ANU Reporter
August 2003
Contents
New centre set to unlock secrets of the laser
The new Stromlo unveiled
Feminine pugilists undermine convention
Creating a gym for the mind
Trojan horse could hold key to cancer
The universe and beyond
Star count: ANU astronomer makes best yet
Time to scrap family benefit system
ANU helps drive Mars mission
Swapping Coburg for Canberra
Impressions
Ancient Chinese rap revived - and ready to export
The last word
To return to the contents section, click the Contents links at the end of each story.
New centre set to unlock secrets of the laser
By Tim Winkler
A laser beam made up of atoms will be just one of the tools produced by a new Quantum-Atom Optics research centre based at The Australian National University.
The new ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics was officially launched last month and promises to set Australia at the forefront of laser technology.
For the Director of the Centre, ANU Professor Hans Bachor (left, at the opening), the development of a research hub dedicated to exploring the potential properties and uses of light is the culmination of decades of research.
Professor Bachor was recently awarded a Federation Fellowship, Australia’s most prestigious publicly-funded individual research grant, to further his work in photonics.
The Centre involves collaboration between the ANU, the University of Queensland and the Swinburne University of Technology.
The Centre has been established with more than $15 million in funding over the next five years, ARC funding, cash and in-kind funding from the universities involved, the Queensland and ACT Governments.
It will be also linked with partners in New Zealand, Britain, The Netherlands, France and Germany.
“We are going to create a new scientific toolbox so that new machines can be built which make full use of the quantum properties of light and atoms,” Professor Bachor said.
“We have an atom laser that is a building block for instruments such as very sensitive sensors or alternatively, a refined way of optical communication.
“We also combine visionary theoretical ideas with experimental demonstration and the design of practical instruments.
“Other devices which we expect to be built from the fundamental work we are doing are extremely sensitive sensors for the environment and the detection of minerals or more powerful memory devices for computers.”
Acclaimed US physicist and Nobel Laureate, Professor William Phillips is among the eminent physicists on the advisory board of the new Centre.
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The new Stromlo unveiled
By Tim Winkler
Heritage buildings will be reconstructed, viewing facilities enhanced for public use and a new virtual reality theatre established in the plans for the reconstruction of Mt Stromlo Observatory released by ANU.
Bushfires in January destroyed more than $40 million worth of facilities and equipment at the Observatory, including five telescopes, workshops, an important heritage building and seven houses.
Mt Stromlo will resume its mantle as the home of Australian astronomy through the planned redevelopment, which includes the placement of two telescopes on Mount Stromlo and one at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran.
The redevelopment (artist's impression above) will ensure Mt Stromlo remains a world-class astronomy research and education facility, ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb said. Funding for the redevelopment, including insurance claims, is yet to be finalised, so the plan allows for staged construction.
“Mt Stromlo is not just an icon of Australian science, it is the workplace of a number of the world’s leading researchers,” Professor Chubb said.
“The January fires devastated the Observatory, but it is time to look ahead to the new Stromlo.
“It is clear that a site with such heritage, renowned as a powerhouse of research and innovation around the world, must be re-equipped with world-class facilities. The University, the International scientific community and the Australian public would not and could not accept a second-class Stromlo.”
The planned redevelopment includes:
- The Advanced Instruments and Engineering Facility, which will replace the workshops destroyed in the blaze, offering expanded design and manufacture capabilities for precision optical instruments and a research and development program focusing on Extremely Large Telescopes
- A new robotically-controlled two-metre telescope, the Phoenix
- The world’s fastest sky-mapping telescope, the Skymapper, to be built at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory, but controlled from Mt Stromlo through a broadband link
- Restoration of the historic 1924 Admin building, to house a rebuilt library and offices
- Restoration of the historic 23cm Oddie Telescope
- Housing for Staff and Students
- A new virtual reality theatre, allowing visitors to fly through our universe in 3D
The Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Professor Penny Sackett, said Mt Stromlo had opened the eyes of tens of thousands of Australians to science and served as a vital resource to international astronomy for decades — and would continue to play this role in the future.
“The fires destroyed much of our infrastructure, but left our most important asset intact — our people,” Professor Sackett said.
