Speech to STEM Education and Industry Forum

I am pleased to join the Teachers’ Guild of NSW and the Australian Institute of Physics at this important forum about STEM education. 

Sadly I am neither an educator or a scientist but instead a politician. But I am lucky enough to be the Shadow Minister for Science, which means I get to meet some very accomplished scientists.

I want to start by telling you about one such meeting.  Professor Eddie Holmes is an evolutionary biologist and virologist at Sydney University and, as it happens, a constituent of mine in Bradfield.  When I met him last year, he told me a fascinating story.

In early 2020, as news spread of a mysterious new disease detected in Wuhan, China, Eddie contacted Professor Zhang Yongzhen at Fudan University in Shanghai.  The two had been research collaborators for several years, and Eddie was an honorary visiting Professor at Fudan University. 

Eddie had visited Wuhan some years before, he had visited the hospital which was now dealing with patients with the mysterious new disease, and he had been to the wet markets in Wuhan which are suspected to be the place where the virus jumped from animals to humans. In fact the way that viruses move from animals to humans is one of Eddie’s research specialties.

The two scientists discussed the news and Professor Zhang immediately contacted Wuhan hospital to obtain specimens from patients with the mystery virus.  Within 40 hours of receiving the specimens, he had completed the genetic sequencing of the new virus and shared the file with Professor Holmes; that triggered intense discussions between them about what to do next.

As Eddie told me the story, he and Professor Zhang soon concluded that it was essential to publish the results of the genomic sequencing as soon as possible, so that work could get underway on finding a cure.  This was not an easy choice for Professor Zhang; the Chinese Government was acutely politically sensitive about this new virus.  But they decided to proceed, and on Saturday morning, January 11 2020 Eddie used Twitter – as it then was called – to post a file with the genome of what we now know as SARS-COV-2 or COVID.

This story is well known – as is the string of well deserved honours which he has subsequently received.  In 2020 Eddie was named the NSW Scientist of the Year and in 2021 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, for “his transformative role in the scientific response to COVID-19.”

The COVID pandemic was a very challenging thing for Australia and the world to go through. But it was also a triumph of science. The genomic sequence of COVID was known extremely quickly, within 40 hours of Professor Zhang receiving the sample. 

Even more remarkable, Eddie’s tweet of the genomic sequence was issued on Saturday morning January 11 Sydney time – or Friday afternoon in the northern hemisphere. By Monday, Moderna, the American medical science company with a specialty in mRNA, had developed a vaccine. It was that quick.

I want to draw on this story, in the brief time available to me today, to speak about why STEM education is fundamentally important.  Why should students be taught STEM subjects?  Why does what STEM educators do matter?  Let me suggest four reasons.

My first answer to these questions is because science and technology is where the jobs are. That is perhaps the most prosaic and utilitarian of the answers which could be given, but it is nevertheless true.

We live in a world where science and technology underpins ever more of the economy, and hence where more and more jobs have STEM underpinnings.

The COVID pandemic is one example. The scientists doing fundamental work to identify the cause and find the cure – whether it is Professors Holmes and Zhang, or Prof Sarah Gilbert at Oxford who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine – are one, relatively small group. 

But the task of testing, manufacturing and distributing billions of doses of vaccines was carried out by global pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca and Pfizer.  There are thousands of people working for companies like these who have scientific and technical qualifications. 

Another good example is Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and agricultural science company, which happens to have one of its Australian offices in my electorate. At my request, three of Bayer’s scientists joined me at Hornsby Girls High School recently, as part of National Science Week, to speak to year 9 students about their work.

This was a way to give the students a sense of the many different jobs that science qualifications can lead to: some are in the lab, some are in manufacturing, some are in sales, some are in corporate affairs.  The three scientists who presented work respectively in microbiology, crop science & medical device manufacturing.

Pharmaceuticals and agriculture are just two of the many fields where science and technology is expanding at a remarkable rate – and creating new jobs all the time. Another good example is the enormous field of information technology.  According to the Tech Council of Australia, by 2025 there will be one million people employed in tech related jobs and by 2030 1.3 million. 

Think about the number of people whose work in such fields as renewable energy; or mobile telephony; or in vitro fertilisation; or in drones; or in cochlear implants; or low earth orbiting satellites; or genetically modified crops. These are jobs made possible by progress in science and technology; most of these jobs did not exist thirty years ago; and when we look forward another thirty years, we can be confident there will be new jobs based on new developments in science and technology. 

The story that Eddie Holmes told me, then, helps illustrate how many jobs there are which draw on STEM – and why therefore a STEM education is the gateway to getting one of those jobs.

But it also illustrates a second reason why STEM education is so important: because science and technology is critical to the wellbeing of humanity.

Thanks to science and technology, COVID killed many fewer people than it would have if it had come along one hundred years earlier. The comparison with the Spanish flu of 1919, for example, is very stark. 

Thanks to science and technology, the green revolution of the nineteen sixties hugely increased crop yields, and allowed humanity to avoid the mass starvation that many had feared would accompany rapid population growth. Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, known as the ‘Father of the Green Revolution’, is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation. 

Thanks to science and technology, we have electricity and transportation and clean, reliable drinking water and high quality sanitation and instant communication and connectivity over the internet and so many other facets of modern life.  The quality of life which ordinary people in advanced nations like Australia enjoy today would simply astound even the wealthiest people from even 100 years ago – let alone 1,000 years ago. 

The march of science and technology, then, has solved many problems which for almost all of human history made lives shorter, more dangerous, more uncomfortable and more unsettling than those we live.

