth in our research profile there too but to my mind it also deals with matters of the environment, ecology, water also the humanities and social science. I think we mustn´t forget that at the end of the day a lot of the critical issues of the tropical world there are certain scientific issues but a lot of the science is relatively well known. What we need to do with here about people and communities and the way the tropical world is developing and I do believe that as a university located in a tropical land mass of a large developed country we should be playing a leadership role. Robyn Williams: Yes, because if you look at the map you´ve got practically the whole of Africa, you´ve got vast amounts of Asia, our neighbours as well as the Pacific. Now the Pacific might have small countries, well until you get to South America perhaps but you´ve got an awful lot of very interested people in the areas of anthropology, marine science you´ve mentioned, and making that connection is something that many of the other universities around Australia seem to have forgotten about sometimes. Sandra Harding: I think it´s very important that we do that and we do that in a context because of what this university is designed to do and its strategic intent is around a brighter future for life in the tropics worldwide. So for us, when you think about it, most of the critical issues facing the world today whether they are environment, ecology or health and medicine, whether it is about economic and social development, whether it´s about democratisation for goodness sake, many of those problems occur in its rawest form in the tropical world and to my mind our program and our research should be addressing those very issues. Robyn Williams: Yes, but what´s different say about your medical school which is quite new actually, is it in its training and its research quite different from the other medical schools in Australia? Sandra Harding: It is quite different, our medical school now has been around since the late 1990s, it´s an undergraduate program and it´s one where we focus on rural remote exposure. We focus on producing medical practitioners who certainly are fully aware of and up to date with modern technology and what you need to do in order to be a practitioner in the 2000s, but also are aware of how it is you operate in rural and remote locations with indigenous communities. And with communities that are basically under-served in many ways - so that´s a particular focus of our program and it´s one that has been very well received. Robyn Williams: And you´ve got a new hospital just down the road? Sandra Harding: Yes the Townsville hospital was relocated adjacent to our medical school which is a terrific thing. Of course the synergy is wonderful in terms of teaching and research as well. Robyn Williams: And Sandra Harding you trained yourself originally in science - what aspect? Sandra Harding: I did parasitology, I studied a parasite in sheep at the time, spent a day a week and much of the year on the killing floor of an export abattoir at Goulburn getting bits of parasites out of tissues - so that´s what I did initially. Robyn Williams: What aspect were you researching then? Sandra Harding: Oh, this was a relatively little known parasite, it was a relatively new one and we were really doing some very basic work on it, it was a parisone parasite and trying to better understand it and what its affects might be in meat. Robyn Williams: So how did you do a segue from that to business? Sandra Harding: Well a bit of a long story and to put it very briefly I thought very hard about whether or not I ought to be continuing on and do a PhD in that area. Had I done so it would have been around trapping feral cats because we thought that was the alternate host at the time. But I did take stock and I thought to myself I didn´t know if that was quite what I wanted to do and I´ve always enjoyed everything quite frankly, I enjoyed history, and sociology, and economics and maths and all of that. So I decided to give myself a bit of time out and decided to think again. So what I ended up doing was a Masters degree in a government related area, worked for a while, then ultimately went overseas to do a PhD on economic sociology. Robyn Williams: You didn´t miss the abattoir? Sandra Harding: I didn´t miss the abattoir for a moment and there are still hints of it when I´m cooking mince you know to make spaghetti bolognaise, it´s still there, there´s an echo there of the smell of the abattoir on a hot day. Robyn Williams: Yes, I can imagine. There´s something strange however about the ways in which business studies have changed institutions; I mean broadcasters, universities and so on. Do you have a view on the way that the new managerialism needs to be more connected to what you were saying before about how human beings really behave, about how communities behave so that you´ve got this tension between efficiency in a managerial sense and people and the flexibility they need to get on to be creative? Sandra Harding: Well I don´t see it as a tension quite frankly, to my mind if you think about it from the university´s perspective, as a university we are here to generate new knowledge, as a site of catalyst for innovation, we are here to generate human capital, we are here to be partners with advocates for various