Dr Tony Smithyman

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, deans of the Faculty of Health and Faculty of Science, distinguished guests, members of staff and especially graduates, family and friends. Welcome. Thank you for this opportunity to deliver this occasional address. It’s a great honour for me and a great pleasure. If I stumble over a few words, I hope you’ll forgive me –

I’ve just arrived back from the tiny little country of Malawi. Now, Malawi, because you’re now graduates, you’re very smart, you know everything, is a small country in East Africa, which also happens to be my birthplace, To the new graduates, many, many congratulations. For each and every one of you, your award’s required countless hours of hard work and application, and unless someone’s actually been through the process, you never get to know just how hard it is and how difficult and exhausting it is to get there, so well done. But let’s not forget the families, either. Who knows what sacrifices the families have had to put up with to get their family members through, so a special thanks to you also. It’s time to celebrate and for you to look to your future.

What will you do with your degree? How can you apply your newfound knowledge in the best possible way, and what are the great challenges that are facing us today? How can you develop a successful career in today’s highly competitive environment? But if you boil all of that down, it just comes to one thing: will I be able to get a job in the future? That’s the question. I can’t answer those questions for you, but perhaps I can share a little bit of my experience of the past 40 years in science and offer some thoughts to the future.

To paraphrase that Australian writer, A B Facey, I’ve had a very fortunate scientific life. I’ve studied under, I’ve met, I’ve worked with some amazing scientists over the years. As a bacteriologist and immunologist, I had the opportunity to work with very difficult problems, including cancer, HIV-related diseases, tropical diseases like malaria, and more recently, I’ve been tackling the really difficult problem of antibiotic resistance. I’ve also had the privilege to travelling to more than 60 countries in all the continents except Antarctica – to remote parts of Africa, to Asia, to the Americas, to Europe and the former Soviet Union. All this in the name of science. Not even professional tennis players get to as many countries as I do.

I was particularly lucky that I graduated in the mid-1970s – now, that may seem a long time ago to you; it doesn’t to me – at the start of what is now called the biotechnology revolution. This revolution was based on two breakthroughs that happened very simultaneously – the discovery of recombinant DNA techniques and also the discovery of monoclonal antibodies. Those two breakthroughs combined to create this biotechnology revolution, and they laid the foundation for a massive new industry, which now employs hundreds of thousands of scientists and has produced hundreds of new drugs. In fact, more than half the new drugs now coming onto the medical market have come from the biotechnology industry.

One thing it did was it allowed lots of scientists like me to take advantage of this new technology revolution, this new industry, and it allowed me to set up my company, Cell Labs, in 1984, which is now Australia’s longest-running biotech company. The best piece of good fortune that I had has a scientist was when I decided what I was going to do with my new biotech company, because it actually consisted of me and a desk and as sympathetic assistant. And we didn’t know what we were going to do but we’d put up our shingle biotech company, and we thought about all the different things we could do but the one thing I kept coming back to was the tropical diseases at that time were very, very neglected.

Even here in Sydney, the School of Tropical Medicine had shut down. It was very unfashionable – deeply unfashionable – to be working in tropical diseases in the 1970s. But I’d been born in Africa and I’d seen the effect of the diseases and so I thought that’s where we would go. And so, we have spent the last 30 years working on diseases like dengue fever, malaria, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, elephantiasis. These diseases, you’ve got to understand, affect at least a third of the world’s population, so it’s been an endlessly fascinating and rewarding journey. I can honestly say that I have not been bored for one minute in all those years, so I chose the right subject.

What have I learned that could possibly be of relevance to you today? I mean, you may just be looking at me and saying, ‘I wish he would hurry up because we want to get to the party’ but it may be important to you. So, if we’ve made such wonderful progress, what other challenges are there today? You know, during my lifetime I’ve seen the cracking of the DNA code, I’ve seen sequencing, whole-genome sequencing, I’ve seen almost the total eradication of smallpox, the near-elimination of diseases like polio. When I was a boy growing up, I had friends who were in these iron lungs with polio, but people don’t even mention it nowadays because it’s vanished. And it was all due to this work that was coming out, this tremendous explosion of medical and scientific technology. All sorts of new vaccines were coming alone.

