| Issue 62 (WAIS 2) Contents
|
What This Woman Wanted and Got
- Well Almost
Patricia Vickers-Rich
Director, Monash Science Centre,
Professor of Palaeontology, Monash University
After dinner speech
When I took my first job, just out of graduate school, I moved from the forests of eastern North America to the flatlands of West Texas. Texas Tech was an oil geologist’s paradise - a staff devoted to the prospecting and development of oil fields - right, smack dab in the middle of the Permian basin (with rocks round about 250 million years old) - an oil reserve that was waning.
I remember stopping at a petrol station on my way to some function shortly after I arrived in Lubbock, Texas - all dressed up - and the fellow who came out to fill up the ute asked me what I did for a job. Well, naturally I told him I was a geologist teaching up at Tech - his eyebrows arched and before he could catch himself he said: “What’s a girl like you doin’ in a place like that?”
Matter-of-factly I told him about what I did - and he was interested in the moving continents, the dinosaurs and the ice ages I worked with. But I wasn’t exactly sure just what kind of a girl he thought I was - clearly he thought I was much too young to be teaching at the tech - but just what he thought I should be doing, he never really explained.
His comment came back to me later that evening - for it was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to me - I really never even thought there was something odd about what a girl like me might be doing in a place like a geology department in charge of the first year program of undergraduate studies. All of that, I mused, really related to where I had come from to get to where I was at age 28.
I would like to take you on a little journey through that background with two central issues in mind - the importance of lifelong curiosity and confidence in your own judgements - and the importance of these two qualities - not only for an individual life but for the “lives” of local and global human communities as well. I would like to start with a short quote from a leader of a major world power. I won’t mention his name, because I have met with the same attitude in many countries and cultures around the world over the years of my career. It is a misapprehension shared by many - sadly for themselves and the human race. The quote is from an election campaign speech given in 1980: “Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?”
I counterpoint that against another quote from a hero of mine, George Washington, in his address to U.S. Congress in January 1790 as he tried to gather a pioneer society into some kind of a cohesive whole: “There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
Curiosity has been a central issue in my life since I can remember - and that is back to about age four. My first clear memory is the extensive, but somewhat taxonomically disheveled collection of insects I set up in a playhouse - all the pests that probably made my father’s job as a farmer a bit more of a challenge.
I grew up on a property in California. From an early time, about age 5, I was involved in some sort of farm labour with my parents and our extended family. My dad’s parents were from Tennessee and had a huge family. In the 1940s dad, being the eldest of 13, moved parents and his brothers and sisters out to California to help them out of their dire straights - and over a time about half of his brothers and sisters lived with us and helped on the farm. No-one was excluded from any sort of work. I was driving farm equipment at an early age, and importantly, worked alongside my parents, picking and hoeing cotton, grading apples and oranges, milking cows. My dad had very little formal education. He had managed to make it through grade 6 before he had to quit school and started to help support his parents’ ever-growing family. Dad’s writing was terrible and his maths not much better, except on practical matters. Mom was clever with her maths and had training in accountancy. She had yearned to go to college, but her father had refused to support her, even though he had offered a college education to his two boys - neither of whom wanted it. Neither of my parents were scientists, but they were clear thinkers and hard workers. Both had a firm belief that hard work resulted in something worthwhile and that one must be extremely practical about things.
Just as Carl Sagan says about his parents in his book, The Demon-haunted World: “They knew almost nothing about science, but in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.” I think to that should be added “clear thinking” and no restriction should be made to scientific thinking. Further, as Sagan says: “They were only one step out of poverty. But when I announced that I wanted to be” - (in my case at an early age - a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon - in Carl Sagan’s case an astronomer) – “they thought that was just fine”. They didn’t try to suggest to me I should do something that was easier, more within my reach, or something that would make more money or was more practical. Sagan and I both found that, at an early age, they took me (us) seriously and filled me with confidence that if that is what I chose to do, I should do it. I should follow my own curiosity and dreams - and they would do everything they could to help me get there.