professional communities and indeed for our own community. Those are the things that we are here to do. However, in order that we do them we need to make sure that we are managing our organisation well so that we apply resources in the right areas so that we can in fact free our scientists up not to have to worry about those matters but so they can get on and do the science that we want them to do. So I don´t see it as intention, I actually see the business approach to these things is an enabler. Robyn Williams: In some places it isn´t. I remember in your old university QUT there was someone from the business school who did wonderful send-ups of some of the great clichés in management and the pillorying of that sort of ultra bureaucratic approach at QUT was well riveted. Sandra Harding: Well to my mind you can poke a lot of fun at it of course and there´s a lot of jargon and I think sometimes it´s easy for people to lose sight of what it is at heart that you´re trying to achieve. And to my mind as long as you´re mindful of managing in a responsible way, the financially accountable way but not losing sight of the heart of what the institution is all about. You know to do a bit of social ology for the moment, universities are institutions in a sociological sense and that means that it´s not good enough for universities simply to have a good bottom line, we are meant to be providing a benefit to society and that´s the basis of our esteem and that´s the basis on which we ought to be recognised I suppose and ultimately supported whether that´s through public funds or through private funds. So to my mind a university or an institution can´t lose sight of the heart of what it´s on about but that doesn´t mean to say you don´t have to be mindful of the business imperatives that are attached to meeting the needs of that heart. Robyn Williams: Now on the face of it, especially with a university if you like outside the major capital cities, you would expect it to be mainly an educational institution giving students degrees. But this campus is famous, world famous for its research - how did that come to be, this emphasis on research? Sandra Harding: I think that´s because of the birth of the university, initially it was set up as a university under that traditional model, to conduct research and certainly to undertake teaching learning programs as well but we were set up under the stewardship of the University of Queensland to become and indeed to be a university. I think a number of other regional institutions and this is no criticism of them have had a different history if you like and that has perhaps created different aspirations, but that different history often is associated with a theme teaching institution first of all and then looking to graft on research afterwards and I think some of them have really done it quite successfully. But our beginning our very core was around research activity and that is how it continues today. Robyn Williams: How will that be affected by the new kind of rationalism where some people have got to sacrifice traditions - well famously I think the departments of geology around Australia have been halved in their number over the last few years. Will you have to cut back in certain areas as well? Sandra Harding: Yes part of the challenge for us is as we know with funding that universities receive is that we do need to ensure that that funding base grows and universities have a responsibility there too, I mean we need to look for external sources of income from people who benefit from the work that we do. And in addition of course we are looking to the various reviews that are going on to potentially provide additional funding for us. At the moment most of our income that is discretionary income if you like to a certain extent comes of our teaching program. So the extent to which students don´t choose to study particular areas it becomes very difficult for us to offer those areas. You mention geology, earth sciences is an area that James Cook University is very well known for too and given that we are again at the centre of a resources and mining boom up here this is a very important area for us and I´m really pleased to say that we have a wonderful and very vibrant relationships and sponsorships from the major assets in the region such as BHP Biliton assets and there´s Strata and others as well which is terrific. So I´m feeling quite good about that particular area that you raise, I think what we need to do is ensure that we are working harder to make a case for the humanities and social science because we cannot be a university of the type that I want us to be unless we have vibrancy there too. So for us we have to think about our tropical ambition and think about then how that plays through into the humanities and social science. Robyn Williams: Yes, going back to geology I was at a major conference last week in Perth and they were just deploring the fact that they found it so damned difficult to get students despite the fact that there´s a boom, despite the fact that there were jobs all over the place and many of them terribly well paid. I mean it´s such a paradox isn´t it? Sandra Harding: It is a paradox and I think the IT industry would make the same argument, have the same lament perhaps. Part of the challenge for us here is to encourage students to make