Ask Professor Stephen Simpson what he means when he describes the Charles Perkins Centre, of which he is Academic Director, as cross-disciplinary and he’ll talk you through a virtual tour.
“If you start here and go to the end of the building, you’ll find one of the world’s leading philosophers and historians of biology and medicine,” he told The Brilliant. “Move through the advanced core facility in live cell imaging, where you can see insulin molecules docking with receptors in real time. Then you’ll meet biomedical scientists, dieticians, nutritionists and economists, people working in mathematics and statistical modelling. You’ll see advanced teaching facilities training tens of thousands of students, and you’ll end up in a clinical facility that treats thousands of patients.”
Then, emphasising the point he’s trying to make, he says, “You’ll find people working quite literally from every discipline at the University of Sydney.”
Every discipline? Yes, there’s even a writer-in-residence, currently Tracy Sorensen.
The reason behind this crowded house, Simpson argues, is the growing expectation for universities to address complex societal problems, which can only be done by bringing together appropriate teams of deep disciplinary experts.
At the Charles Perkins Centre, the problems to be solved are some of humanity’s biggest and they’re massively complex.
“Our mission is to ease the burden of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and related conditions,” Simpson explains. “That gives us free rein across all health-related issues and everything that touches them, which includes the whole of society – our food system, our built environment, our political and ethical structures, the economic systems within which we work – everything from individual biology all the way through to global trade and commodities and industry.
“It’s a broad remit, but it’s one that’s required if you’re going to try and solve these problems,” Simpson says. “The burden of chronic disease is a pandemic that is threatening not only the health and wellbeing of the world but its economic wellbeing as well.”
Named after Australian civil rights leader Dr Charles Perkins – the first Aboriginal man to graduate from university – the centre was established in 2012. It shares Perkins’ philosophy of collaboration, inclusivity and challenging the status quo.
What we’ve done is build a place that works according to the principles of complex adaptive systems,” Simpson says. “You need to create an environment where people can come together like the neurons in a developing brain, each with their own capabilities, their own skills, their own expertise, communicating with others according to an ethos that requires people to be collaborative and share what they’re doing and to be respectful of other disciplines.”
“And then you need to essentially select what comes out of that network of collaboration, in the way that natural selection might work, or any other cumulative, adaptive selective process.”
Simpson’s earliest passion, growing up in Melbourne, was for insects. Undergraduate studies led him to Brisbane, where he first developed an interest in understanding how animals – initially, sheep blowfly maggots – decide what to eat.
A PhD in London followed, where Simpson switched his focus to locusts’ feeding decisions and later their mass swarming behaviour. All of this was “deeply informative”, Simpson says, when the time came to set up the Charles Perkins: “I was interested in how you could go from events within the individual locust’s nervous system in response to crowding that would translate into continental-scale mass migration. To understand that, you had to go from neurochemistry and molecular biology through to behaviour and statistical physics and landscape models of habitat change.”
Simpson moved to Oxford where he remained for another 22 years, which included a stint as curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. By the early 1990s, Simpson was collaborating with Professor David Raubenheimer, a leading expert in nutritional ecology, and the pair developed a theory for nutrition they called “nutritional geometry”, which they began to expand across species.
In 2002 Simpson and Raubenheimer became fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin), formed in 1981 to pursue projects in the natural and social sciences. “It’s an extraordinary place,” Simpson says. “They invite 40 people from around the world to come together for a year. They put your family up in an apartment, look after you and say, ‘Do what you want for a year – make the most of this opportunity’. The fellows included composers and economists and biologists.
“That experience shaped what has happened at the Charles Perkins. You can’t force people to collaborate and you can’t force things to happen, but you can set up the environment that will increase the probability of it happening.”
Simpson sees part of the Charles Perkins remit as helping to untangle the “nasty mess” of conflicting ideologies around nutrition.
Sex, death and food are the three things that drive biology,” he says. “Humans have established religions around each of them. There is more madness, zealotry, irrationality and anger in the field of nutrition than you’ll find just about anywhere else. When you add that to social media and commercial influences, both through the commercialisation of these ideologies and the commercialisation of the food system, you’ve got a mess.
“What we need is to grapple with the complexity of nutrition to make it simple, but not too simple, and to develop high-level insights into how nutritional biology works, which will help guide people.”
As part of that guiding process, Raubenheimer and Simpson wrote Eat Like the Animals: What nature teaches us about the science of healthy eating, published this year by HarperCollins and chosen by New Scientist as one of their “best books” of the year.
How is it, Eat Like the Animals asks, that a baboon, a cat and a locust instinctively know what to eat for balanced nutrition, but we humans struggle?
Simpson believes, however, that humans now have the information they need to “cure” obesity.
“What’s stopping us is fundamentally the food system,” he says. “Many aspects of the environment conspire to make us overweight and on the slippery slope to obesity. The smoking gun is our basic biology intersecting with the food environment, in particular ultra-processed foods. We need to place our exquisitely evolved appetite systems back into a food environment in which they work for our health rather than the profit of food companies.”
Fixing the food system is not simple. We know exactly what we need to do, but there are incredibly powerful commercial and other interests that are making that difficult. But once we’ve done that, we will have fixed it.”
Visit the Eat Like the Animals Website
Follow the Charles Perkins Centre on Twitter
Article by Iain Scott
Photo supplied
Comments are closed.