Later, when it came time for me to attend university, my parents sacrificed a great deal to make it possible. They sold up everything they owned and moved with me to Berkeley; where we had just enough to rent a small house, buy a beat up old bomb of a car, and all go to work to earn enough to get by on. We had a ball - and mom finally got her university experience - she went to work in the Entomology Department at UC Berkeley as a clerk, and sat in on classes as she could.
Education -primary and secondary
When I look back on my primary, secondary and outstanding tertiary education in California in the 1950s and 1960s, I realize just what a fortunate life I had.
I was born right at the end of World War II. To me and my parents, the late 1940s in the U.S. and in California specifically was a time of prosperity. People were home from the war. They were back together for the first time in awhile - there was plenty of work for those who wanted it. It was a time of real hopefulness - at least as viewed by the people in the street. Schools in California, certainly in my part of California (a rich agricultural valley that split the state in half ), were well funded and staffed for the most part by absolutely excellent teachers. I can only remember one teacher, who should have retired 10 years before I had her, who was not exceptional. Classes, even in public schools, were of a reasonable size, schools were small and local, and the teaching community at each of those schools was reasonably stable - you could expect to see the same teachers there year after year. So many of the extracurricular activities that we now have to pay for were part and parcel of the schools I attended for no cost. Even in primary school we had bands, orchestras, all sorts of sports and sporting carnivals, science fairs. And in addition to that many social events that were sponsored by the schools.
As the years went by and the space race heated up between the U.S. and the Soviets, science became a big deal in California schools. Science was viewed by me and my fellow students (and remember we were kids from a farming community) as something really exciting and something many of us wanted and were encouraged to pursue. Science and technology were looked upon, sometimes just a little unrealistically, as fields that would greatly benefit humankind. Scientists like E. O. Lawrence, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and a bit later when I was in early high school, Crick and Watson - were great heroes of us all. Sports held a high profile in my high school, but so did science.The status of both students and teachers in the science area was substantial.
Keep in mind, these schools I am talking about were supported by state taxes. We paid nothing, other than our taxes, to attend - and at the time I was a part of the system in the San Joaquin Valley of California the schools were as good as the very best of schools, public and private, in Australia today. All the while I lived in California, I was again fortunate - because the variety of environments and the biodiversity of the area was immense. My family loved the outdoors, and even though we didn’t do it too often because of finances, we camped, went clamming at Pismo Beach on the central coast of California, and fished the mountain streams of the Sierra Nevada’s and the open ocean off San Francisco. We caught a good bit of the protein that we needed. Those interests have remained with me and with my own children.
The chances that I had to visit all these places, as well as the life I had on the farm gave me great opportunity to exercise my innate curiosity. Although we did have one of the first TVs in our district, in the early 1950s, it played second fiddle to my outdoor interests. The shows were terrible - some of the only ones being the wrestling matches!
My paternal grandmother had a lasting influence on me with her vegetable garden. Her philosophy was that sowing a crop each year was fundamental to sanity. I agree wholeheartedly with her - one needs a direct connection with the land which so many urban people have lost - and with it the understanding of the vagaries of supply dependent on agricultural production so tied to the climatic variation from year to year. My grandmother’s actions and my grandfather’s Cherokee background were a strong part of my heritage - and those qualities together with a natural curiosity meant that boredom was an unknown quantity to me. Today, I think boredom is one big problem for a significant part of our population - especially for those who have lost contact with their innate curiosity - so very present in young kids.
Education -tertiary
UC Berkeley in California and later the Ivy-League Columbia in New York were both absolute mind-blowers to me when I launched into my tertiary education. But in a way, they were not something I thought out of the question for someone with my background - a farm kid.
Berkeley, at first was overwhelming, with me going from a 300 strong Mt Whitney High School to an over 30,000 strong Berkeley. We were told that half of the first year class would not be going on in second year - maybe an exaggeration. I thought just getting into the place students fondly called Bezerkeley should be enough, if you worked hard, to see you through. Thank goodness in my case it was -but not for all.