an active choice for some of these professions, not just because there´s money in it which there will be where there´s a labour shortage, but because it´s worthy and because it´s well worth while considering the a career in these areas. Unfortunately if you are waiting until the students are in Year 11 and 12 it´s just too late and in fact we are beginning to think we have to get to primary schools and indeed certainly the middle school years in order to encourage students to take the right subjects that are going to lead them through to the sciences in particular, science and technology in particular. We certainly have as all universities do various bridging programs to try and help students who want to make a different choice that they perhaps on the surface are ill prepared for so we try to assist those students but at the end of the day we´ve got to go back I think in educational years to really encourage students to think hard about careers in science and technology. Robyn Williams: Yes, what do you do to attract students to James Cook University from Australia, what do you really tell them about their prospects if you like in jobs or whatever, especially in tropical pursuits? Sandra Harding: We have of course a range of marketing platforms all universities do which encourage people to come here. I guess it is our flavour, so for students who are interested in issues associated with the tropical world whether they are biological sciences, physical sciences or social sciences I think that this of itself would be encouraging to students. We do try to ensure that students are aware that you can have a broad range of study in a really terrific location I must say too, but part of what we hang our hat on as well is we are a medium sized university, our classes are very small and it´s often interesting that students who transfer from larger metropolitan universities, and I had a conversation with one the other day and he said that they´d never met their head of school and wouldn´t even have a clue who that person is. When they had a bit of a drama about a piece of assessment they immediately were in touch with that person, that person personally helped them and there´s a friendliness and a personal touch if you like, a high touch here that perhaps isn´t always possible in the larger universities. So that´s part of the story too. Robyn Williams: And what about overseas, I´ve just done an interview with somebody from Brazil who is a young woman, brilliant of course, came here when she was 17 which is rather astonishing and is so committed that she is actually becoming an Australian citizen. I wonder how far afield your remit is for where a number of students come from - all over the world? Sandra Harding: They do come from all over the world but we are markedly different than any other Australian university in that the majority of our international students are coming from the United States, North America. Most universities of course the dominant student cohorts are from China, or India, or southeast Asia. In fact we need to do a little bit better there I think in order to add to some cultural richness of our campus, we certainly have people from all over the world coming from those countries too. But it is interesting that people choose to come here particularly from North America and South America as you found and a lot of those people of curse are interested in issues associated with the tropics and tropical science and tropical medicine. That´s what they are really very keen on doing and of course to come here where your location is your laboratory how wonderful is that and you´ve got a cattle property at Fletcher View, and we´ve got Orpheus Island a research station at Orpheus Island as well as campuses spread throughout the tropics. It´s a terrific place for international students to come. We don´t usually have to work too hard on international students, Europeans, a lot of Europeans are here too. Robyn Williams: What about members of faculty or lecturers and your professors, do you have to put a bomb under them to make them come here? Sandra Harding: Well again for those for whom this is location integral to their work no, not at all. People who understand the significance of the work that´s done here in those areas and so forth are very pleased to be here. To be fair though for some other people we have to encourage from within Australia in probably a much more focused way than people internationally because sometimes I guess folk from down south or from the west have a particular view of what northern Queensland might be like and almost without exception that view would be 20 years old or more. And therefore it doesn´t represent the sort of vibrancy I guess, the social and economic vibrancy that visitors to the region find these days. So we always do encourage people to come and have a look, we are always mindful of partners and to look after those people very well so they can make an informed judgement about joining us. Robyn Williams: Just two more questions - the first is when it comes to research maybe you´re not any longer in the abattoir but are you keeping your hand in some aspect of research in business or whatever? Sandra Harding: I do try to be, a few years ago I was involved in a very large Australian Research Council project called the Australian National