Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO

Future Safe?

3 September 2004

The vertically challenged Scottish playwright, J.M. Barrie, fantasised about re-attaching one's lost shadow with sticky soap. Perhaps he had my genius for becoming invisible in the best hotels. Perhaps it should be a source of comfort, when querying a false version of one of those express check-out bills, to be addressed as Mr Johanssen –- this must give first base in proving error -– but I prefer existentialist farce in the theatre where it belongs.

Some mysterious force field which surrounds me had also corrupted the electronic room safe. I can remember, as I'm sure you believe, a four digit pin for a couple of days but the tin box insisted on flashing an implacable error message. For those of you yet to experience this fun let me assure you that hotels have high-tech stethoscopes rather than brace and bit or dynamite.

These background distractions took place at last week’s Australian Leadership Forum whose theme, with remarkable prescience, was 'trust'. Participants divided neatly into two groups -– those concerned with breach of trust and those concerned with establishing trust. This outrageous generalisation is all I want to say about the main theme, because the most interesting sub-strand for me concerned itself with the future of bioscience.

I moderated a thought-provoking session presented by David Fineman of the Keck Institute and attended a fascinating plenary lecture by Jonathan West, an Australian at Harvard and a University of Sydney alumnus to boot. Both have management school backgrounds and both have conducted case studies on aspects of research and commercialisation in the life sciences. Let me share some impressions.

Fineman described the bittersweet example of Merck and its invention of a cure for river-blindness caused by parasites. Not only was there no chance to recoup development costs from individuals in the third world, there was also no willingness from governments to pay drug production costs. In this case the company committed to a massive charitable funding of its own. This had no beneficial effect on the share price (of course) which apparently has slipped for other reasons. This raises obvious questions concerning whether moral purpose can or should be part of a public company's charter and, if so, what structural mechanism would provide enablement.

Jonathan West showed how life science developments now can potentially revolutionise 65 per cent of the US economy, how US government investment in basic research in the field is increasing exponentially and how cash investment from the private sector, also growing steeply, is mirrored by cash burn of equal magnitude as yet unmatched by returns. He noted that in pure economic terms this is as unrewarding a game as buying lottery tickets, bonanza gains through equity being the pay-off.

His thesis, chilling when applied to Australia, is that this is a very different species of technology from those of the recent past. One can neither generate large numbers of jobs from the R & D, as in, say manufacturing, nor can one benefit as a fast adaptive consumer of the invented product, as in, say IT. One must be an equity stakeholder –- and no Australian government has dared to imagine the resource commitment required.

I have left a note in the safe that technology is a challenge to be welcomed not feared.