Staff at Berkeley were most amazing - Nobel Laureates coming out of the wall - some teaching first and second year courses. To me, this was the real essence of learning about science - being able to talk directly, and to work directly, with those doing science. At high school, we had been told about what scientists do - by teachers who were not them-selves scientists. Now it was time to talk to the researchers. My contact with Prof. Willard F. Libby at UCLA in late high school when I carried out a science fair project on radio-carbon dating - had convinced me that this was the real way to learn science - from the horse’s mouth, not its mouthpiece. My Berkeley years only reinforced this - and certainly this is the basis for my teaching style and in my founding the Monash Science Centre.
My time at Berkeley set my life’s course. At first I felt quite at sea amongst the 30,000 plus students. I had entered Berkeley to carry on with a medical degree - but there were more than 4000 pre-med students. This little country girl was just plain lost. I noticed in the student handbook that there was a Department of Paleontology at Berkeley - and since I had been collecting fossils since childhood, I decided to wander over to that department and find out more. Find out I did - and there were only 10 undergraduate students in the department. The staff were friendly, even had time for undergraduates - even at a university this size - and the undergraduates were able to spend considerable time not only with the profs but also the graduate students. And then there were field trips, the place where real learning occurred - the place where the theoretical became practical. I was convinced right then and there - that was the place for me. It was at Berkeley that I met several people who had profound influence on me - probably the most from Rueben Arthur Stirton - a great pioneer in Australian Palaeontology, a relent-less explorer and the man who gave me my PhD problem. It was at Berkeley, too, where I met my husband - who then became my partner in palaeontological mischief - for better or worse!
An important aspect of U.C. Berkeley was not just the science I learned there, but courses I took in a wide variety of subjects - my under-graduate degree was, in fact, an arts degree not one in science - and Berkeley, with a catholic attitude as a keeper of knowledge supported, and still does, a diversity of disciplines that are not and were not driven primarily by market forces. I was able to study as an undergraduate with logicians, theologians, musicians, historians and performing artists. That training made it possible to think over a broad range of topics and seek links between them.
Columbia
I went to Columbia University in New York City with my husband in 1967. We had to make a choice. The people we wished to study with were at different institutions -Tom’s at Columbia, mine at the University of Florida. We went to Columbia. Our choice could not have been more fortuitous - definitely the right decision.
When we arrived at Columbia, we were immediately thrown into a wonderful paradigm shift - a major change in the view taken by researchers in a field of science. In the 1950s and early 1960s a great debate raged over whether continents moved and ocean basins grew or stayed as they were always. By the time we left Columbia in 1973, the majority of earth scientists and a growing number of biologists had accepted the idea that continents had moved over time. The theories of plate tectonics and sea floor spreading were current. Much of the theoretical and practical work on these theories in the U.S. were carried out at three institutions: Lamont Geophysical Labs, a part of Columbia University; Scripps Institution in California; and Woods Hole on the NE US coast.
We were at Columbia and working alongside the mappers of the ocean floor (Heezen and Tharp), the seismologists (Sykes and le Pichon) and many others. Graduate students like us from Lamont, the geology department at Columbia, and paleontologists and biologists from the American Museum of Natural History (where we were based) were all talking to one another - a multidisciplinary effort and one of the most exciting times in the history of geology to be a graduate student. Scientists were mapping the sea floor - both topographically and magnetically, they were plotting the distribution of earthquakes (both horizontally and vertically) and volcanoes, they were beginning to date different parts of the ocean floor (the mighty Joides expeditions that are still going on) - and lo and behold all of this information had links. It certainly made it easy to study for our massive oral exams - for we could now relate, in one theory, how all of this once disparate material might fit into an overall pattern.
The pattern could be explained by dividing
the rigid upper 100 km of the earth, called its
crust, into several big plates. These plates grew
and ‘shrank’ along different kinds of boundaries
- such as ridges, trenches, transform
faults. It is the dynamics of these plates, of which the continents are only a part, that
brings about the movement of the continents. For palaeontologists, the outcome of this
dynamism, the collision and separation of continents through time, was and still is of
utmost interest, and that is just what my thesis
topic involved.