Organisational Study which is on my website and we´ve done a second wave in the last year or so of this particular organisational survey and I´ve got fantastic colleagues in the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, NC State and UMAS Amherst with whom I work with in particular so they really do the work and they allow me to play - they are very kind a wonderful colleagues. Robyn Williams: Yes you keep a blog don´t you? Sandra Harding: Yes I do, I keep a blog and that can be accessed on the front page of the university. Robyn Williams: How interesting. And finally, what is the association of this James Cook University with the royal family in England? Sandra Harding: Well this is an interesting story. In 1970 James Cook University was signed into being by Queen Elizabeth II, she was here of course for the Bicentenary and the royal yacht Britannia as I understand was moored off Magnetic Island and on the appropriate day Prince Phillip and the Queen and Princess Anne came on campus and signed the university into being. Just recently I had the architect who was responsible for a number of the buildings at the time here, he´s in his 80s now, Jim Birrell and Jim was telling me do you know Sandra that there are only three universities in the English speaking world where a monarch has personally signed the university into being. And I said oh, tell me, and he said yes, Oxford, Cambridge and James Cook University. Robyn Williams: So there´s a special claim to fame, Professor Sandra Harding, Vice Chancellor of James Cook University in Townsville and her career from abattoir to business, from parasites to running a huge enterprise reminded me of another great Australia woman Dame Brigid Ogilvie recently elected a special fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Once she was head of the immensely wealthy Wellcome Trust. Brigid Ogilvie: I was born in Glen Innes on a sheep farm, I was lucky enough to have a father who was a very unusual sheep farmer in that he believed in educating his daughters. I went to the University of New England where I did the course rural science, which the science is underlying animal production and I was, in fact, the first graduate. Came to England in 1960 as a PhD student and went to the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge where I did a PhD on the immune response to helminth parasites of the gut. Robyn Williams: What was it like for a young woman from country NSW in Cambridge then? Brigid Ogilvie: Well I had a very good time, I must say I had a particularly good time socially and I managed to do my PhD without too much difficulty. Robyn Williams: You didn´t play up much? Brigid Ogilvie: I played up a lot, I gave the college I was attached to hell, Girton College, I was not used to being treated as a mildly intellectually deficient 13 year old after my years at Armidale where I was in charge of a Hall of Residence which was theoretically female but in fact was bisexual. Robyn Williams: Do you know most young people when cast adrift like that, being told here´s a bench, here´s a problem, go and solve it and come back in three years would panic. Why didn´t you? Brigid Ogilvie: I think it was because growing up on a farm and being heavily involved in a farm I learnt to be responsible with the freedom that goes with life on a farm at a very early age. And I think my whole course of life has been related to that experience in my early childhood, I´ve always been very independent and done things my way. Robyn Williams: You´ve been with the Welcome Trust now for some years, how did you come to be from this practical person from the Australian bush who liked doing practical work in laboratories to being an administrator and a leader? Brigid Ogilvie: Yes many people found it very strange that somebody who was so enthusiastic about research should make such a career more at the time I did. I actually got restless after 17 years, 17 wonderful years at Mill Hill and the reason I got restless was I´d got to a point in my career where I got more fun out seeing the young people I was responsible for get turned on by scientific research than doing it myself. It´s the teacher in all of us I guess. Robyn Williams: Dame Brigid Ogilvie now living back in Australia some of the time. Well next week I shall be In Conversation with Julie Horsefield, another remarkable woman in science in NZ this time. Coming up on Catalyst in a couple of minutes on ABC TV the Eureka Prizes and I´ll take you on a tour of the Shine Dome at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra. Production by Nicky Phillips and Charlie McKune. I´m Robyn Williams. read less
2008-08-14 Pole to Pole: A vet on the ice with seals
Wed August 13 2008