“We can not and we should not reconstruct a carbon copy of the old Stromlo. This new design is overwhelmingly oriented around meeting the needs of staff, students and visitors — while also ensuring Stromlo retains its status as an internationally important observatory.
“The new design retains telescopes and the research hub at Stromlo, but provides even stronger integration with the University’s Siding Spring resources, ultimately providing a more powerful research facility for Australia.”
For further information on the redevelopment of Mt Stromlo go to: http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/
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Feminine pugilists undermine convention
New study of women's boxing
By Jessica Jeeves
Boxing is a sport that has always provoked strong reactions. The peculiar sight of two athletes in a confined space competing over who can inflict the most violence is fascinating for some and repulsive for others.
There is also a strong contingent of boxing enthusiasts, many within the boxing establishment, who enjoy boxing as a spectacle — just as long as it is men they are watching. Critics of the male-dominated realm of boxing argue that there is something particularly gendered about the way boxing is perceived, especially in a time when all other contact sports, from rugby to bull fighting, have embraced women as participants.
Boxing clubs are attracting increasing numbers of women around Australia, but organised women’s fights remain illegal in New South Wales, where Arthur Tunstall, head of the NSW Amateur Boxing Association claims it’s just, well, wrong for girls to hit each other and call it a sport.
“I was brought up to respect a woman, and I do. And I don’t think she’s there to be punched around,” Mr Tunstall told the media in April 2001.
While women’s boxing has a long tradition — there was an exhibition bout at the 1904 Olympics — it is still a long way from attaining cultural legitimacy.
Silke Andris, a doctoral candidate at the ANU Centre for Cross-Cultural Research is currently examining why this sport is still so controversial and why, despite that, so many women are drawn to it.
Ms Andris has recently moved to Perth in order to conduct her fieldwork with the national women’s boxing coach and the amateur female boxers who train under him.
What makes Ms Andris’ work compelling is her choice of film as a medium for her thesis — she believes that one of the keys to our strong response to women’s fighting lies in its specifically visual nature, its confronting physicality.
Above all, Ms Andris believes boxing is performative, something enacted for an audience, whose ideas of gendered embodiment are projected onto the fighters. Ms Andris suggests women’s fights are visually jarring because they challenge our view of women’s bodies as passively aesthetic and sexually objective.
Andris's thesis will discuss the often over-looked issue of whether boxers themselves understand their practice as violent, and their relationships to their opponents as disrespectful and objectifying.
Women who box, perform a traditionally masculine ritual, and in doing so they unsettle conventional notions of femininity, physicality, class and aggression.
Andris contends that boxing is seen as “an essentially masculine, working class activity, associated with male aggressiveness, physique and psychology,” making it socially transgressive for women to participate.
Physical aggression is seen as the terrain of men, and when women express aggression with their bodies, even in sport, it is seen as unfeminine, ugly and again somehow wrong. In an age where women participate and are accepted in nearly every activity, boxing remains something of an anomaly.
Andris suggests that unlike other sports, boxing’s history (prisons and carnivals) and the centrality of violence (one writer called it “vicious and brutish”), have coded the sport as exclusively masculine. While women’s boxing has made inroads into popularising the sport, with an ever increasing number of gyms and organised fights, the commercial side of boxing, with its focus on pay-per-view, remains mostly closed off to women’s fights.
The argument from networks like Fox Sports is that women’s fights are simply unpopular, drawing public complaints whenever they are viewed.
However, boxers like Sydney’s Holly Fernely, who last year cancelled her fight which was to open the Mundine-Lester bout because Fox refused to televise it, argue that fights are so rarely screened that it is difficult not to believe that Tunstall’s “unladylike” idea is shared by many in the boxing establishment, preventing women’s boxing from getting the exposure that it deserves.
Andris’ project, to conduct a visual anthropology of women’s boxing, is also focused on the women themselves — why they enjoy boxing, how they train and how they negotiate their identity through boxing.
“Boxing is not only a celebration of muscles, strength and aggression but also of friendship, respect and love”, Andris says.
She cites the intimacy of the relationship between coach and boxer, and between boxers themselves as examples of the ways in which boxing is a mode of expression that goes beyond the simple mechanics of the fight.
