“SUITCASE scientists” working at overseas facilities would get more funding and postdoctoral researchers working offshore would be guaranteed a job on their return home under a plan proposed by the Australian Academy of Science to boost international collaborative research.

Academy president Kurt Lambeck will tell the National Press Club today that Australia will miss out on big scientific and technological breakthroughs unless it steps up joint projects with overseas laboratories as science becomes increasingly globalised.

“This is something governments have been aware of but they’re not doing enough and they’re not treating it with sufficient urgency,” he told the HES.

The federal government has some good programs in place to drive international collaboration. They include Australia’s bid to host the world’s biggest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array. But, overall, programs to integrate Australian science more closely with the international scene are underfunded and ad hoc, says Lambeck.

The government had discontinued the $2 million competitive grants element of its International Science Linkages Program in the last budget. That had provided funding directly to researchers for joint projects with colleagues overseas.

The road to the Australian Synchrotron facility in Melbourne was paved by suitcase scientists who made short trips overseas in the 1970s and 80s to use first and second-generation instruments for probing matter on the atomic scale.

Lambeck says Australia generates less than 3 per cent of the world’s knowledge. “But (Australia) requires access to much of the other 97 per cent to be able to maintain the status quo,” he says. Failure to join forces with overseas laboratories will limit Australia’s access to science and technology, and compromise its ability to capitalise on the knowledge it does produce.

Under the academy’s plan, universities, science agencies and business would compete for funds for collaborative research with both long and short-term goals.

Basic research would be supported alongside applied research, and the program would favour early career scientists. Honours year undergraduate students would do some of their research overseas. To stem the brain drain, postdoctoral researchers working overseas would have a right to return to a job. Short-term bilateral exchange programs for scientists would sow the seeds of long-term research and development projects. And suitcase scientists would get more support.

A quarter of a century ago, Peter Colman, now at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, was one of a small group of Australian scientists who went overseas to use synchrotron radiation, or “bright X-rays” to probe matter.

Synchrotron radiation includes X-rays billions of times the intensity of those used in medicine. This radiation is emitted when electrons accelerated to near light speed are deflected by magnetic fields.It interacts with the atoms in materials so scientists can use it towork out the atomic structure ofmolecules.

After working 48 hours straight on the DESY-EMBL particle accelerator in Hamburg in 1983, Colman was en route to designing one of the world’s first two anti-influenza drugs. He was leading a team looking for a weakness in the virus to target with an anti-influenza drug which, in contrast to vaccines, would attack the pathogen directly.

Colman, then with the CSIRO, wanted to characterise neuraminidase, a protein on the surface of the influenza virus.

The work led to Relenza, a drug jointly developed by Melbourne-based firm Biota and its international partner GlaxoSmithKline. Relenza was hailed as one of the biggest commercial success stories of Australian science.

Colman and his fellow travellers were given free access to overseas facilities. They built Australia’s capability in what would become one of the most powerful areas ofresearch.

“We had people here who seized the opportunities,” Lambeck says.

Australian synchrotron science took off in the 1990s. Australia built its own beamline on a Japanese instrument and used federal funding to buy shares in beamlines at the top US facility. It eventually graduated to its own instrument.

Opened in 2007, the Melbourne facility put Australia in the forefront of synchrotron research, critical to fields ranging from medicine to minerals processing.

“The synchrotron user community is now something like 1500 people,” Colman says.

Now he uses the Australian Synchrotron to work out the structure of proteins that regulate cell death. “There is some evidence that the failure of cells to die when they should leads to cancer,” he says. The work could deliver a new cancer therapy.

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