In this polar year many initiatives are offering new insights into changes in Antarctica. Dr Phil Tucak from Perth has spent several months exploring sites where Weddell seals are found. His studies of their behaviour and biology at a time of change are both illuminating and exciting. TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Vaughan Williams, his Symphony Antarctica. Hello, Robyn Williams with In Conversation and you may have noticed that this year is Polar Year. It´s also the year of the frog, of the potato and quite a few other items as well but tonight we´re polar...despite the somewhat confusing discovery that polar year is two years long. Still, worth paying attention to these north and south elements of this planet of ours. Last week we heard a little about the Arctic. This time we go south, with a vet, to the ice. Dr Phil Tucak trained at Murdoch University in Perth and now treats the usual range of domestic animals in his practice. But he´s also an adventurous veterinarian; he´s also broadcast in a spell for local radio in Esperance Western Australia, and now he´s been venturing to Antarctica to look at the seals. Well Phil Tucak is with me in our Perth studios. Phil where did you go and how did you get there? Phil Tucak: During the summer of 2006/7 I had the opportunity to head down to Antarctica and heading down from Hobart south via Macquarie Island to the continent and it took us actually six weeks to get there because we had to travel and stop off at the various Antarctic stations to resupply them. So we stopped past Casey, tried to get into Mawson Station, got stuck in the ice for a week, and then eventually ended up at Davis Station where we got out. I suppose the first thing that perhaps strikes you about Antarctica is that it´s not what you expect all the time, it´s not just white and ice covered, there´s also rocky areas around the coast and so it´s quite different to that sort of initial imagining that you would have of the continent. But when you see it for the first time it's—on the horizon it is just incredible to know there´s this massive land mass down the southern end of the globe. Robyn Williams: One and a half times the size of the Australian continent. Yes, huge, and most people are just knocked out—were you? Phil Tucak: It is that thing—and I suppose also the fact that in terms of not just Australia´s involvement down there but various countries, obviously there are various stations down there but where they are located is obviously such a small area in terms of this overall size of the continent that you definitely do get the sense that you´re on your own down there. And even just travelling down there on the ship, the ship is an ice breaker to get through this ice, and down there but you´re well and truly on your own. So you have that sort of feeling that if something should go wrong you´re a long way from help. At the same time you´re comparing it to the earlier explorers and they were doing this similar trip in a tall ship, or that type of thing, it´s just amazing to think that they were able to get there and survive for the years or so that they were down there. Robyn Williams: A ship made of wood not so much size actually, they were quite small. Phil Tucak: Exactly and just the fact that they had to take enough food and how they survived for warmth—down there this time we were well rugged up, four of five layers of clothing, from your thermal underwear up to your fleeced lined jacket, beanie, gloves and it still gets cold. So to imagine what they must have been like back 100 years ago is pretty amazing. Robyn Williams: How did you get stuck in Mawson? Phil Tucak: Well we were there fairly early in the season. Generally what happens is that when the ships head down to Antarctica they are going during summer months when it´s a bit warmer, so the ice does break up. But we headed down in early October and when we got there the ice was still quite thick, so the ship tries to get as close as possible to allow the helicopters to fly off to resupply people to the station. And so we were trying to get as close—and I think the minimum distance they have for a fly-off was 80 kilometres or something like that and we just couldn´t get that close. So for quite a few days we were circling in the ice trying to get in different leads and then they figured they could just sort of sit there and wait, they had a bit of time to see if they could get a bit closer if the ice would break up. For about four or five days we were just sitting there, in the ice, the ship was still running but ice all around and you see an amazing amount of wildlife. The penguins come up to the ship and are obviously very surprised about this big orange hulk of a thing just sitting there. Whales surface through the cracks in the ice and it was a very sort of serene experience and at one point we wanted to get to Antarctica but at the same time it was very relaxing to have that opportunity just to sit there and drink in the vast expanse of Antarctica. Robyn Williams: What was a veterinary scientist doing in Antarctica, what was your role? Phil Tucak: I was involved in a field research study that was being conducted through the Australian Antarctic Division which is based in Hobart and also the University of Tasmania and they have their Antarctic Wildlife Research Unit and together they have been conducting various studies. But the one I was involved with was on Weddell seals and they are the most southerly ranging mammal that permanently inhabits the Antarctic mainland. And the good thing about Weddell seals is that they are very placid, laid backed, sedentary animals and that means that for a scientist we can actually get up close to them in order to be able to study them compared to people might have heard of things like a leopard seal, which is a bit more aggressive, has a lot more potential to give you some serious harm if you get too close. So Weddell seals are very laid back and as a result