An Interview with Professor Suzanne Cory
Gael Jennings
These days, since the discoveries of
the Human Genome Project, many of us
justifiably expect to find out if anything is wrong with our genes, and
perhaps get them fixed. Yet only a few short years ago, there was so little
knowledge about genes that this was unimaginable.
To predict the link between genes and disease 30 years ago took great foresight. To prove it took faith and a touch of genius. And that's what our guest did. With her husband Dr Jerry Adams, she was the first in the world to show that cancer is caused by defective genes.
Now a world-famous, highly respected scientist, and successor to Sir Gustav Nossal as Director of Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Professor Suzanne Cory was yesterday awarded the prestigious international L'Oreal- UNESCO Women in Science Award.
GAEL JENNINGS: Congratulations on winning the UNESCO L’Oreal Women in Science Award.
PROFESSOR SUZANNE CORY, GENETIC SCIENTIST: Thanks very much, Gael.
GJ: Now, the award is for your work on the link between genes and cancer. Do genes cause cancer?
SC: Yes, very much so. Cancer is a malady of the genes, as Michael Bishop, the Nobel laureate, said. Accidents occur to our genes - mutations, in other words - and they are the underlying cause of cancer.
GJ: Of all cancers?
SC: Yes. Basically, these accidents can occur in different ways, though. Sometimes they’re inherited - we have a slightly faulty gene. Sometimes the accident happens during our lifetime - there’s a small probability of any process in the body going wrong, and sometimes it does. And sometimes it’s imposed by the environment. For example, too much UV light damages our DNA, as everybody knows by now, with the `Slip, slop, slap` campaign, or asbestos or irradiation. So lots of things in the environment can also cause damage to our genes.
GJ: So it seems amazing that after all this time and all the billions of dollars of research, decades of research, we haven’t eradicated cancer. Why haven’t we?
SC: Well, it’s a very complex disease. More than one genetic accident has to occur for a particular tumour to develop, so in fact, there’s a succession of errors in that tumour by the time it arrives. It’s got a lot of faults in it. A lot of things have to be fixed up if you’re going to be able to, say, reverse that tumour. It’s in essence the life process going wrong. And we have to come to grips with understanding the whole life process of ourselves before we really understand cancer. So it’s a very complex equation we’re trying to understand. When we understand it more fully, we’ll be perhaps able to interfere more effectively. In fact, I’m quite sure we’ll be able to interfere more effectively.
Maybe to you it doesn’t seem like we’ve made much progress because people are still dying of cancer, but in fact there are more, far more, cures of cancer than there were before. We know a lot more about environmental causes and so we can... the incidence of smoking, of lung cancer in men from smoking is on the downward turn because of public awareness campaigns, and new drugs are starting to emerge from the revolution in genetics that's gone on over the last 20 years. That has given us so much more knowledge. We now can tackle the problem with much more effective knowledge.
GJ: Over 30 years ago, you and your husband, Jerry Adams, were one of the first in the world to actually start to research on genes and the relationship between genes and diseases. Most people were still looking at big cells, but you went below that and looked at the molecules of the genes. Did you envisage at all how big genetics would become?
SC: No, I think even in our wildest dreams, when we first set out on our, if you like, our journey into molecular biology some 30 years ago, we didn’t imagine we’d be as far forward - I mean `we` in the collective sense - as we are now. It’s been a tremendous revolution. We didn’t even dream of what we would find, and we certainly didn’t dream we’d be as far forward as we are now.
I think the revolution that's often called genetic engineering by the public and which we scientists call recombinant DNA basically lifted the order of the game by several orders of magnitude, and so the pace of discovery was much faster. And now with the Human Genome Project complete, that's another very big tool that`s been given to us, and I think you can see even faster rate of discovery over the next decade.
GJ: What did you imagine back then? What were you imagining?
SC: Well, you know, back then we were trying to understand how very small organisms, very tiny viruses worked. We were trying to understand them at the molecular level. Trying to understand how a cell as complex as the cell from you or me worked, how it divided, how it stopped dividing - that was much more complex, involving many, many thousands of genes instead of only, say, some 5 or 10. So we didn't imagine we would be able to deal with that complexity at that time.
GJ: And in the time that you've been a research scientist, there's almost been a doubling of scientific knowledge overall. What's that been like?
SC: Well, you know, it's hard to keep up with, and the effect has been, I suppose, that everyone has become more specialised in their knowledge base. The counteracting thing there is that we've started to work in bigger teams, so everybody brings their own specialised knowledge base to bear and their own skill base to bear on the problem that they're trying to tackle and work as a team together. And together, they have far more knowledge that each one of them knows individually.
GJ: Just looking back, what was the singularly most wonderful moment?
SC: Scientifically? Well, I think I've been lucky. There have been a few of such moments. It's really quite magic when you understand something for the first time that nobody else in the world at that moment understands. That is a real `Eureka!` experience, and it's those experiences that keep you going through the long down times that also occur.
GJ: And in the future, what diseases do you think we will have eradicated, and what will be killing us?
SC: Well, I think it depends what country you're talking about, of course. In Africa, infectious diseases are still the major killers. In Australia, cancer is one of the biggest killers. I think if you talk to the director of the Anti-Cancer Council, he would say that in 20 years time, we will have far fewer deaths from cancer. In fact, he would go as far as to say that we may have largely eradicated cancer. I think that neural degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's will still be a very significant problem in our society, but I think that we can hope to see major advances in neuroscience that may come to grips with that as well.
GJ: In our program tonight earlier, we were looking at the state of Australia's universities. Do you think that the university system is adequately preparing Australia for the future?
SC: I think it's very important that we have very strong universities, and I think it`s very important that we have very strong public funding of universities so that as many of our bright young people can enter university as possible, because we need... you know, we're facing a very competitive environment in the future. We're going to need as much knowledge in science and engineering and technology as we can muster to be competitive in the future. Therefore, we must have to have strong universities, and therefore we have to invest very strongly now. We cannot let our universities run down.
Having said that, I think the Government fully recognises this and they have already doubled the funding in medical research over the next five years, and recently they announced other major new funding in the other university system, the ARC. I think they’re investing wisely, but I think we have to keep persuading them that they need to invest still more, because governments overseas are investing hugely.
GJ: So do we run the risk of falling behind?
SC: Yes, we do. We have to keep the investment up.
Published with permission of Gael Jennings and Insite, SBS.
Website is www.sbs.com.au