So, perhaps there’s no challenges for you – perhaps you’re wasting your time. I don’t know. However, let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a time in history where we need scientists more than today. This is where I get you very, very depressed before you go out. In fact, we are really in deep trouble. Previous generations, especially mine, have left the planet in an incredible mess. We’ve denuded the forests, we’ve polluted the rivers, we’ve fished out the oceans, we’ve fouled the air and we’ve driven many species to the brink of extinction. Okay? And in addition to that, as part of that, along with this destruction has come a whole range of terrifying new diseases that we had never even contemplated before. We’ve got diseases such as Ebola virus, dengue fever, chicken [name], Zika virus, West Nile fever, we have a resurgence of malaria and in more recent years we’ve just managed to contain swine flu in 2015, bird flu 2013 and SARS in 2003. And in each case, these outbreaks and epidemics took almost the total resources of the world’s global biomedical community to contain them. And at the front line, what I call the thin white line, were the scientists, okay?

There’s a lot of other diseases emerging too – re-emerging – as a result of emigration, conflict, and other problems. Global travel. Leishmaniasis has resurged in the Syrian refugees. Chagas disease, which is a very, very dangerous disease of the heart, parasitic disease, has appeared in the southern United States, and a disease that has never been seen anywhere in Europe, [name], has appeared in Sardinia, in all places. And at the same time, all the drugs we’ve spent so much time developing – our antibiotics, our antiparasitic drugs – have all stopped working or they’re starting to be less and less effective.

Another typical example – chloroquine resistance in malaria. And a particular problem is this antibiotic resistance. Can you imagine working in a hospital where there are no antibiotics? Can you imagine a situation where we have an influenza epidemic like the one in 1918, the Spanish Flu, which killed 100 million people? Can you imagine having that happen again but without having antibiotics to treat the secondary infections? So, it’s not a question of too few challenges, but too many. And who’s going to sort out the mess? Well, it’s not going to be me, because I’m going to be retired. It’s going to be you. And so, I wish you the best of luck.

I’ll tell you who it won’t be – it will not be the merchant bankers, it will not be stockbrokers, and it won’t be the politicians. It’ll be you, the graduates of today, who’ll have to be on the front line. You’ll have to handle the bird flus and the Zika viruses and the Ebolas, and you’ll have to look after the patients with these things. So, we’ve never needed scientists as much as we need them now. So, anyway, are you all depressed now? Everyone depressed? Good.

So, is there any good news? Yes, there is some good news. There has never been a time in history, in the history of scientists, when scientists had so much knowledge at their fingertips. The DNA revolution has given us almost incredible access to the world of biology. I mean, for example, it took hundreds of millions of dollars – billions of dollars – to sequence the first human genome back in 2000, but now you can do that for a couple of hundred dollars in two or three hours. Incredible power. And if you don’t – if your interests don’t lie in infectious diseases, you’ve got the field of immunotherapy or genetic engineering with the new [name] techniques.

And at the same time as that’s going on, that genetic revolution, we have the information revolution, so suddenly you, the new graduates, you’ve got the whole world’s libraries in your pocket with your iPhone or your tablet. Every library is just there. Anyway, you must be thinking – and I’ll finish here – that’s all very well, these great challenges, all these great pandemics and epidemics are coming our way. But what can I do as an individual? You know, I’m working in a laboratory or a hospital – I can’t do much to help these problems. And I think that’s the wrong attitude altogether.

I think what you should do is aim high. Choose an area of science that you really love and aim high. It’s amazing what difference one person in some tiny laboratory can do. The history of science is littered with individuals who, by themselves, took on the prevailing view and revolutionised science. To give you a few examples: Galileo, who was thrown into prison because he said the sun didn’t revolve around the earth; it was the other way around. Spanish Inquisition took objection to that. Semmelweis, who discovered or prevented childbed fever – he ended up in a lunatic asylum. He was committed to a lunatic asylum because he went against the prevailing wisdom, but he saved and has continued to save millions and millions of women from childbed fever. And then Félix d'Hérelle, who discovered phages, another great individual. And then in Australia we have Professor Rob Warren and Professor Barry Marshall who won the Nobel Prize for going against prevailing thoughts about what causes stomach ulcers from h.pylori. All great individuals.

So, I’d just like to finish with one final bit of advice from Malawi again: one of my great heroes was a fellow called Dr Anthony Hall Martin, and he was one of the greatest conservators that Africa’s ever seen. He managed to save lots and lots of game parks and he’s managed to save countless species from extinction, especially the big animals, rhinos, elephants, lions etcetera. He died in 2014, and if you go to, there’s a small game park in the south of Malawi called Majete, and on a hill there there’s a little epitaph to this fellow, Anthony Hall Martin, and it’s a saying from a fellow called Daniel [name], and this is the epitaph in honour of Anthony Hall Martin. It says, ‘Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir one’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans, deep into the future. Aim high in hope and work. Have faith, remembering that a noble plan, once recorded, will never die and long after we’re gone will still be a living thing.’ So, aim high, choose worthwhile targets, have a wonderful day, and have a wonderful career. Thank you.