Turning 82 this year, this Nobel laureate and former Australian of the Year underscores a deep involvement in communicating evidence-based science and combating misinformation with a refreshing irreverence.
Six decades ago, when Professor Peter Doherty was a relatively unknown medical researcher with a veterinary degree, he was asked to give a speech. He was terrified. “I remember the immense trepidation that I confronted that first scientific talk with – or my wife remembers it more intensely,” he says, laughing.
Now a Nobel laureate, author of eight books, former Australian of the Year, and well-known proponent of evidence-based science – particularly in recent times in regards to vaccines and immunology – Doherty knows good and bad science communication when he sees it.
“I think some scientists should never attempt to be science communicators,” he says. “They’re terrible. But there are other personalities in science who are really good communicators.” He mentions Brian Cox, David Attenborough and Dr Karl Kruszelnicki as particular stand-outs. “Karl’s the ultimate polymath – enormously broad rather than narrow and deep. But he’s good. And does a great job.”
After completing his PhD at Edinburgh University, Doherty took up a postdoctoral position at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, and perhaps would have remained just another relatively unknown scientist quietly solving the mysteries of the world. But his research in the mid-1970s with Swiss colleague Rolf Zinkernagel discovered the role and mechanism of killer T-cells in controlling virus infections, and brought him into the spotlight in 1996 when he was given a Nobel prize for this work – the only veterinary-qualified scientist to receive the esteemed award. He was living in the USA at the time.
“The year after [the] Nobel Prize, everyone wants a piece of you and so, I’ve got all these massive commitments ahead of me and I get the call saying I’ve been made the Australian of the Year. I said, ‘Well, can I put it off a year?’ and they said, ‘Not if you ever want to visit again’. So, we came back to Australia three or four times. And I talked a lot in all the capital cities and I talked about science and why it’s important and what science is doing and stuff. And I really got the impression there’s a bit of a void.”
Doherty stepped into that void, discovering the pitfalls of trying to communicate science in various media – such as being heavily edited or stereotyped as a scientist. “The only safe thing is direct-to-air radio. I mean, TV, where they edit, you find yourself saying things that are ridiculous because they’ll do a five minute interview, then grab 10 seconds. And if you watch it, even you can’t understand what it’s all about. And you always have to be in a white coat – the stereotypes! I got rid of most of those people by effectively saying (generally more politely), ‘Piss off, I won’t put a white coat on, I won’t look down a microscope, I won’t hold a petri dish up to the light. So, if you’re not happy with that, just get lost.’ It’s a waste of time and it just gives the impression that people who do science are weird nerds who do nerdy things.”
Another issue is dealing with journalists who know nothing about science. “If it was a newspaper interview, you’d always wait with embarrassment to see what actually appeared in the newspaper… It’d normally be the junior journalist who covers AFL who doesn’t understand anything and puts everything in footy terms. And only then if there’s no good footy story.”
Doherty’s own media consumption consists of a lot of reading, including The Conversation, which he says former editor of The Age Andrew Jaspan started in 2011 after talking with him about these issues. “I get The Conversation to my inbox every day and Guardian Australia I read online. I pay subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post. I still pay subscriptions to The Age, which has been going downhill, I mean, like all the print papers, but it’s still not toxic. I won’t pay for anything Murdoch at all. They’ve moved from climate change denial to greenwash.”
The ‘dinosaur’ on Twitter
He’s written eight books, from A Light History of Hot Air and The Beginners Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize, to Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know, but believes visual media are the best way forward. “I encourage kids who want to communicate about science to do videos, to do YouTube,” he says. “Go for visual mechanisms and online and social media type things, because I think that works a lot better than what I’ve done. I mean, I come from the era when people wrote books. I’m a dinosaur.”
Yet this ‘dinosaur’ has taken to Twitter like a duck to water, posting more than 30,000 tweets on science from the role of fungi and climate change, to his own explainers on viruses, vaccines and immunology. He originally started tweeting because his publisher convinced him it would help him sell more books, but he has adapted superbly to the platform. In a humorous incident in the midst of the COVID lockdowns in 2020, he accidentally tweeted ‘Dan Murphy opening hours’ instead of googling it. But rather than harming his reputation, it dramatically boosted his Twitter following from about 20,000 people to 108,000.
“On Twitter you can get a good discussion going with someone intelligent, which is what I like about it. You may not know who they are, but they may point out various things you don’t know. So it can be useful, but it can also be a terrible time sink.”
Doherty is aware that when scientists work for an institution such as a university, they are often constrained in what they can say in public.
“But I think the Nobel Prizes are an institution, and when you get one of these, you’re some sort of institution yourself in some ways… so I tend to say and do my own thing.”
He has often engaged – not always successfully – with people who disparage his views or the science behind them. “A lot of people get very, very confused basically. And they have all sorts of things in their head that are quite untrue. It’s very hard to shift though,” he says. “I’ve tried a bit on Twitter with people who come across very aggressively. I’ve tried approaching them with a bit of respect and saying, ‘Well, look, I understand where you’re coming from. Maybe have you thought about this?’ And sometimes you get a good response to that, sometimes you just get more abuse. But basically I decided it’s just not worth the effort. I can’t do it. It’s too tiring because you find yourself going down their rabbit holes as you try to deal reasonably with them.
“I just got an email today saying I’m taking my orders from the bureaucrats in the Australian Government when I talk about drugs and immunity. It’s just beyond pathetic. Then people say I get paid large amounts of money by Pfizer, Merck, the Gates Foundation and the Chinese Communist Party. I’m ‘very wealthy’. So, someone’s been stealing all this money. I mean, there seems to be a set of people out there who simply can’t believe that people do things because they think it’s the right thing to do.” Very sad!
Article by Kylie Ahern
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