Thesis
My first problem as I began my thesis was to determine the history of a group of birds, of gargantuan proportions, from Australia - the dromornithids. R. A. Stirton had, along with others, amassed a collection of these now extinct ground-dwelling birds. Most were decidedly larger than the living emus and cassowaries. Much of the material that I had to work on was disarticulated, but a few specimens from Lake Callabonna in northern South Australia were at one time nearly complete.
That was the first problem - but my real problem grew much larger. When I looked at the Australian avifauna, as had Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin in the 1800s and many other biogeographers before me, it stood out as very different from bird faunas elsewhere in the world. Much of this had been explained by Australia’s isolation and the development of unique forms in such splendid isolation. When I began working on my thesis the prevailing idea, however, was that the stock for Australian birds was northern hemispherian. Birds had at some time in the past, over time, moved into Australia, become isolated and then followed their own evolutionary path. According to this theory the weirdest of the mob were the ones that had been here the longest - the emu, the cassowary, and the lyrebird. More recent arrivals, the crow and very recently the English sparrows and starlings, were most similar or identical to their northern relatives. In a paper published ironically on the day I was born by Ernst Mayr, a brilliant biologist, called the Birds of Timor and Sumba - this idea of a series of waves of invasion into Australia from the north was proposed, following on ideas of biogeographers such as William Diller Matthew in the early part of the 20th century.
Of course, with the new ideas of moving continents and shifting liaisons between them, biogeography needed revisiting and revising. My thesis proposed that there were likely other sources of Australia’s birds, one of them, especially for the more unique forms, might have been the previous connections of Australia across the late, great Gondwana continent -that included today’s South America, Africa, Antarctica, India and Australia/New Zealand. Leftovers then evolved, and new forms appeared as Australia severed its connection with the other Gondwana fragments and moved north during the last 50-60 million years. Now with its approach to Asia, faunal exchange has been and is increasingly occurring across the narrowing water gap between the two faunal and floral provinces, across Indonesia.
Part of my thesis work went well beyond the bones of the big birds, the dromornithids. I found that I needed to review all of the fossil birds that were known from Australia, to try gaining some idea of change through time -about 20 million years when I first began my work -but that has now been extended to upwards of 110-120 million with finds of bones and feathers in Victoria and Queensland.
I was most fortunate to be included at this time on a joint American Museum-South Australian-Queensland Museum expedition in 1971, that took me to Australia where I could visit all the museums and look, at first hand, at those collections that I knew only from papers. How essential this is if one is to get identifications right - it is difficult to work on literature alone in such an exercise. You really need to look at the real bones, in 3D to do realistic comparative anatomy. Another reason that the 1971 expedition was essential was for me to get a real feel for the environments of modern day Australia and to see the sediments that had produced the fossils to better evaluate just how and in what kind of environments the fossils had been preserved. What I found both on that trip and from subsequent work was that based on both the fauna and flora and the sediments Australia had become remarkably drier, more arid over the past 20 million years, notably during the past million. What we see today in Australia is very different from what the place was like not so distant in the past.
That trip also convinced me that I had to return to Australia. Being basically an explorer, a curiosity seeker following in the footsteps of my mentor, Stirton, I found Australia still a frontier in my field. There was such a vast land to explore and such great gaps in the fossil record here that had to be filled, that both my partner in palaeontological mischief and I agreed - we had to go back - and this time for a long time.
Costa Rica
My experience at Columbia amidst the moving continents debate had convinced me that in my field of Palaeontology one had to know well a variety of scientific disciplines in order to come to a decent understanding of the fossils I was studying - geology and biology especially. This is certainly not unusual in most fields of scientific endeavour. Trying to understand the fossil birds I studied made me acutely aware of my lack of knowledge of ecology - and so in 1970 I managed to secure a place on a team of 20 American graduate students to spend 2 months in Central America - looking at tropical ecosystems. I spent weeks watching ants protect the growing tips of acacias, successions of vultures tear apart a carcass of a young horse, surveying mangrove swamps (where we almost lost the professor in the mud) - all helped me understand how fossil assemblages form. A number of my own Ph.D. students have worked on related problems, that were first inspired by these observations in one of the world’s most beautiful wet tropical areas.
