A U S T R A L I A N
U N I V E R S I T I E S ’
R E V I E W
Blinded by science, again (Thomas Dolby, 1982) The best Australian science writing 2021 by Dyani Lewis (ed.) ISBN 9781742237374 (pbk.), ISBN 9781742238272 (ebook), ISBN 9781742239163 (ePDF), NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, Australia, 293 pp., 2021. Reviewed by Neil Mudford
When I first opened this book, to begin reviewing it, I was expecting it to contain many articles on COVID-19. I was surprised to find only four of its thirty articles had anything to do with the disease even though most of the articles would have been written in 2020. So, in spite of the science-related fixation on COVID, day after day in the media throughout the last two years, less than a seventh of this edition of the best Australian science writing is on pandemic-related topics. Additionally, several of these are on aspects of the disease far from the mainstream media’s focus on virus mutation and behaviour and our collective response in formulating efforts to protect people from it. Thus, the unrelenting public focus on fighting and reacting to COVID seemed at odds with its apparent status here simply as one of many issues. A moment’s further thought dispels my ill-conceived expectation. The volume has the balanced view, properly aligned with scientific priorities. First, there are so many other important issues and interesting areas of study being pursued. An emergency in one aspect of existence does not warrant halting all other activities, though plenty of day-to-day activities – handshaking, hugging, travelling, horizontal folk dancing – have had to be wound back. It would be foolish to concentrate too heavily on a single issue, long running though it might be, at the expense of everything else. Second, concerning breadth of coverage, what would be the point of re-hashing the same narrow band of ideas that have been swirling around the public domain for two years now? One of science and scientists’ great strengths is to see issues afresh and uncover a topic’s vital but hidden aspects. This being an issue of Australian Universities’ Review with a COVID focus, I will consider the COVID articles in detail, highlighting their novel revelations, and then comment briefly on the panoply of the collection’s other creative and insightful articles. In ‘The virus detectives’, Fiona McMillan presents her and her colleagues’ fast-paced race to understand the new SARS vol. 64, no. 1, 2022
threat that became COVID-19 beginning with the warning being sounded from Wuhan. The advances over the last decade or two in rapid genetic sequencing, the establishment of openly available databanks of the results and the experiences with AIDS and earlier SARS crises showed their worth in allowing the knowledgeable to quickly assess the nature of the disease, recognise the high level of the threat and set about creating the immunological weapons to fight it. It has been a source of wonder to me, and to others, how it was that the biomedical research community managed to get so many highly effective vaccines created, trialled and available for use in only one year. McMillan answers these questions by taking us through the intricate sequence of events along the way. The very first question to answer was whether humans could contract the disease from each other or only through exposure to the animals from which it sprang. If the former, then the disease was a tremendous danger and a rapid, massive, international response was required. If otherwise, the problem could be tackled locally. Recognising the potential dangers, Chinese scientists sequenced the genome as soon as they could and made the results available worldwide. This allowed researchers around the world, with a whole array of knowledge and skills, to examine the genome and deduce its behaviour. The answer was ‘yes’, there will be human-human transmission. Thus, the research community received an early ‘heads up’ and knew they had to spring into action and the story takes off from there. This didn’t stop the Chinese scientists being criticised for being secretive and even for creating the disease in a secret laboratory. I am glad to see those scientists receiving here due praise for their quick and scientific response. McMillan makes several points about the research community’s state of preparedness and the scale and intensity of the mighty effort that produced the understanding and the medical solutions.
Blinded by science, again (Thomas Dolby, 1982) Reviewed by Neil Mudford
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