we can get near them, we can physically touch them, to measure them and so what we were doing was firstly we were doing a census of the number of these seals in a particular area called the Vestfold Hills region which is near Australia´s Davis Station and then subsequent to that we were then catching some of the adult females who had just recently pupped and had their young seal pups alongside and we were sedating and then measuring and weighing the adults to get an idea of their body condition and size and also their pups. And that way we could make a bit of translation between knowing how much condition had gone from the mum to the pup and then relate it back to how the season was in terms of whether they were having a good season or not. Robyn Williams: Just a thought on those leopard seals you talked about, a couple of weeks ago on The Science Show I mentioned two leopard seals who were in fact blown right through in a storm north to Australia and they were actually stranded off the coast of Sydney and then taken to Taronga Zoo. The point I was trying to make is in a discussion of how you keep the Antarctic separate I asked whether you could then take the leopard seals back when they recovered. And of course the answer was no, we don´t do that at all because they might have caught some sort of infection and Antarctica is so pristine we don´t want to bring new germs in. Now does that surprise you? Phil Tucak: No, I had heard that as well and actually had done a little bit of work at Taronga with one of the vets there who had been talking about this exact issue and in one sense it was frustrating for them because they knew that they had this magnificent animal that they had nursed back to health and that they couldn´t release it. But at the same time I can definitely understand the reasons for that, that as you mention, it´s to do with the fact that for a period of time if you have an animal who´s now associated in a different environment with humans and potentially coming into contact with maybe other animals or other animal germs as such, that the risk then if they then are released to go back to their normal population is that they could bring something into them. To relate it to what we were doing in terms of when we were going down to interact with the animals, firstly you have to have sort of permits to actually engage with these animals so it´s not just as if anybody can go there and do this. And most of the time staying away from them if we could in the sense of only touching them if we needed to and you´re sort of maintaining fairly good hygiene in doing that and the fact that the animals in their own environment are not getting stressed by the stuff that you´re doing. You are hopefully therefore minimising any potential risk to them of picking up any germs from you. But I suppose definitely it´s just one of those things that not only from the animal point of view but even getting on and off the ship we had to be careful of whether there was dirt, or seeds in our boots, or out clothing because you could quite easily transfer those types of things into the Antarctic environment and also out of—you don´t want to be taking things back onto the ship. So it´s just that whole area of hygiene and sort of making sure that we minimise our impact on them. Robyn Williams: It´s almost like going to a different planet and making sure you don´t seed it. Phil Tucak: That´s definitely right and it´s quite interesting to know there are other research studies going on where they are doing these things, where they´ve been studying the mount of seeds and spores which are carried in people´s clothing and it is quite scary to think what stuff could potentially be introduced down there to what is a pristine environment. Obviously there´s quite a few things down there which would probably stop most things growing because it´s very cold and not much would survive but I think it just brings into play that wider issue of Antarctica is a relatively untouched place and perhaps almost the last place on earth where humans haven´t had a bit impact on it as yet and hopefully it will stay that way. But it just means that we do have to be fairly careful if we are going to be involved down there. Robyn Williams: And the Weddell seals, they responded well to your intrusions? Phil Tucak: Surprisingly—I mean that´s the thing, even as a veterinarian you´re obviously always concerned about the welfare of the animal you are dealing with and in this situation, as I mentioned, they are a very sort of placid animal, so it means we could literally walk up to them and they would barely be bothered by us, they´d just sort of roll over, cock one eye at you as if to say who are you, what are you doing here. In terms of their response to the procedures we were doing, we were able to sedate them, weigh them, measure them, it was all over in about 15 minutes and as a result they were then sort of back with their pup, they were then quite happy to be just there lying on the ice again. So in terms of our interaction hopefully the information we were able to gain from dealing with them sort of outweighed any potential sort of small risk to the animal. And that information I suppose hopefully can be related back to things like climate change, effective fisheries in the ocean because if we can get just a small snapshot