This time of extended observation in the field was invaluable to my later studies of more ancient “ecosystems” - but it almost changed the course of my career when I became fascinated with pollination biology - who pollinates what and how do the plants to be pollinated attract their pollinators? I think one of the most exciting realizations that I have had was a bit of an understanding of one little co-evolved system - between a plant with tiny flowers covered by large, drooping leaves and a small hummingbird.
I noticed when I was hiking through
the forests of the southern highlands of Costa
Rica, near the Panamanian border, that leaves
of a low growing bush, Columnea florida, sometimes
had a pair of red spots. Some were bright red, some
faded, and some leaves had no spots at all.
Hummingbirds love the color red - as do a number of
other organisms. Others are intimidated by the
colour. Why, I wondered, were those red spots there
- what did they signal in this sea of green forest?
After a few days observation, I finally figured out
what was going on. The forest was very wet -lots
of rain during June and July, when many
things were in flower. Rain tends to wash away the
pollen which plants need to have distributed around
in order to insure their reproduction and thus
survival. C. florida had “solved” the problem of the
pollen being
washed away by having large leaves that completely
covered the flowers - but, of course, with the
flowers covered, how could their pollinators, which
were the humming-birds, find them? Hummingbirds
don’t smell their flowers, they look for them - and
what seemed to have happened is that the red spots
attracted the birds to the plant that was in
flower. The red spots were most intense on those
plants with just bloomed flowers. They faded when
pollen was no longer available, and on young plants
with no flowers, the red spots had not yet appeared.
Although I did not have enough time then to think
about just how this system came about, or what cued
the red spots to appear, I had at least made the
connection between the red spots, flowering
times and the birds. Someone else could follow on
with more detail - for after lengthy conversations
with myself, I decided that my heart was really in
Palaeontology, after all - and pollination biology
would have to be left behind.
The experience in Costa Rica gave me insights that have been useful all through my career and gave me contacts with scientists outside my normal working field with whom I still correspond and have published with occasion-ally.
Australia
After the Ph.D. (sometimes one thinks that it will never be finished!) I did return to Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship for a year to continue my work on birds. Tom, my husband, was offered a job with the Museum of Victoria during that year - and thus began two years of a commuter marriage - not really to be advised. I had students finishing degrees in Texas and their welfare needed to be looked after. Near the end of 1974 I was offered a part-time tutorship at Monash University (Melbourne) in the Zoology Department, then chaired by Professor Jim Warren, also a paleontologist - so I gave up a full time, tenure track job and arrived in Melbourne in 1975 for a $2000 a year tutorship.
Pioneering work in my field was the central issue that decided which way I would jump. Financially it could have been a disaster - but it was worth the risk for the real possibility of making interesting new discoveries, particularly in the exploration of the Middle and Early Tertiary of Central Australia (that is the time from about 65 million years ago until about 30 million). For a decade I chased older and older bird fossils and Tom chased older and older mammal fossils. We worked in many parts of isolated Central Australia, found a number of new fossil fields in those areas that began to fill in the gaps of knowledge back about as far as 30-40 million - but there was still a ghastly blank between the origins of Australia’s mammalian and avian fauna and what we knew about. All of this work was supported, at a modest level by both the National Geographic Society and the ARC (Australian Research Council), when ARC still had the philosophy that a number of small grants are useful, instead of concentrating large sums in a few projects. It would be difficult to do this sort of exploration now unless you are lucky enough to be personally wealthy or to somehow secure non-governmental support.
The Mesozoic work -Victoria
A couple of things then happened. Desperation set in at not being able to find material in older rocks. Fossils from rocks older than about 30 million years were just not being found - of mammals and birds. There were few feathers of ancient birds known from South Gippsland in Victoria - but no marsupials and no bones of the birds. Many of us in Melbourne kept looking in rocks around that area but all we could find were fish, and although many of my graduate students have found fish fossils most interesting - my heart was not really in fish!
