by Lesley M Russell
It's nice to be here tonight. I thought I'd tell you a bit about the Olympics and about my job, because most people aren't very clear about it, and then I'll tell you how I got to where I am.
The Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) is a statutory body set up under legislation passed by the New South Wales parliament to carry out the conditions of the bid for the Games.
We often describe our relationship with the NSW government by saying it's the government's responsibility to build the theatre and it is our responsibility to put on the show. So all of the arguments of price overruns and contamination at Homebush Bay, you have to read in the context of who does what.
Within SOCOG we have seven directors to run the show: a director of marketing, a director of games and venues which will probably eventually be split into two, a director of ceremonies (Ric Birch who did the ceremonies for LA and Barcelona), me as the director of communications, a director of finance, a director of human resources, and a director of cultural programs.
Under the rubric of communications there are a lot of things, such as responsibility for the media, for government relations, Aboriginal affairs, environmental relations, unions, the disabled, church groups, children's groups, the general community, tourism and probably a few other things that I have yet to discover.
I have responsibility for the written press and given that there will be some 10,000 athletes and 15,000 press at the Games this is a fairly major undertaking. Telecommunications is covered by a separate unit called SOBO, Sydney Olympic Broadcasting Organisation, because a significant amount of the money we must raise to fund the Games comes from the sale of television rights. In addition, although television rights are sold for Australia, the United States, Europe and a big bloc in Asia, there will be other countries at the Games that won't be able to buy into those blocs or send huge television teams. So SOBO will send out about 3000 hours of television signals for people to pick up.
I also have responsibility for Image and Identity, which in its most concrete form is the logo and the mascot - and everybody has an idea of what they think the mascot should be. But it really goes to the look of the Games and how they are decorated, and how, in the years to come, when you look at film, you will know that you are looking at the Sydney 2000 Games.
The third area I have responsibility for is Olympic family, protocol and language services; ensuring the delivery of all the reports, arranging meetings and transport for all of the Olympic family, which is the International Olympic Committee, the 197 national Olympic committees, all international sporting federations and all of the translation services that go along with that. All of our documentation is in both English and French, but fortunately I have six years of French and two years of living in France, so I manage.
In addition, my department is the service department for the rest of SOCOG so we are responsible for producing the reports, written materials, facts sheets, videos and all that sort of material that comes out of SOCOG. I have a team that is growing quite rapidly. It's currently about 12 people; it will be about 20 by this time next year, and will be 40 plus volunteers by the year 2000.
As well as being part of the communications team I am part of the whole. There's a great team spirit within SOCOG, and within the Olympic family there's a great transfer of knowledge and resources from one organising committee to another. As you can imagine, we are spending a lot of time working with Atlanta at the moment. They are really our best learning experience, even though the way Atlanta is going to run their games is very different from the way we will run ours. And obviously we look forward with great anticipation and perhaps some hesitation to see who will get the 2004 Olympics (there are 12 cities bidding at the moment) because those people will be treading on our heels in much the same way as we are treading on Atlanta's.
There is an enormous number of tasks to be done. The challenge really is keeping your eye on the ball, 15 September 2000, and not getting distracted by day to day things. There are huge demands on your time, and everyone wants a piece of the action, especially school children, and you've got to spend time talking to them. You have to break everything down into manageable tasks, bite sized chunks, recognise what all the interactions are, and then go and do it.
As we get bigger, internal communications are going to be a major issue, and keeping people's spirits up especially when there's scrutiny, and persuading people that they can keep up the pace. And, basically, this is a fairly political job. There's a lot of people out there who want this job and who'll be snapping at my heels. You come in knowing that. There's scrutiny all the time, and if I make a mistake they'll be calling for my resignation.
The next issue, I guess, is how a scientist gets to be there and that's going to entail telling you some of my life story. I started out fairly traditionally. I grew up in Tasmania and had my early education there, including my first two degrees. I really set out in life to be a research scientist and it was made fairly plain to me, as a student in the sixties, that if I was serious about science, being a university professor was the only thing that I could possibly aspire to. There was nothing else out there for me, and anything less than that would be selling out. A big mistake.
I worked overseas in a number of different universities, University of London, University of Tel Aviv and I went to the United States to teach at the Department of Defence Medical School in Bethesda, just outside Washington DC. I used to say I was the only part of Ronald Reagan's defence budget I approved of.