of what´s happening with the Weddell seals at their level of the eco system, the scientific research can then be correlated back to further down the food chain. And at a really simplistic level, if we have climate change occurring and sea temperatures are rising even slightly that affects the grown of algae on sea ice, which then affects how much food is available for the smallest of fish which are then eaten by bigger fish, which are then eaten by seals. So if we can sort of get a level at that point as to how they´re doing we can then relate it back and over a period of time work out what changes are occurring. Robyn Williams: The web of life. Any results yet? Phil Tucak: The results are sort of on going, it´s a research date that started in 2005 and is ongoing over several years. In terms of the population of Weddell seals in that area near the Davis Station it´s relatively stable which is great to know in terms of the numbers of actual seals. And the other data that they are collecting in terms of population dynamics so as to speak is also giving them data over a period of time to let them know what´s happening with that population. But also if they are attaching satellite monitoring tags to these seals, they are collecting specific information at the time to do with things like salinity levels in the ocean, where these seals are going, so they are definitely getting information that they can use right now and that´s going not only to the University of Tassie Antarctic Division but also the CSIRO who are also involved as well. Robyn Williams: Did you, Phil, have any veterinary work to do other than the scientific investigations; did you have to treat anything? Phil Tucak: No, many people would know that all the husky dogs have been removed from Antarctica for many years now, so there´s unfortunately none of them down there. Robyn Williams: It´s sad isn´t it? Phil Tucak: It is, but the good thing being that on the ship and at the bases as well there´s a lot of history associated with them still there, photographs and displays about life with the huskies. There´s wildlife around in terms of penguins and bird life and that but in general we don´t interact with these animals or don´t interfere in terms of if anything was going wrong. And I remember one situation where we were travelling through one of the ice covered fjords of this Vestfold Hills region and we came across a young seal pup which was right in the middle of the ice, no where near any of the adult seals or anything, so obviously it had been separated from its mum and was a long way from home and was not going to survive. But as to whether our role in that situation is to pick up this seal and move it and try and find its mum you would have a very hard time trying to do that. We don´t interfere, its how nature works down there and so as a result the veterinary work I was involved in is purely in terms of supporting this research team. Robyn Williams: You left it? Phil Tucak: We left the seal yes, it was a very hard decision to do and you hear so often of things where people are watching a lion stalk and attack an animal you know why didn´t they interfere or stop, it just gets back to the fact that this is nature in action and in most cases we are not in a position to be able to do any thing like for arguments sake, if we had picked up that seal and tried to find its mum, firstly that would have then imprinted us in it in terms of our scent, and also potentially stressed the animal out in the short term. And in trying to find its mum we wouldn´t have been able to know which one it was with so we probably wouldn´t have helped the situation at all. Robyn Williams: Yes, talking about imprinting, it may have thought that you were mum and followed you around. You´re responding as a scientist of course and you are surrounded by a number of other scientists, what general fields were they in the people who were on the team with you? Phil Tucak: The specific team that I was working with we were myself and three seal biologist so their background is all very strongly in the area of seal research. One of them actually was a former doctor who has now gone into the area of seal research and another one had been doing it for about 20 year, been down to Antarctica several times, so they had a great wealth of information between them in terms of the various research that they were doing. So it was great just to be involved with them and to learn a lot about the Weddell seals and also their other experiences in Antarctica. And then slightly broader to that we were also travelling down to Antarctica firstly on the ship there were about 90 to 100 expeditioners going down and that´s a combination of scientific staff but also the support staff for the base. So that´s tradespeople, a chef, doctor, management—you´re sort of exposed to a whole range of people and as a result you can learn a lot about all the different things that are going on. The other great thing about going to Antarctica is that everyone is really keen to help each other and there´s a lot of co-operation, so we were able to be involved in other scientific work that´s going on. I had the opportunity to head out with a moss scientist and collect moss samples which was something... Robyn Williams: It´s a surprising thing that moss grows in Antarctica actually. Phil Tucak: It