The fortuitous event that changed everything in the late 1970’s was the finding of a dinosaur bone near Cape Paterson by two graduate students (Tim Flannery and John Long) and geologist Rob Glennie. The significance of this discovery was to encourage us to try harder and gave us a clue as to what sort of thing to look for in the rocks there. A single dinosaur bone and the tooth of a lungfish had been found in this area before, in 1903, but no-one had been able to find any more.
After Flannery et al.’s discovery, the search was on, and as a result a major research programme got underway - first to prospect for sites worth excavating and furthermore to understand the entire environment and ecosystem operating. Over the years this program cost more than 3 million dollars, its funding coming primarily from the National Geographic Society, the Australian Research Council and private enterprise - such groups as Atlas Copco, ICI, Safeway and dozens of other sponsors. It involved over 500 volunteers, who ranged from mining engineers and blasting experts to jewellers to retirees, the oldest of which was 85! The National Geographic Society underwrote part of the field expenses and ARC again provided a modest amount for the preparation of materials. We never asked for large sums from ARC during any of this work for we knew the funding base in Australia was small, and the need base among scientists was growing. I felt it irresponsible to ask for larger sums because of the effect on other researchers in the area - and while the ARC philosophy still included grants for projects in the range of $30,000 to $40,000, it was possible to access the funds needed to prepare the delicate material coming out of these ancient rocks. The winner take all philosophy did not prevail at this time, but unfortunately, this is not so much the case now.
The lead time to train someone to prepare material from the Mesozoic rocks of Victoria is not short - more than two years to become competent. One cannot just advertise for a first class preparator competent in dealing with such material and have people standing in line for the job. We were lucky in that at just the time we needed it one of our volunteers, Lesley Kool, turned out to be just the person we needed and over the years, even when funds were tight, she has stuck with the job and become a superb, world class preparator.
By the 1990s my team and I had a unique assemblage of fossil animals and plants that represented:
-An environment and ecosystem with no modern counterpart.
-High biodiversity at a latitude with at least 3 months of total darkness during a year.
-Substantial forests at such high latitudes.
-Low, but not excessively low temperatures, including times of permanently frozen ground.
-Polar dinosaurs, some of which appeared to be warm-blooded (the hypsilophodonts) and others that at least probably hibernated in the winter and may have even been cold-blooded (the ornithomimosaurs).
-Perhaps the oldest placental mammals.
-Environments that may have spawned new groups of fauna (ornithomimid dinosaurs, ceratopsian dinosaurs).
-Environments that may have protected some groups like allosaurids and the large crocodile-like “labyrinthodonts” by excluding species that couldn’t cope with cold or some other aspect of high latitude environments
-A sequence of rocks that spanned at least 20 million years over which we had the opportunity to look at climatic and biotic change during a dynamic time of earth history - change from a Greenhouse Earth to an Icehouse Earth
South America and Gondwana
The search for answers about the nature of polar faunas at the end of the age of dinosaurs, begun in Australia has taken me many places - Africa, New Zealand and most recently to Argentina, Japan and Alaska.
Australia and South America were linked across Antarctica when the dinosaurs were on the move - and fossils are far more abundant in Argentina than in Australia. Tom and I were invited by a museum in Patagonia to take part on a long term basis in the exploration of similar aged rocks to those we were working on in southern Victoria - and the promise of a better understanding of the distribution and movement of vertebrates 100 million years ago was worth pursuing, even if the whole project was to be funded primarily out of our pockets. This program needed to be pursued with gusto - and with gusto it has been for the past several years.
I must admit that one of the reasons I keep returning to South America is not entirely scientific. Patagonia is a wild place, a vast country with hardly anyone to be seen. The Indians and mixture of peoples who live there have a warmth of character and love of children that I admire, and a language that is full of passion. It is a land where the wind sometimes blows so hard that it bites - throws rocks in your face - and a place where major discoveries are yet to be made in its isolated canyons and plains. I love this place and will continue to search its vast spaces for hidden treasures until I can prospect no more. Curiosity needs the combination with such passion to make it work best!