I had an SRC Fellowship when I worked at the University of London. I worked in a private lab in France and went to Israel at the invitation of someone who had been working in my lab. It was not a particularly secure job or terribly well paid but I thought that if I went there I could perhaps get a Fellowship to the Weizmann Institute. I really wanted that, and I did get it, but by then I had fallen in love with my husband so I went to the United States instead.
It was the very early '80s. I had always been very interested in politics and I had married an American who worked on Capitol Hill, so many of our friends came from Capitol Hill. It was a time of great debate in America about genetic engineering, the deliberate release of genetically engineered micro-organisms and the use of animals in research. It is hard to explain to you sitting here in Australia just how emotive that last issue is.
I used to pontificate endlessly at dinner parties, usually with lawyers, about how important science was. Everyone used to roll their eyes and say, 'Science is boring', and they certainly didn't want genetically engineered organisms floating around their children. I thought, it's not enough to talk at dinner parties about this, I really want to do something. So, using the contacts I had through my husband, I marched up to Capitol Hill and started knocking on doors looking for a job. Everybody said, 'Well, what would we do with someone with a PhD?'
Then I found another source. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the organisation that puts out Science magazine, has run for the last 25 years or so a Congressional Science Fellowship Program. Under that program a number of organisations, for example, the American Geological Society, the American Psychological Society and the American Society for Microbiology, sponsor scientists to go and work on Capitol Hill for twelve months.
The program has enormous status and people on Capitol Hill actually fight to have someone from that program in their office, in large part because you come well-trained. They give you an extraordinary orientation program, you have your salary paid and you come with a commitment for twelve months. People that you will have heard of, such as Al Gore, the present Vice President, always had at least one Congressional Science Fellow, and Gore is an enormous supporter of that program.
I decided that was going to be a first class route for me to Capitol Hill, largely because if I was really going to leave this career that I had spent a long time building, it would give me an opportunity to test the waters and I could run back without completely burning all of my bridges. The only problem was that I wasn't a US citizen, but I managed to persuade them they should interview me. They were impressed with how much I knew about American politics (probably because I had been educated in Australia!), and offered me the fellowship.
I didn't have to become an American citizen. I can be very critical of the United States, but they gave me an enormous opportunity as a non-voting person. I did become a permanent resident; I had a green card. But they didn't really mind that I was not an American citizen. People were intrigued by my accent and couldn't figure out where I came from. I remember someone saying, 'With an accent like that, I guess you come from the south'. And I said, 'Yes, but a lot further south than you are thinking'.
So in 1984 I went to work on Capitol Hill, as a Congressional Science Fellow, for the largest committee in the House of Representatives, the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The joke about this committee in terms of its jurisdiction was that if it moved it was energy and if it didn't move it was commerce. In other words we had jurisdiction over everything and in particular, from my point of view, over the National Institutes of Health, over AIDS, over things like product liability, mental health, substance abuse and everything to do with health in general except the Medicare tax.
The chairman of that committee was John Dingell, who'd been in Congress for about 35 years, and who'd been elected as a 26 year old to replace his father. He was chairman of the full committee and of the oversight and investigation sub-committee which did exactly what its name said. Did any of you see the recent movie Quiz Show? Well, it was the oversight and investigation sub-committee which did the enquiry that was portrayed in that movie.
I initially went to work for the oversight and investigation sub-committee and I did issues of biotechnology, vaccine development and ground water monitoring.
When my Fellowship year was up, as I had hoped, I was asked to stay on and I moved to the full committee to do health legislation. I was there for seven years working on just about anything you could think of to do with health. I was there for the very first hearing held on Capitol Hill, in fact the first anywhere in the United States, about the project to map the human genome. We had three Nobel prize winners at that hearing. I remember one of the Congressmen leaning over and saying to me, 'You know when I was a student we had a book by someone called Watson. Is that guy down there any relation?' 'Well yes, that's James Watson, the father of DNA', I said. Congressmen can be impressed.
In much the same way that the Australian parliament does, the US Congress made decisions about things that were scientific and technical often without any input from scientists. Scientists are often not very good at making their case. They expect other people to make it for them. Their opponents are not so reluctant to come forward.