With film as her analytical tool, Andris intends to produce not only a documentary of women’s boxing, but a commentary on the particular social significance of this sport, why it provokes such visceral responses and how we read women’s bodies when they perform unconventional roles.
Weblink:
www.anu.edu.au/culture/n_people/students/silke_1.htm
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Creating a gym for the mind
By Kylie Brittliffe
Five years ago, Professor Helen Christensen and Dr Kathy Griffiths were busy as usual. They had just been involved in writing the clinical practice guidelines for treating and preventing depression in young adults, and also in preparing the first national action plan for preventing mental disorders in Australia.
“At that stage we were extremely aware of two things,” Dr Griffiths said.
“One in five Australians suffer from a common mental disorder such as depression or anxiety, but the majority do not seek or receive any help.”
“In addition, our review of available scientific evidence had just identified cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) as a most promising tool for both treatment and prevention of depression.”
“We were faced with the problem of how to extend and deliver CBT programs to reach those who needed them most, in particular young adults, who we know to be at very high risk of mental health disorders.”
After researching the success of CBT delivery through self-help books, the pair spawned the idea of implementing an engaging CBT program on the web.
With the emergence of sophisticated web techniques and the known attraction of the internet to young people, web-delivery seemed ideal — but ambitious.
Already within the field of mental health research there were sceptics.
“Who,” they demanded “is going to visit a website that delivers CBT to prevent depression?”
Five years on, it is apparent that approximately 4,000 people a week do exactly this.
In 2001, CMHR launched MoodGYM — a widely-accessible and engaging CBT program targeted at young people but which is used by all age groups, delivered free of charge by the web, and which is shown in scientific studies to be effective in decreasing the anxiety and depression symptoms of users.
MoodGYM consists of five modules, an interactive game, anxiety and depression assessments, an online workbook and feedback assessment.
It teaches the principles of CBT using flashed diagrams and online exercises, demonstrating the relationship between thoughts and emotions, and teaching users to come to grips with their own feelings and the ‘warpy’ thoughts that might accompany them.
It also includes methods for dealing with stress, handling separation and relationship break-ups, and relaxation techniques.
A revised version of the internationally acclaimed MoodGYM program is soon to be launched thanks to the technical work of David Berriman and Richard Pass (ANU Corporate Information Services), and financial support from the ANU.
Christensen and Griffiths remain humble about the success of MoodGYM — for these two the focus is always on what to do next and how to do it better — how to most effectively help Australians deal with the common experience of mental health problems.
“Right now we are developing an innovative tailored online depression and anxiety prevention program,” relates Christensen.
“A user’s journey through the site will be automatically tailored to suit their needs depending on their response to questions about certain life experiences, or membership of certain high-risk groups such as those dealing with bereavement, separation or traumatic life events.”
The ambitious project, due for completion in 2004, brings together innovative and proven techniques for creating and maintaining mental and emotional wellbeing, integrated into a personalised and supportive journey.
MoodGYM is accessible free of charge at http://moodgym.anu.edu.au.
CMHR has also developed BluePages, an online depression information website, available at http://bluepages.anu.edu.au.
For details of the many research programs undertaken at CMHR, see the website: www.anu.edu.au/cmhr.
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Trojan horse could hold key to cancer
By Edward O’Daly
A biological ‘Trojan horse’ under development at ANU could hold the cure to diseases like cancer, diabetes and arthritis.
Ground-breaking research by ANU PhD student Brendon Barratt and Dr Jamie Simpson, supervised by Professor Chris Easton, aims to combat illnesses caused by hormone overproduction by targeting the final stage of hormone production.
The hormones in question, peptide hormones, occur naturally in the body, and are required for a variety of functions. Growth hormones are an example of peptide hormones, however they can also play a devastating role in disease – for example the overproduction of growth hormones is one of the mechanisms some cancers use to grow.
In the past, scientists have shown that inhibiting peptide hormones can stop the spread of cancer and reduce inflammation but they have struggled to develop a hormone-inhibiting treatment.
In the normal production of hormones, a prohormone is converted into the hormone in the final step. The ANU approach is to make a tiny structural change to the prohormone that would normally develop into the overproduced hormone that is causing the disease.
By exchanging a nitrogen atom in the prohormone for an oxygen atom, a prohormone mimic is created that will prevent hormone production – a biological Trojan horse.