But we have not solved every problem.  There is plenty more for scientists to do.  And of course some of the problems we face today are consequences of technologies we invented and started using in the past.  The use of fossil fuels has allowed us to generate electricity, to travel quickly and conveniently, to stay warm in winter and delivered many other benefits.  But now humanity’s focus is to phase out the use of fossil fuels so as to contain and in due course to reverse global warming.

The amount of scientific energy and effort going into that task is enormous. Last year I joined a delegation of Australian politicians attending COP28 in Dubai.  It was very impressive to see how many universities and businesses were there demonstrating their research and innovations.

Whether it is climate change, or developing new antibiotics as bacteria become increasingly resistant to our existing ones, or tackling the many remaining incurable diseases, there are plenty of challenges for scientists to get their teeth into. That is why it is important that you keep doing your work inspiring your students, to attract at least some of them onto the path of studying science at university and going on to a scientific career. 

Of course, the majority of students will not study science beyond high school.  Even those who do are very unlikely to go on to make fundamental scientific discoveries.  In theory, one of your students might turn out to be the next Galileo Galilei or Marie Curie or Albert Einstein; in practice the probability of this is extremely close to zero.

These realities might cause some to say that there is no need to teach STEM subjects, at least as far as the great majority of students are concerned.  But such an argument would be nonsensical.  For one reason, even if most students will not become world class scientists, a small number may – and to find the few it is necessary to teach science to the many. 

Eddie Holmes, when he was interviewed in 2015 upon becoming a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, spoke about a biology teacher who had prompted his interest in the science of evolution.  This happened in a slightly perverse way because his teacher did not believe in evolution and forbade his students to read the textbook chapter on evolution – which only encouraged Eddie to read this chapter with great interest, sparking his interest in what became his career direction.

Most of us, it is true, will not become world leading scientists like Eddie Holmes. But all of us are going to live in a world, and a society, where science and technology is fundamental.  And in such a world, it makes sense for all of us to be educated in STEM subjects. 

If you are going to understand some of the key debates of our times – about climate science and climate change, or the risk of losing species diversity, or the rise of precision medicine – it is very useful to know at least some of the basics of science. 

I would suggest it is also very important to understand a little about scientific method, in which findings are arrived at through reasoning and evidence and conducting experiments.  It is particularly important to understand that widely accepted theories can be overturned based on new evidence.  

The work of Copernicus and Galileo in disproving the accepted theory that the planets revolved around the earth a well known example. A more recent one is the work of Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren in showing that most stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Previously, they were thought to be caused by stomach acidity.  For their work they received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine. 

It is common today to hear the phrase ‘the science is settled.’  Perhaps with wider understanding of science this grating expression would be used less.

I have spoken so far about various practical reasons why it is useful or valuable to have as many people as possible learning science.  The fourth reason I want to cite today however in support of STEM education is a more fundamental one: science attracts us because it is inherently fascinating.  We human beings are very curious about our world and science is a way of satisfying that curiosity. 

Of course the outcomes of scientific endeavour, conducted on a large scale, have the practical, utilitarian benefits I spoke about.  But even without these, I suspect that many scientists would still choose to be scientists: they are people who are curious about the world and want to find out as much as they can.

In 2022, the biologist and ecologist Patricia Selkirk was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the highest rank, in recognition of her life’s work studying Antarctic and subantarctic terrestrial ecosystems.  She has made eighteen field trips to the Antarctic and subantarctic islands and written over eighty academic papers.  It turns out that she too is a constituent of mine, so I got the chance to meet her – and it was a very illuminating conversation.  I was left with a strong sense of the intellectual curiosity which drives her.

Arguably, the very establishment of the modern nation of Australia is a consequence of such scientific curiosity and fascination to explore interesting questions. The first objective of Cook’s expedition on the Endeavour, of course, was to visit Tahiti and observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun. 

His crew included the botanists Banks and Solander; when the ship sailed on to Australia in the second part of its mission, they enthusiastically took specimens of large numbers of plants and animals previously unknown to Western science. 

Recently I was in Townsville where I visited the Australian Tropical Herbarium at James Cook University. Amidst the extensive collection two specimens held pride of place: both had been collected by Banks during the Endeavour’s voyage, over two hundred and fifty years ago. 

Another recent visit was to the lab of Prof Glenn King at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland.  When he showed me a live scorpion inside a glass jar without a lid, I felt a little queasy. But there was nothing to worry about, he assured me: the scorpion cannot climb up the glass. 

Prof King clearly loves his scorpions – and his spiders and the many other creepy crawlies he studies.  As it happens there is a clear purpose to the work: by analysing the contents of the venoms these creatures inject into their victims, Prof King and his team are finding eco-friendly insecticides. 

But it was clear to me that he is simply fascinated by finding out more about these creatures and the scientific properties of their venoms.

That spirit of curiosity, of intellectual inquiry, of wanting to find the answers to fascinating questions, is at the core of science.  It was what motivated Joseph Banks and it is what motivates today’s scientists like Eddie Holmes and Patricia Selkirk and Glenn King.  Of course they want to see their work deliver beneficial outcomes for humanity – but before all that, they simply want to find answers to their questions. 

That is a fundamental human instinct – and it is a very good reason for educating students in STEM subjects.

Let me conclude, then, by saying that what you all do as STEM educators is fundamentally important. 

You are engaging and stimulating your students’ curiosity. You are equipping them with a level of knowledge about the fundamental scientific and technological underpinnings of so much of the advanced and prosperous society in which we are fortunate to live. 

And you are equipping at least some of them, should they choose, to take up further study in science as a pathway to helping answer questions which are fundamental to humanity’s future.

Thank you for the work you do and thank you for making me welcome here today.