Extract from ABC The Science Show
1. Sylvia Earle: oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer
We're seeing upheaval in things that we've taken for granted: that we can breathe the air, that water will magically fall out of the sky at the right time. We're at a crossroads in so many ways. But it's not too late to do something.
Half the coral reefs in the world are gone, that's bad news, but half the coral reefs are in pretty good shape. Ninety per cent of many of the big fish are gone, but we still have 10 per cent of the tuna and 10 per cent of the sharks. We still have groupers out there on the Great Barrier Reef—they're not all gone. But they could be unless we do something now.
2. Simon Kyaga: psychiatrist and researcher
I'm interested in the association between genius and madness. We've done research on this alleged association and we've found it seems to hold, on a national level—that there is, in fact, an association between creativity and psychiatric disorder.
Once we have established that there is an association, we need to ask ourselves why. This question can be put in two different aspects: one is what is happening in the brain that could explain these associations, on a mechanistic level? The other is, what is the reason for humans displaying this trait, this association at all? Is it possible this association may tell us something about who we are as humans and why we evolved to be humans? That's more of an evolutionary perspective.
3. Norna Robertson: experimental physicist
My field is the detection of gravitational waves and a few weeks ago we announced that we'd actually detected them. These were a prediction by Einstein 100 years ago and it's taken that long for us to finally be able to say that they do exist. It's a really exciting time for me at the moment.
I'm a physicist and I'm an experimentalist, so I worked to develop the techniques necessary to make these detections.
4. Brian Schmidt: cosmologist and Nobel laureate
I work on the universe on its larger scales: what it's been doing in the past and what it's going to do in the future.
Seventy per cent of the universe is stuff we call dark energy. Only 5 per cent are atoms that we know and understand here on earth, and 25 per cent is what we call dark matter.
We're at a remarkable point in history where we have this great story of the universe, but 95 per cent of the universe is dark matter, dark energy, stuff we really don't understand. I'm explaining why we're so sure that those things exist but why they remain a mystery.
5. Priyamvada Natarajan: theoretical astrophysicist
People like me have been engaged in trying to discern how dark matter is distributed spatially. The way I do it is by looking at images, exploiting this phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where matter causes deflection in paths of light rays as they reach us from distant galaxies.
Recently I've been most excited about a very deep data set from the Hubble Space Telescope. I've been involved in trying to recommend them to look at six places on the sky where we know we've seen some lensing already, where we know there are huge clumps of dark matter. By looking deeper, by having the deepest ever images, we can reconstruct a very exquisite dark matter distribution, where you can really map the granularity of dark matter.
I've been really trying to confront the observations with our theoretical understanding. There are some hints that there may be something interesting, but it's a little too early to tell.
6. Rob Sparrow: philosopher and bioethicist
I work mostly on the ethics of genetic technologies, in particular pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and now direct genetic modification of human beings using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. I also work on the ethics of robotics, mainly military robotics but also aged care robotics.
Science shapes our world so it feels like we should have a say in it. I'm interested in the ways in which we could have a more democratic conversation about science.
7. Jenny Martin: drug researcher
I want to make the world a better place and a more equal place for everyone, not just half the population. I'm talking about gender equity in universities and how we can make sure that half of our professors are women, not just one fifth of them.
There's loads of ways we can do that. We need to make sure we have welcoming positions, welcoming offices, and welcoming environments for everyone, not just for men. We need to make sure that we look out for unconscious bias, measure that, and make sure we address it.
8. Rod Lamberts: science communicator
I'm very interested in where ethics and normal people come into contact. There's the scholarly side of ethics—all that very scientific stuff—and then there's the humanities side of ethics. That's what really interests me most, that public interface between eggheads and people who can actually give some real feedback.
We're talking about cutting certain genes out of people before they're born so they have certain characteristics. We're talking about bionics and enhancing human beings. Who says what's good and what's bad? How do we have those conversations? The idea of ethics as a process is really important. It's not an end point, it's a ongoing discussion.
9. Stefan Hajkowicz: expert in strategic foresight
We live in the era of the innovation imperative. We've built wealth and prosperity in Australia over the last few decades via high grade mineral oil reserves, high commodity prices and other fortuitous things, but we've moved into a different phase, and the economies around us have matured and changed.
There was a session here on the movie The Martian, and this guy had to solve science challenge after science challenge to get from where he was to the launch pad on Mars. When he's talking to his colleagues at NASA about how it could be possible to do this when there's so many challenges in the way, his response is "We're going to have to science the shit out of it." To me that captures what we've got to do with the Australian economy to be able to push it forward.
10. Gerfried Stocker: media artist and engineer
Usually when we see all these wonderful utopian scenarios of what smart cities will look like, we don't see the people. We describe scenarios that are very ordinary, very organised, and some people like to be organised, but some people don't, and usually the living quality of a place is that it offers a good environment for everybody to live there. I think this is a huge deficit, that in most of the planning of the smart cities of the world, citizens are not in the equation.
I'm directing an organisation that is working with many artists as well as social activists on concepts on how to live in the city of the future. We're not so much on the architecture side or infrastructure side, but with our laboratory we have many collaborations with big industries. For three years we've been working on the autonomous cars of the future, including questions of how these robots on the streets will communicate with us, and how we will be able to communicate with them.
11. Margaret Somerville: ethicist of medicine and science
Humans have got extraordinary paths, that no humans before us have ever had. I'm worried that they might be used to destroy the real essence of what it means to be human.
I think currently the world's most dangerous idea is that there's nothing special about being human, and that could lead to thinking we're no different to animals, that we're no different to robots: we design them, why not design us? Or we euthanase them, so why not euthanase us?
12. Cheryl Desha: environmental engineer
My passion is around making sure that cities in the future are places where people can thrive and enjoy great quality of life in the context of what's happening to our environment over the next 50 years.
We know that climate change is going to be impacting on our cities, whether it's weather changes, heat changes, the ability for certain things to grow at certain times of the year.
In those rapidly changing conditions, how do we ensure that our cities are still vibrant places where people can thrive? That includes the very centre of cities and also the suburban contexts surrounding them.
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