Using this method, many natural peptide hormones can be potential disease inhibitors, Mr Barratt said.
“The idea basically goes like this: say we want to treat a cancer resulting from overproduction of growth hormone, we will make the mimic of the prohormone for the growth hormone causing the disease, by changing one of the nitrogens to an oxygen,” Mr Barratt said.
“The oxygenated inhibitor is the Trojan horse, appearing to be the same as the other prohormones, but then stopping the enzyme from producing hormones.”
Mr Barratt and Dr Simpson believe the discovery may be the answer to the development of potent drugs with high selectivity for the treatment of peptide hormone related disease.
The newly created prohormone mimics will bind to enzymes in the same way as the natural prohormones do, and will be carried throughout the body in the same way. However the Trojan horse prohormone stops or reduces the overproduction of peptide hormones, and subsequently stops or reduces the spread of the disease.
The development, which has a patent pending, has been attracting interest in academic circles and beyond, with funding for further research coming from the ACT Government.
Mr Barratt has been travelling the world presenting the theories to the wider scientific community. Last month, a National Institute of Biosciences travel award and the Jim O’Donnell student travel award from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute took him to a conference in the US.
He also recently won a best student presentation award for his research at a conference in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The next step for the development is more detailed testing.
“All the models and tests we have done against the enzyme indicate that this will work in the body, but the next step is to demonstrate it in cell assays and an animal model,” explained Dr Simpson.
“We expect that the body will take the modified prohormone directly to where it is needed, giving it huge therapeutic potential.”
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The universe and beyond
By Amanda Morgan
With many of the world’s most influential astronomers looking on, two graduate students from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics have detailed discoveries that both fill gaps in current knowledge and challenge prevailing wisdom about our universe.
Laura Stanford and Brad Warren presented their findings at the recent General Assembly of the International Astronomy Union – a triennial, two-week conference of over 2000 astronomers held this year in Sydney.
Stanford’s research contradicts a long-held view that the stars of the brilliant cluster Omega Centauri, in the southern Australian sky, formed billions of years ago.
When the first stars in a cluster are born, some explode, blasting away the interstellar gas from which more, newer stars could form. If some gas survives these explosions, it is usually stripped when it passes through galaxies, such as the Milky Way, leaving no star-forming matter in the cluster.
But Stanford’s research, in collaboration with RSAA colleagues Dr Gary Da Costa and Professor John Norris, and Dr Russell Cannon from the Anglo-Australian Observatory, conclusively shows that some stars in Omega Centauri formed long after others.
“Once the gas is gone, no stars should form, but we’re seeing lots of these newer stars in Omega Centauri,” Stanford said.
Her theory is that Omega Centauri may be the pitiful remnant of a once enormous galaxy, which has been ripped to pieces by the gravity of our own, the Milky Way.
“For a few years now there have been hints that there was something very strange about Omega Centauri,” Stanford said. “Our new observations show beyond reasonable doubt that Omega Centauri is not what we all thought it was.”
The definition of ‘galaxy’ may also need revision following Brad Warren’s research into a relatively undiscovered phenomenon – galaxies of gas.
Traditionally, galaxies have been thought to consist of thousands of millions of stars, but Warren has identified at least a dozen that have very few stars but a lot of gas.
These gassy galaxies are vast discs of hydrogen, tens of thousands of light years across, which weigh more than a billion suns and, for an unknown reason, have not transformed their hydrogen gas into masses of stars like their twinkling counterparts.
“Most galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have transformed most of their gas but the galaxies we have discovered have held back and we are not sure why,” Warren said.
“Discovering this missing link will give us important insights into how, when and why galaxies, such as our own, formed.”
Warren collaborated with fellow ANU researcher, Dr Helmut Jerjen, and Dr Barbel Koribalski, from the CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility.
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Star count: ANU astronomer makes best yet
There are more stars in the sky than all the grains of sand on every beach and in every desert on earth, according to an Australian National University astronomer who has made the most accurate calculation of star numbers to date.
Dr Simon Driver (pictured above, right, with Brad Warren, left), from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, using some of the most powerful telescopes in the world, concluded that about 70 thousand million million million stars shine down on us each night.
