Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to draw the attention of senators to the many assets of the Australian people to be found in the national capital. I refer particularly to one that may have escaped the attention of many people and one that I think is often overlooked because it is not a frequently visited site like other national institutions in the national capital. It is, like so many jewels in the treasure box that is our national capital, an asset of enormous importance and value to the Australian people—but, again, perhaps not well understood.

I am referring to the John Curtin School of Medical Research, which is found on the northern shores of Lake Burley Griffin. The school was established more than half a century ago to be Australia's national medical research institute. It was conceptualised by the Australian-born Howard Florey—later Baron Florey—who won the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his contribution to the development of penicillin as a therapeutic drug while working at Oxford University. He was in Australia in 1948 for the establishment of the John Curtin School and guided it basically for its first 10 years, until its buildings were officially opened in 1957. The John Curtin School of Medical Research was named for Australia's wartime Prime Minister John Curtin, who supported Florey's concept for an Australian world-class medical research school. Although Florey and Curtin never actually met, they saw the need for a national medical research school and in their own ways shepherded the school through its early years. It became clear that this facility would be ideally sited at the new university being established in Canberra, the Canberra University College, later the Australian National University. The aim then, as now, was to keep exceptionally talented minds working in Australia rather than losing them to appointments at overseas universities or institutions. The John Curtin School of Medical Research was one of the first of the five research schools built at the ANU, and they are all great national assets and treasures.

The John Curtin school was and is more than simply a place where research was conducted in those early postwar years and has continued since; it rapidly achieved international prominence and recognition. Indeed, it was very quickly a centre of excellence in medical research, and that excellence can be measured in a very reliable way—through a very high rate of acknowledgement by the international community, most conspicuously through the awarding of Nobel prizes. The school has the distinction of having three investigators who have received Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine for work conducted at the school. In 1963 Sir John Eccles was awarded his Nobel Prize for his work on the transmission of signals in nerve cells. Much more recently, in 1996, immunologists Professor Peter Doherty and Professor Rolf Zinkernagel were awarded the Nobel Prize for studies describing how the body's immune cells protect it against viruses. The research was carried out at the John Curtin school in the early 1970s, when Professor Zinkernagel was a PhD student. Indeed, he had the distinction until relatively recently of being the only Nobel Laureate awarded a prize for work done during his PhD studies. Another award was made in 2010, so he was the first of two to have received that distinction. To celebrate the work carried out by Professors Doherty and Zinkernagel and to encourage young researchers with excellent ideas and enormous potential to achieve success in medical research, the school is currently offering the first Zinkernagel-Doherty 'Freedom to Discover' Career Development Award for Medical Discovery. The award program will offer the successful candidate an opportunity to foster innovation, discovery and major breakthroughs in medical research.

There is another name associated with the school which, although it does not have a Nobel Prize attached to it, is nonetheless rightly a name considered among the giants of medical research in this country. Professor Frank Fenner is a name associated with work in virology and parasitology. He was a director of the school. He has received numerous prizes and awards during his long association with the school. He died relatively recently. He was well known for his work on the malarial parasite particularly and was appointed professor of microbiology at the new school in 1949. His interest then lay in the balance between virus, virulence and host resistance and he was famously involved in the minimisation of the rabbit plague in Australia through the release of the myxoma virus. We all know of myxomatosis. Professor Fenner had the distinction of chairing the World Health Organisation Global Commission for Certification of Smallpox Eradication. It made this famous certification on 9 December 1979, saying it:

Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.

In fact that was one of the most important achievements in medical science of all time, one of only two diseases to have been completely eradicated by human endeavour. This is little known by many Australians, I am sure, but here in Canberra, at our national institution the John Curtin School of Medical Research, enormously important work was done by Frank Fenner and his colleagues to that very goal. Professor Fenner was awarded the Japan Prize in 1988 and the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2002. Florey's vision for a diversified medical school covering a range of disciplines, with scientists carrying out superlative, basic and fundamental research in areas including pathology, medicine, physiology and epidemiology has been carried forward today into new fields. Today scientists are carrying out groundbreaking research in areas that include immunology, genomics, neuro­science, mental health, infectious diseases and metabolic disorders.

The latest in a long line of extremely distinguished academics to have held the post of Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research is Professor Julio Licinio, formerly of the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Miami. He took up the appointment in 2009, leading the school to develop a focus on translational medicine, which aims to bring discovery from the laboratory to the clinic through improve patient care. At one time the school was essentially funded entirely by a block grant from the Commonwealth. These days, as we know, these things have tended to change and the school is now only partially federally supported directly and in fact raises most of its funding for its academic and research mission from granting bodies and other sources nationally and internationally. That is why at the moment the school is developing a John Curtin medical school foundation to support the school and to foster new programs. There have been a number of those new programs in recent years. Some of those new initiatives include setting up the national centre for translational medicine, including a new national centre for human genomics in partnership with the Beijing Genomics Institute from Shenzhen in China, and establishing the Eccles Institute of Neuroscience. The Eccles Institute will bring together ANU neuroscientists studying brain and nervous system function and diseases at a new $65 million purpose-built building due for inauguration in December 2011. There is currently a search under way for the director of that institute.

The John Curtin School of Medical Research is conducting an open day next Saturday. If any of my colleague senators are in Canberra on that day I would warmly encourage them to spend some time visiting this great national institution housed only a few kilometres from this national parliament. The building in which it is housed is an award-winning building, only relatively recently opened, funded by a significant grant from the Howard government to give it a new home after having lived in its previous home, the one opened by Howard Florey more than half a century ago. It is a fabulous building to visit in its own right. Again I remind senators that this is only one of a range of extraordinary institutions owned by the Australian people which are littered across this city and which represent together a great national asset of importance to all Australians.