is. Well that´s the thing, I´m sure it´s pretty much one of the only significant plant forms that do grow down there, the mosses and the lichens, and it is quite amazing because there´s so much just white down there in terms of the ice and the snow and the rock, a sort of browny colour. But if you see some of this green moss growing it is interesting for your mind to take that in because it´s such a strikingly different colour. So we had a few days we were out based in the field walking around and taking samples from different areas which they can then study and again I think moss itself holds a lot of clues to what´s happened over previous years, it´s a fairly long living plant form. So that was definitely interesting to be involved with but there is also geological work going on collecting ice core samples, there were people collecting water samples from beneath the lakes to see what marine life was down there, what was the sediment levels, people diving underneath the ice to again see what plants were growing in the seabed. So there was a whole lot of stuff going on and it is I great to know that there is so much science happening in Antarctica and that Australia is supporting that. Robyn Williams: Especially in this year when it´s Polar Year in fact which goes on paradoxically for more than a year, which is very interesting. With all those people there obviously there would be discussion, something to do with climate change. What were the general feelings amongst all your scientists about what´s happening down there? Phil Tucak: A common question I get asked a lot is could you see any effect of climate change there? And I think going down there once off, no you can´t, simply because you´re only there for a short period of time. Whereas some people had been there over progressive years and as a result they could make some comment as to subtle changes in terms of whether it´s the level of sea ice, when it forms, how thick it is, people who had been going back over several years could make more comments about that. It was also interesting the amount of marine life, whales around in terms of the whaling issue, there were different views about what was happening about that. But I think the thing being that people down there who were involved in research in science they are all so passionate and committed about finding the information that is stored in Antarctica and then being able to relate that to things like climate change so they can explain to people that there are changes occurring and we do need to consider the way we are doing things to hopefully slow down what is going on down there. But I think obviously climate change is something that is going to become more and more of an issue especially in Antarctica simply because a very subtle change in sea temperature has a lot more dramatic effects down there than it does perhaps up around Australia. Robyn Williams: Yes some people have said that the warming is going faster in the south but paradoxically because it might be getting warmer there would be more evaporation and therefore more precipitation, rainfall, snowfall and there´s very little of it. It is in fact, sometimes described as a desert because the rainfall, or the snow fall is so light. However, because of the increase in temperature paradoxically the ice may be getting thicker in places. Were you coming across that sort of argument while you were down there? Phil Tucak: No, but I can definitely understand that reasoning and I suppose it does just highlight that it´s a complex issue in a way and it´s going to take a lot of work for us to be able to try things and whether, even at the moment, there´s changes occurring in government in terms of carbon trading and all that sort of stuff which obviously has flow on effects, that it should for of help down there but I think the scientists have definitely been saying that changes in Antarctica have been accelerating, whether it´s in the recent decade or so in terms of various ice shelfs collapsing, it is telling us that there are changes occurring. And it would be very unfortunate or sad for us to lose such a pristine environment or for it to change, whether it means if you´re losing areas of ice covered water there´s therefore less areas for penguins or seals to breed, so therefore that effects their population. It does have a whole lot of flow on effects that we´re slowly becoming aware of. Robyn Williams: The other big issue that you mention—whales, you said there was much discussion were many people there amongst your colleagues for whaling? Phil Tucak: There were a few and I think it was perhaps specific to the species involved. One argument that was presented was that some of the species, I think it was maybe the minke whales, are sometimes referred to as the cockroaches of the sea and that there are a large number of them around the world. So therefore if we´re going to do whaling you´re not making a significant difference to their population. I´m not saying I agree with this, so that was one thing that I found interesting that some of the scientists were actually just voicing that in terms of the numbers—it´s not always the way it´s represented. But obviously at the same time there are species I think like the humpback or whatever which are in a lot more of a precarious state so therefore from a scientific poin