“Even for a professional astronomer used to dealing in monster numbers this is mind-boggling,” Dr Driver said.
Dr Driver and his collaborators – Dr Jochen Liske, from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh; Dr Nicholas Cross, from Johns Hopkins University; Professor Warrick Couch, from the University of New South Wales and Dr David Lemon from St Andrews University – did not count the stars one by one.
Rather, Dr Driver and his team counted all the galaxies, which are large collections of stars, in one small region of the universe close to Earth.
By measuring precisely how bright each galaxy was they were able to estimate how many stars it contained and extrapolated this out to the whole region of the Universe visible through telescopes. The calculations would not have been possible without the world's largest galaxy survey, the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.
The researchers, who presented their finding to the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney recently, believe their estimate is ten times more accurate than any previous count.
"This represents the number of stars in the observable universe today, however whether our universe is itself embedded in a larger multi-universe remains to be seen, if so this could push the number higher even to infinity."
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Time to scrap family benefit system
By Maciej Wasiliwicz
Australian families are missing out on the financial support they need while the Federal Government wastes resources on an ad hoc, contradictory benefits system, ANU researcher Professor Peter McDonald has found.
The system is inconsistent, ineffective and inefficient and should be scrapped, Professor McDonald has said.
“At the moment there are incentives in place that encourage and discourage women to return to the workplace,” Professor McDonald said.
“The complexity of the present system means that even official government brochures suggest that young families should seek professional tax advice before applying for benefits.
“Our family policy is a mish-mash of stop-gap initiatives which have been bolted onto the original family policy framework by successive governments, producing a system which is without strategy or logic.
“We need to scrap this inadequate system and replace it with a simplified system of payments attached to the child and reform of early childhood education.”
In a comprehensive review of Australia’s family benefit system, Professor McDonald has found an overwhelming lack of coherence in family policy.
Professor McDonald has proposed a series of reforms, based on successful policies in France and Scandinavia, which would provide payments of $6,500 to families each year for the first three years of a child's life and $2,500 at ages three and four.
These payments would be cost neutral to the government because the Baby Bonus, the Child Care Benefit, Family Tax Benefit Part B and other benefits would be scrapped.
The advantages of these changes include simplification, enabling a better combination of work and family, and encouraging a more sustainable birth rate, Professor McDonald said.
By using a flat payment, contradictory incentives are removed and women can plan their return to the work force in the way that suits their circumstances.
These reforms would prevent the loss to business of many women who stay at home because of the work disincentives built into existing policy.
In addition to the flat payment, Professor McDonald proposes a universal early childhood education system for three and four year-olds funded by both the Commonwealth and the States and Territories. He says that this would eliminate the ideological battle that has been raging between whether there should be childcare or preschool by moving both into the one system.
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ANU helps drive Mars mission
By Edward O'Daly
NASA scientists are working with the ANU on a propulsion system that could take man to Mars and beyond.
Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, a veteran of six space shuttle missions, who has logged almost 1,300 hours in space, has been invited by Professor Rod Boswell to visit the ANU to continue his collaboration with the Research School of Physical Sciences to develop the revolutionary Helicon Double Layer Thruster (HDLT) invented and developed by Dr Christine Charles.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency are interested in the HDLT, a plasma thruster that uses a fraction of the fuel that conventional chemical rocket engines consume.
“By working with NASA we have realised just how important our work is,” said Dr Charles.
“It gives Australia a fantastic opportunity to become part of the international space race.”
The ANU plasma thruster is the simplest plasma thruster ever made, using naturally occurring reactions rather than electro-mechanical intervention to create a stable beam of plasma.
Plasma thrusters like the HDLT and the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) invented by Dr Chang-Diaz take their power from electricity and gas rather than rocket fuel. The propellant gas is passed through a plasma source and a magnetic field creating a beam of plasma, which pushes the spacecraft forward.
While the technology of plasma thrusters is not new, its popularity has only taken off in recent years, with it being used to help satellites maintain their positions in orbit. However, the NASA VASIMR concept and more recently the ANU HDLT are very recent inventions which may open the door to deep space exploration.
“The HDLT is a beautiful piece of physics because it is so simple. It doesn’t need any moving parts,” said Dr Charles.
