Annual Report 2000

THE MENZIES FOUNDATION LECTURES

In 2000, the Menzies Foundation sponsored two Menzies Lectures, both given by eminent international scientists.

Professor Susan Greenfield is an impressive scientist and science communicator and at the ScienceNOW! Menzies Foundation Lecture given on 4th May, 2000 at the National Science Forum, she provided some thought provoking and challenging material on her theme "The Future of the Mind".

Susan Greenfield is an Oxford University neurobiologist and is the first female director of the Royal Institution. She is, by her own account, something of a maverick. She was the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and has written a book about the brain designed for ordinary people to understand. She writes a column in a Sunday newspaper about science and pops up in every appeal to get more women into science. The media love her.

Greenfield talks about the brain the way other people talk about fine art or football; it is a thing of endless beauty and fascination, adorning her walls like pictures of prize-winning cauliflowers. It is mindboggling, stunning, brilliant, she says. "All you are, you see, is your brain". The last bit of this is self-evidently true. It is also, though, an infuriatingly unfathomable concept, for how can you think objectively about your brain when the only thing you can use to think about it is the thing itself? This is one of the reasons why you might expect a conversation with a brain expert to be somewhat confusing. Another is the fear that an Oxford scientist is going to talk in language you do not understand. What makes Susan Greenfield so remarkable is that she can tell you about your brain without baffling it.

Does she believe men and women have fundamentally different brains? Well, she says, if you put hers and the male photographer's on the table in front of us, you wouldn't be able to see any difference. Studies show there are some gender differences - but in her view, the individual trumps all of that.

She does not just try to take science to 'the tabloid readers' but to bring something of the outside world into the lab. She has set up her own company with venture capital money, and the company then awards her with a grant for research. She concedes that being a woman in an overwhelmingly male world makes it easier to be noticed, but speaks out repeatedly on the need to get more girls interested in science. "One of the problems is that women have always had more complex lives, so are more interested in weighing things up. Science is taught in a fact-oriented way, and boys are happier going for facts and getting something right or wrong. If only schools showed what you could do with the facts, girls would be more interested. Everyone knows that if you learn Greek grammar you can read Homer. Nobody says what you can do if you learn your science grammar". She also worries about girls lacking role models and confidence, and suffering from 'impostor syndrome'. Extracted from an article by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian newspaper (June 8 1998).

The ABC's national telecast of the lecture the following Wednesday night provided the Foundation with valuable exposure in both the scientific world and with the general public, and led to many positive comments in the ensuing days.

The second Menzies Foundation Lecture for 2000 was entitled "World Blindness and the Global Initiative". It was held on 10 August, 2000 in association with the Centre for Eye Research Australia and the Ophthalmology 2000 conference. The lecturer was Professor Al Sommer, Dean of the School of Medicine and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a practising ophthalmologist who has an international reputation as a leader in epidemiology and in public health ophthalmology.

Currently, Dr Sommer's academic interests include outcomes assessment, clinical guidelines, cost containment, blindness prevention strategies, child survival, health interventions in developing countries and the growing interface between medicine and public health.

Dr Sommer's landmark work on Vitamin A has been credited with saving the lives of millions of children around the world. This pioneering work has earned him numerous awards, including the Helmut Horten Medical Research Award and the Charles A Dana Award for Pioneering Achievements in Health. In 1997 he was the winner of the Lasker Prize which is the most prestigious prize in medical research in the United States. The citation reads:

Throughout the developing world, in Indonesia and Tanzania, in South Africa and Nepal, in virtually all countries where vitamin A deficiency was once common, millions of children owe their eyesight and their very lives to a visionary, persistent doctor from Baltimore. Alfred Sommer, winner of the 1997 Lasker award for clinical medical research, discovered that vitamin A, known to prevent blindness from xerophthalmia, also gives children the biochemical strength to recover from life-threatening infections that are common in most of the poorest nations on earth.

Xerophthalmia often begins with nightblindness, which in some cultures is called "chicken blindness" because afflicted children mimic chickens' inability to see at dusk. As xerophthalmia progresses, "Bitot's spots" appear on the eyes - white, foamy or cheesy accumulation of tissue that is known as a sign of vitamin A deficiency. If vitamin A deficiency progresses untreated, the patients deteriorate and may develop eye ulcers that, as Sommer puts it, "eventually turn the cornea to mush."

Vitamin A deficiency is one of the oldest recorded medical conditions. The ancient Egyptians treated nightblindness with animal liver (where vitamin A is stored) 3500 years ago. By the early 1900's, the connection between xerophthalmia, overall resistance to infection and vitamin A was well-documented by American and Danish nutritionists who treated their patients with cod liver oil, butter, and whole milk. For all practical purposes, xerophthalmia was erased from the medical map in Europe and North America.