As you can probably tell, I had seven of the most fabulous years of my life. I didn't get a lot of sleep, but I did have a great time and I learnt a lot.
I had never been one of those Australians who thought that all the best things in life were outside Australia. I always thought that I would come home and then I was actually offered a job, a brand new job as manager for public affairs with a pharmaceutical company. At the same time my husband's small lobbying firm was bought out by an international firm that had an office in Sydney so we just looked at each other and packed up and moved. And we have never regretted it.
I came back to Australia in August of '91 to work in the pharmaceutical industry. It is a fascinating area because it's where science and public policy and health policy, and altruism and capitalism and so on all intersect. If you think about it, there aren't many industries out there that have done more to improve our quality of life in the last fifty years than the pharmaceutical industry, but when was the last time you heard anyone say anything good about it. In large part that's the industry's fault but it is also tied because you're not allowed to talk about your products to the general public and people therefore think you're keeping things hidden. But if you're interested in doing risk benefit analysis and explaining it to the general population, it's a great place to be.
I care passionately about health care and one of the things I enjoyed about doing health care in Australia is that there are problems here but you can get your hands around them. It is almost impossible to solve the issue of AIDS in the United States. Australia is a marvellous example to the rest of the world of how to manage AIDS. We may be the only country in the world where the rates of AIDS and the rates of HIV infection are actually declining. I can only hope that it continues to do so. I brought Congressional teams here to look at needle distribution programs and their eyes would bulge. You can't do that in the USA because giving away clean needles to drug addicts is promoting drug use and you can't use Federal money to promote drug use.
So there I was having a great time with all sorts of expanding opportunities and somebody called me up one day and said, 'You know, they're looking for someone to be Director of Communications for the Olympics, someone with your sorts of qualifications. Are you interested?' And I said, 'Yes'.
I guess there are two or three things that I could say out of this. One is that I prefer real politics to academic politics because it's about real issues. Second is that you don't have to be at the lab bench to be on the cutting edge of science, although I do miss the lab just very occasionally. And finally, if you've had a good education and you know how to think, you can do just about anything.
Australian science education will stand you in great stead internationally. I have never been embarrassed about my education; in fact, quite the opposite. In certain areas people will take Australians because they know we are well trained theoretically and in laboratory techniques, we are organised and, in spite of what people say, we actually do work quite hard. One of the things I noticed about American post-graduate students was that they had no idea how to organise an experiment.
What I didn't get from university or working for Congress was management experience and skills. The pharmaceutical firm I came here to work for is very progressive and it was very embarrassing at the age of 45, having spent much of my life apparently managing people and budgets, to discover I'd been doing this in a very ad hoc fashion. I knew nothing about writing objectives and sticking to them, or about developing staff.
I sometimes think it's a serious defect in our university education that we are not taught those sorts of things and have to learn it by trial and error. We know people who do it wonderfully and people who do it terribly. In the university situation you are not rewarded for being a good manager. In the private sector you are rewarded for being a good manager.
I also think women have very different management styles from men. Women tend to be much more into team work, which is fashionable at the moment and I'm a big believer in it. I ought to be able to leave the office for half a day and not have to take my beeper or portable phone. If I set up my department well enough it can operate without me unless there's an absolute crisis. In the end, the buck stops with me and I have to make the hard decisions. But there shouldn't be secrecy and you should involve everybody who needs to be involved in the decision making. Then, if you have to come in and say, 'Sorry, but in the long run this is the way it has to be', they at least understand why you have done it. I've not become a slave to management but I'm certainly interested in it.
I have talked with the staff of Senator Peter Cook [Minister for Science] about a Parliamentary Science Fellowship. I've been as positive as I can and intend to keep on talking to them about it because I think that the more bureaucrats, politicians and scientists exchange, the better everything will be for everybody. There were scientists in my group who went back to the lab but they all admit that you never read a newspaper the same way again after you've worked in politics and you always understand why you can't just sit back and say, 'Someone else will make that argument for me'. You get in there and you make that argument as effectively as you can.
As far as I know there isn't anything similar to the Fellowships here, but I think groups like WISENET could really become advocates for something like that. I'm certainly going to keep lobbying for it. I maintain a passion for science and for wishing that people saw science as being much more integral to life and education.
This edited version of Dr Russell's talk at WISENET's AGM incorporates answers to some of the questions asked by the audience.