Rival thrusters encounter problems because their beam is made up of positively charged ions. The ions could potentially cause a disaster by interfering with a spacecraft’s communications systems, so a secondary beam of electrons has to be produced to neutralise them.
The ANU thruster naturally emits electrons as part of the process that creates its thrust, neutralising the beam and solving the problem, without the need for a complex secondary system.
While the plasma thruster has a fraction of the power of the rockets that launch the space shuttle, it uses far less weight of fuel and gets more thrust as a ratio of the fuel it burns, making it ideal for interplanetary missions.
In deep space, the electricity to make the magnetic field comes from solar panels, while a proportion of the hydrogen gas needed to make the beam is supplied by waste hydrogen created elsewhere on the spacecraft.
The system has already proved its worth, with an ANU team led by Professor Boswell managing to optimise Dr Chang-Diaz’s VASIMR plasma rocket by 50 per cent.
The latest step in this increasingly close relationship with the US space agency is the astronaut’s visit to Australia, with the twin purposes of promoting both systems and developing a plan to extend the relationship.
The next step for the HDLT system is to find funding to build and test a prototype. There are no suitable testing facilities in Australia, but with the US and European space programs interested in acquiring new technology, Dr Charles and Professor Boswell hope that a test site will be found, either at NASA or at the European Space Agency’s test facilities in Holland.
Dr Charles hopes that seed funding can be found in Australia to pay for the construction of the prototype.
“No company will be able to fully fund this development in the present economic climate, so we need the government to invest. This is a great chance for Australia to get involved in space.”
With the prototype complete, it would fall to whichever space agency takes on the system to meet the costs of testing it on earth and then in space.
However, Dr Charles warns that we shouldn’t head to the travel agents to book a holiday to Mars just yet.
“It will be decades before there is a mission to Mars. Once we get the funding and build a prototype it will have to be tested for at least two years before it is tested in space.
“While this is going on, we at the ANU will be working on refining the physics,” she explained.
“And Mars’ orbit only brings it close enough to Earth to consider a mission every 11 years.”
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Swapping Coburg for Canberra
The lure of Australia’s most prestigious science degree
In Coburg, the trams do daily battle with cars for space along the bustling shopping precincts of Sydney Road. Along the footpaths, the population is a melting pot of scores of nationalities. The air is thick with an aroma of car exhaust fumes and freshly baked Turkish bread.
Canberra can seem a long way from the northern Melbourne suburb at times, but for Sarah Jones, 18, the trip has been worthwhile.
Ms Jones (pictured above with Pearl Gallagher, left, and Lachlan McCalman) and is one of an increasing number of students lured north to the ANU, attracted by specialist degrees and degrees with recognition that simply can’t be found elsewhere in Australia.
For Ms Jones, the attraction was being part of the inaugural intake of the unique, four-year Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) — Australia’s most prestigious science degree.
In its first year, the four-year Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) is an exciting new research-focused degree unique to the University.
The PhB, offered through the University’s Faculty of Science, is aimed at intellectually ambitious students who want to study at the highest level.
The degree is open to students with a UAI of least 99, or another significant academic achievement. Applicants must provide examples of additional work they have completed during high school.
“A lot of them have done a staggering amount of additional work,” Dean of Science Professor Tim Brown said.
Four students, for example, are International Science Medal winners and another was selected to visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.
This year’s intake comprised 24 students from as far away as far north Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
All have embarked on specialised study in a variety of fields, from Mathematics and Physics to Biochemistry and even French.
“The range of things they get to do is fairly broad,” Professor Brown said.
“In a theoretical area like mathematics it might be learning a particular area of maths that isn’t part of the normal curriculum,” he said.
Students must complete six Advanced Studies courses in their first three years.
To assist them, students are provided with one-on-one interaction with an academic from either the Institute of Advanced Studies or Faculty of Science who individually designs each student’s program.
“There’s no other course in the country quite like it,” Professor Brown said.
“Some of the students are doing some astounding things in their first semester of university.”
Ms Jones has developed new material and practicals for training students for the International Biology Olympiad.
Another student, Lachlan McCalman, is already coping with graduate level physics as a first year undergraduate.