Behind the Iron Curtain -1979 to 1998 -China
Curiosity has sometimes gotten me into interesting situations - and my work in China and
Russia has certainly been an example of that. In 1979 just as the Cultural Revolution seemed to be at an end, I went as a guest of the Chinese government and with sponsorship of the Australian Academy of Sciences to assess the state of vertebrate Palaeontology in China. I arrived there in the midst of winter having sent ahead a list of places I wanted to visit, including the jewel in the crown of vertebrate Palaeontology in that country, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. I got all I had asked for except Mongolia - of course, this was under metres of snow by this time - so I was not too surprised.
The end result of this first of five trips was many fold: a great exhibition of Chinese fossil material that toured Australia in the early 1980s, a casting programme that led to the Museum of Victoria gaining casts of two massive dinosaur skeletons plus a number of other fossils, an exchange of scientists and technicians and artists between IVPP and several institutions in Australia. As a result of a long term interest of mine in linguistics, one big project that developed out of my time in China was to compile and place on a computer data base more than 20,000 Chinese technical terms and their English equivalents that were of value in Palaeontology - but are also useful in many other scientific fields. The terminology is useful, for example, in translating geological reports for oil and mining concerns, even for medical literature. We are still working with colleagues to make our computer data base more user friendly. This visit also led to the beginning of a history of science project on the foreign involvement in the development of vertebrate Palaeontology in China - a rich history of involvement of the Canadians, Swedes, French, Americans and others. One of my current graduate students, Patricia Komarower, has carried on this work.
Russia
I learned a very important lesson from my work in China. Scientists could put their heads together and generate funds that could be used in underwriting research. Funds for research by the mid-1980s were coming under some pressure and by the early 1990s the budgetary squeeze on science was severe. So many times I began to hear the phrases justifiable research, market driven research, ivory towers, etc. It was as if all research that was of any value had to have an immediate practical application. Basic research had to have a current practical application. I asked myself, how can what we need right now necessarily have anything to do with what we might need tomorrow ? - and if we do not accommodate some research that is not always practically driven - that is instead driven by the innate curiosity of the researcher - how can we expect to foster innovation for tomorrow? What I had seen in operation at UC Berkeley when I was a student, of diversity of disciplines, of interaction between these, of both practical and basic research, seemed to be passé in these times in the early 1990s. I also sensed a shift in the funding philosophy - that tracked what was going on in society and has been so well described in a book published in 1995, written by Robert Frank and Philip Cook - the winner-take-all society. Their idea as it applies to science funding, and which many funding groups took on board was that you chose a few winners and fund them well - and too bad for the rest of the mob. The golden rings on the roundabout are fewer, bigger - and what Frank and Cook see as the outcome is economic waste, funding inequality on a great scale, and in the end an impoverished cultural and, in my field, an impoverished and demoralized scientific community.
This was not going on just in Australia, but worldwide, and so when I saw a beautiful exhibition of Russian and Mongolian dinosaurs in Japan while I was attending a conference of geologists there in 1992, I decided that it was time the Russians and I got together to see if we could help each other out. I organized to meet with the Director of the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Alexei Rozanov, at the conference I was attending in August 1992, and we agreed over a cup of coffee that we would try to make this work. I returned to Australia and heard nothing from Alexei - until December 1992 -when he asked me if I would like to come to Moscow to negotiate for the exhibition. “Of course” was my answer. But then came the problem - how on earth was I going to raise the funds to get the exhibition here in the first place?
Fundraising for field funds from private enterprise was something I had done before - but I didn’t need jack hammers and gelignite, I needed cargo holds and trucks and funds to produce a catalogue and funds to build an exhibition. Fortunately I had published a few things before this. I had also crossed paths with a publicist and fundraiser, Kay Hamilton, who had been instrumental in gaining funds for the Museum of Victoria on a number of occasions. We met and talked and in a circuitous way we made connections with a marketing agency, Hambleton Ruff in Melbourne. With this team of publicist, marketing agency and scientists - and a lot of good will and altruism - we managed to secure significant funding from Qantas, ICI, Channel 7, Bostik and a number of other sources.
