Canberra needed more than just the clinical school proposed by the ACT Government, according to a leading medical researcher. It needed a full-scale under-graduate medical school and it needed to nurture basic research.
Professor Bob Blanden, the head of the division of cell biology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, said last week that Canberra had good medical research centres that needed a full under-graduate medical school to help bring together pure bio-medical researchers with those with practical problems.
The plan for the clinical school is for students only in their final years to come to Canberra from Sydney University.
He was speaking at a forum, including a panel of 15 academics, at the University of Canberra last week on “”Future Options for Canberra”. It was a lead-up to the September “”Canberra: Face of the Nation?” conference sponsored by the university, the Canberra Business Council, the ACT Government and the National Capital Planning Authority.
“”Medical research has led to an enormous reduction in pain and suffering with great cost-benefit,” he said. The best example was the vaccines that prevented epidemics like polio. However, they could not have been done without previous pure research which at the time seemed to have no application.
Many medical developments were accidental, though they relied on a basis of pure research.
“”Basic medical research, like any other form of basic research, is a creative enterprise which has a great deal in common with the creative arts, and like them has intrinsic merit as a cultural pursuit,” he said. It was performed by creative people whose main motivation was curiosity. These people provided the building blocks of knowledge which came together to provide developments in preventing a curing disease.
“”It is no more productive to tell them what problems they should be researching than it would be to tell Rembrandt what to paint,” he said.
Canberra must maintain the intellectual climate to allow new generations of gifted researchers to have the freedom to investigate basic problems about which they are curious.
Both researchers and clinicians benefited from exposure to each other’s work. That was why a full medical school was important to interact with Canberra’s present medical research establishments. Present thinking on the limited clinical school was based on a belief that present medical schools were Australia producing enough doctors. He hoped this thinking would change to allow a full medical school in Canberra.
Administrators of research and politicians were emphasising research with practical application too much. However, if you stifled the highly creative, unpredictable pure research, “”the basic information which constitutes the building blocks for new practical developments will not be produced”.