A third, Pearl Gallagher, is working with a team that has just developed the first atom laser — a breakthrough that has a host of applications for areas requiring precise time measurement.
So, what will these sharp minds do once they have a PhB under their belt?
“I think the world is their oyster really,” Professor Brown said.
“The extra skills they’re getting on top of a normal science degree, things like problem solving, working in teams and communication, are the things that employers value. I think they’ll be very marketable in terms of jobs.”
He said he expected many to go on to PhD studies after completing the degree.
For more information on PhB degrees visit www.anu.edu.au/science or email faculty.secretary.science@anu.edu.au
The Arts Faculty is also offering a PhB program next year for students wanting to acquire the ultimate Arts degree, designed for students who want to study in depth at the highest level in any of 38 disciplines.
For more information, visit:
http://arts.anu.edu.au/student_information/prospective_students/phb.htm
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Impressions
Stories behind important ANU photographs
It’s a long way to the top … Shadowed by two imposing peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas in the Hongu glacier are Canberra mountaineers, John Finnigan and Will Steffen, who along with colleagues from the ANU mountaineering club were part of a 1988 expedition of 10 climbers to Mount Baruntse.
Baruntse, the 7128-metre high peak at left, is 12 kilometres south of the highest in the world, Mount Everest.
The team — which included ANU physicist Dr Ken Baldwin, who took this photograph — got tantalisingly close to Baruntse’s summit, but were stopped just 200 metres short because of the danger of avalanches, and the approaching monsoon season.
It was the second expedition to the Himalayas for Dr Baldwin, who was instrumental in coordinating the first major Australian expedition to the Himalayas in 1978.
Sixteen mostly ANU Mountaineering Club members, including Dr Baldwin, went on that expedition to Mount Dunagiri, in the Indian Himalayas, and two — Tim Macartney-Snape and Lincoln Hall — made it to the summit. This year is the 25th anniversary of that ascent — coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest.
Photograph: Ken Baldwin
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Ancient Chinese rap revived - and ready to export
By Tim Winkler
An ancient form of Chinese performance similar to modern rap has been revived by an ANU Asian Studies student who is set to perform in China.
Sally So, a second-year Asian Studies and Commerce student, has won a national competition for Chinese language students, involving extensive tests of linguistic ability and also requiring performance of a Chinese art.
Ms So, from Canberra, will travel to Shanghai and Beijing later this year to compete in an international university competition for non-native speakers of Chinese, the Chinese Bridge Contest.
A sixth-year ANU Asian Studies-Law student, Gloria Lai, from the Gold Coast, last year won Second Prize in the inaugural Chinese Bridge Contest and will help prepare Ms So for the competition.
Ms So (pictured with Gloria Lai, left, and Professor Kam Louie, right) said she had chosen to compose and perform the Chinese rap after seeing a demonstration on Chinese television.
“It goes back possibly to ancient China and was done by people on a daily basis. It is a performance of the people — whether walking around, commenting on the way the world is, or a performance that makes people laugh,” Ms So said.
“Anybody with a pair of bamboo sticks can go out and do it on the streets — it is very easy to compose.”
“My rap is about how good the ANU is, then how to learn Chinese — listening and speaking are very important, but you also have to watch Chinese TV, eat Chinese food, watch Chinese theatre — take it outside and put it in your life, so it’s not just learning a language.”
The head of the ANU China and Korea Centre, Professor Kam Louie, said the success of Ms Lai and Ms So was a great tribute to the quality of the University’s language teaching.
“The ANU has been judged a world-leader in Asian research and the achievements of our students demonstrates that our researchers are also delivering a first-class teaching program,” Professor Louie said.
“Ms Lai was ranked above competitors from 20 other countries at the first Chinese Bridge Contest, held last year and Ms So has demonstrated an excellent grasp of the language by winning a place on the Australian team for this year’s competition.”
The competition is organised by the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, where students of Chinese from all over the world compete in Beijing, giving speeches in Chinese, answering questions from a panel about aspects of Chinese culture and giving a performance in a Chinese art, such as music or martial arts.
Ms Lai, 23, was born in Australia and was schooled on the Gold Coast in Queensland. She began studying Chinese to maintain links with her heritage and to provide an opening into a career in law interacting with Asia.