Fortunately, too, I had been involved in a number of other exhibitions - and had put them together with a museum that I admire greatly, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. It is one of the few museums in Australia, another being the South Australian Museum that places real value on its scientific personnel and seeks significant scientific input in its exhibitions - in addition to the entertainment component. The entertainment is there, but the science content and detail are fundamental, and not at just the gee whiz level. This is very like what I have recently observed in science museums around Japan.
The QVM (headed by Chris Tassell, a
palaeontologist by training) had a superb staff
of preparators, and they were jumping at the
chance to participate. The Monash Science Centre, of
which I am director, had the educators and
scientists (including my husband, who is an
Associate as well as a curator at Museum Victoria)
necessary to put together the information panels and
the catalogue, to design the educational materials
and to provide the professional development sessions
relating the exhibition to the current national and
state curriculum guidelines for primary and
secondary schools. Hambleton Ruff and Kay
Hamilton had the expertise to design the
commercial products to go with the exhibition (and
much of the profit from these products were put back
into scientific research - visitors buying coffee
mugs and T-shirts supported research efforts in both
Australia and Russia), and, of course, the Russians
had the beautiful fossil material that made the
whole thing possible. We all cooperated with each
other, and the exhibition was on the road from 1993
to 1997 returning to Moscow in mid-1997. All
of the material in the exhibition was moulded and
used to create two cast exhibitions that have just
now finished their tours, but in turn have given
rise to others touring the Pacific Basin and
Southeast Asia and North and South America. The
intention is that these exhibitions and casts for
sale from the original moulds will continue to
generate funds for science and science education on
a global scale.
The Monash Science Centre
As a result of all this exploration, curiosity, exhibitions and interactions with scientists around the world, the Monash Science Centre began as a dream in the early 1990s - as an institution that would put children and adults alike in direct contact with research scientists. These scientists, just as those I met with as a high school student and as a tertiary student a UC Berkeley, could relate how science is done, how exciting it is, what the human race can gain from understanding it - what they as individuals can gain from an understanding of science.
The MSC has now been in operation since 1993 and has a place in the Science Faculty at Monash University. It has secured funds for a substantial facility within the Monash University campus at Clayton. The location has been selected for its beauty and its connection with the natural world, it has also been selected as an area that serves the whole university, for the centre deals not only with science and technology, but with art and music, and with curiosity and imagination. It needs a natural spot not connected with any particular discipline in the university to make the point that they are all related - and the building itself is to serve as an example of how a commercial building can be environmentally sensitive and energy efficient - it has no central air conditioning or heating - it is instead built to passively accommodate the changes over a year and minimize the impact on the surrounds. The Monash Science Centre is a unique facility within Australia because of the high level of interaction between active research scientists and graduate (even under-graduate) students with the general public and pre-tertiary students. In this day and age of increasing amalgamation of schools, the demise of the small school, I hope we can continue to nurture small groups interacting with individual scientists to learn about the way science really works. In some respects we are swimming against the tide - no matter what the public statements are to the contrary.
Summation
To sum up I think:
• Intellectual curiosity should be subsidized from the moment a child is born until they die as ancient adults - this means every child, everywhere.
• People should all be nurtured to follow their dreams and should have places in their lives where they can work in small groups, where they can be special and learn in that special environment.
•Quality should never be compromised.
• George Washington was right!
All of these ideas are rather summed up in one of my favourite movies, perhaps a bit out of fashion these days, but then I have never really worried too much about fashion. That movie is Babe. Babe and I agree on lots:
•Babe was curious and questioning and once in the right environment had that curiosity subsidized both by his surrogate mother (a dog) and his man.
• Babe followed his dreams.
• Babe never compromised quality as the final sheep trial scene in the movie clearly shows (100 out of 100 even from the worst of his critics).
Professor Pat Vickers-Rich holds a Personal Chair in Palaeontology at Monash University and is the Founding Director of the Monash Science Centre. Her research programs in several areas of palaeobiology have resulted in major contributions to the knowledge of Gondwanan fossils, especially Australian, and palaeoenvironmental change. A talented and entertaining speaker, she has been an important publicist for Australian Science.