Ms So, 20, grew up in Canberra and decided to study Chinese in order to give another dimension to her commerce qualifications.
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The last word
New challenges for scientific publishing
By Dr Matthew Rimmer
There have been a series of controversies within the life sciences over data sharing by authors in major scientific journals. In response, there have been concerns about the impact of intellectual property upon the sharing of information and data amongst researchers and scientists.
In February 2001, Science published a paper by Craig Venter and Celera Genomics reporting the sequence of the human genome. Instead of depositing the sequence in the public database for genetic sequences, GenBank, the company posted its data on its own private database. Celera Genomics required both researchers and commercial users to enter into contractual agreements to gain access to the data.
In April 2002, Science published two papers reporting the draft genome sequence for two subspecies of rice, japonica. Syngenta International initially placed limitations on data access - similar to those required by Celera Genomics in respect of the human genome project. However, the company later relented, and agreed to share its data with the public consortium working on the rice genome.
The editor in chief of Science, Dr Donald Kennedy, was responsible for allowing the private companies to withhold data related to the publications that appeared in the journal. He argued that his decision was prompted by exceptional circumstances.
Kennedy maintained that the historic publication of the human genome sequence was unique. He also contended that the rice genome was an exceptional case because rice was the most important agricultural commodity in the developing world.
In response, a letter of protest from twenty eminent scientists was sent to the advisers to Science, stressing that the withholding of publication-related data was a "serious threat to genomics research".
One of the authors, Michael Ashburner, the Cambridge geneticist, complained: "My gripe is that the companies are wanting to have their cake and eat it. They are wanting to publish what is by all appearance a regular scientific paper in what is after all a very respectable magazine, and yet they don't want to adhere to the norms of their community with respect to data release."
Indeed, the genomics companies sought to protect the scientific databases through a combination of copyright law, contract law, and material transfer agreements.
A member of the Syngenta rice genome project, Steve Briggs, said: "Our data is publicly available… It's just not in the public domain. Think of it like a book or movie. It's available to you, you can get the book, you can watch the movie; but it isn't in the public domain, you've got to go pay for it. Somebody owns it, and provides access to it."
Furthermore, the firms have also applied for patents in respect of particular uses of selected genes that have arisen from the large-scale genetic projects.
A number of reforms have been discussed in relation to this issue - most revolving around intellectual property and scientific publishing.
Ari Patrinos and Dan Drell of the United States Department of Energy, a major funding source for much genomics research, put forward the proposal that scientific data in journals should be released on a timer: "The 'timer' mechanism would allow a company to publish valuable data that would otherwise remain private, while offering some protection for a limited duration for it to use the data exclusively".
However, many peak scientific organisations have been reluctant to relax policies on the release of biological data to meet the demands of private research and commerce.
The United States National Academies of Science established a committee to undertake a study of the issues related to sharing publication-related data and materials.
The chair of the committee, Nobel Prize-winner, Thomas Cech, re-affirmed the general principle that authors should be obliged to release data and materials to enable others to replicate published findings: "It keeps science honest and it fosters the progress of science. Both are worth nurturing and protecting."
Even more radically, the Public Library of Science has called for a boycott of commercial scientific publishers, and the development of open source databases: "We believe that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library".
The group found, though, that the boycott failed to break the hegemony of commercial scientific journals such as Science. As a result, it instead plans to establish two new rival online journals dealing with biology and medicine.
At an international level, the respected ethics committee of the Human Genome Organisation has adopted the principle that genomic databases should be considered to be global public goods, and made freely accessible in perpetuity. A committee member, Abdallah Daar, said: "The impetus should be to give people knowledge, rather than gaining money".
In my opinion, there is merit in the proposals to reform intellectual property laws to allow greater access to scientific information.
There is a need to override contracts and material transfer agreements, which place undue restrictions on access to scientific data.
There would be less incentive for private companies to monopolise essential scientific information if they could not obtain copyright protection over scientific databases.
Furthermore, the patent system should do more to encourage patent applicants to quickly and fully release data into the public domain.
Such reforms would help foster greater international communication and collaboration in the life sciences. It would ensure that the tradition of open publication of scientific results was not undermined by commercial imperatives.
- Dr Matthew Rimmer is a lecturer with the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture at ANU.
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