Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales AU8 1 0 2014 U BRAR'lS. Volume 147 Parti Numbers 451 and 452 for the eraxaiiagsment of studies and investigations in Sdmce ArtlitmlL^ and Mosc^hy 5 The Royal Society of New South Wai.es Patrons President Vice Presidents Hon. Secretary (Ed.) Hon. Secretary (Gen.) Hon. Treasurer Hon. Librarian Councillors Southern Highlands Branch Rep. Central West Branch Chair Executive Office Office Bearers for 2014-201 5 Her Excellency The Honourable Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO Governor of the State of New South Wales. Dr Donald Hector BE(Chem) PhD (Syd) FIChemE FIEAust FAICD Mr John Hardie BSc (Syd), FGS, MACE MRSN Em. Prof. David Brynn Hibbert BSc PhD (Lond) CChem FRSC RACI FRSN Em. Prof. Heinrich Hora DipPhys Dr.rer.nat DSc FAIP FInstP CPhys FRSN Prof. Michael Burton BA MA MMaths (Cantab) PhD (Edinb) FASA FAIP FRSN Mr Colin Bradley BBus MA (Bus Res) MHA GAICD Mr Shakti Ram BComm (Macq) MBA (Deakin) CPA GAICD (vacant) Mr Erik Aslaksen Prof. Richard Banatd MD PhD FRSN Mr David Beale BSc(Tech) (NSW) FIEAust Dr Ragbir Bhathal PhD FSAAS Margaret Cameron LLB (Syd) Mr Brendon Hyde BE (Syd) MEngSc( NSW) MICE (Lon) FIEPak FIEAust CPEng Em. Prof Roy MacLeod AB (Harv) PhD, LittD (Cantab) FSA FAHA FASSA FHPIistS FRSN Dr Frederick Osman BSc (Hons) PhD (UWS) Grad Dip Ed FACE MAIP MRSN Mr Hub Regtop Judith Wheeldon AM, BS (Wis), Med (Syd), FACE, FAICD, FRSN Mr Clive Wilmot Ass. Prof. Maree Simpson BPharm (UQ) BSc(Hons) (Griffith) PhD (U Q) Ms Emma Dallas DipHR BComm (UWS) LLB (UWS) Editorial Board Prof. Michael Burton BA MA MMaths (Cantab) PhD (Edinb) FASA FAIP FRSN - Hon. Editor Dr David Branagan MSc PhD (Syd) DSc (Hon) (Syd) FGS Dr Donald Hector BE(Chem) PhD (Syd) FIChemE FIEAust FAICD Prof. David Brynn Hibbert BSc PhD (Lond) CChem FRSC RACI FRSN Dr Michael Lake BSc (Syd) PhD (Syd) Dr Nick Lomb BSc (Syd) PhD (Syd) FASA FRSA Prof. Bruce Warren MB BS (Syd) MA DPhil DSc (Oxon) FRCPath FRSN The Society traces it origin the Philosophical Society of Australasia founded in Sydney in 1821. The Society exists for “the encouragement of studies and investigations in Science Art Uterature and Philosophy publishing results of scientific investigations in its Journal and Proceedings; conducting monthly meetings; awarding prizes and medals; and by liaison with other learned societies within Australia and internationally. Membership is open to any person whose application is acceptable to the Society. Subscriptions for the Journal are also accepted. The Society welcomes, from members and non-members, manuscripts of research and review articles in all branches of science, art, literature and philosophy for publication in the Journal and Proceedings. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Volume 147 Parti Numbers 451 and 452 ‘ „ for the eneouiaganent of studies and investigations in Science Art literature and Riifosopliy ’ The Royal Society of New South Wales Patrons President Vice Presidents Hon. Secretary (Ed.) Hon. Secretary (Gen.) Hon. Treasurer Hon. Librarian Councillors Southern Highlands Branch Rep. Central West Branch Chair Executive Office Office Bearers for 2014-201 5 Her Excellency The Honourable Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO Governor of the State of New South Wales. Dr Donald Hector BE(Chem) PhD (Syd) FIChemE FIEAust FAICD Mr John Hardie BSc (Syd), FGS, MACE MRSN Em. Prof. David Brynn Hibbert BSc PhD (Lond) CChem FRSC RACI FRSN Em. Prof. Heinrich Hora DipPhys Dr.rer.nat DSc FAIP FInstP CPhys FRSN Prof. Michael Burton BA MA MMaths (Cantab) PhD (Edinb) FAS A FAIP FRSN Mr Colin Bradley BBus MA (Bus Res) MHA GAICD Mr Shakti Ram BComm (Macq) MBA (Deakin) CPA GAICD (vacant) Mr Erik Aslaksen Prof. Richard Banati MD PhD FRSN Mr David Beale BSc(Tech) (NSW) FIEAust Dr Ragbir Bhathal PhD FSAAS Margaret Cameron LLB (Syd) Mr Brendon Hyde BE (Syd) MEngSc( NSW) MICE (Lon) FIEPak FIEAust CPEng Em. Prof Roy MacLeod AB (Harv) PhD, LittD (Cantab) FSA FAHA FASSA FHHistS FRSN Dr Frederick Osman BSc (Hons) PhD (UWS) Grad Dip Ed FACE MAIP MRSN Mr Hub Regtop Judith Wheeldon AM, BS (Wis), Med (Syd), FACE, FAICD, FRSN Mr Clive Wilmot Ass. Prof. Maree Simpson BPharm (UQ) BSc(Hons) (Griffith) PhD (UQ) Ms Emma Dallas DipHR BComm (UWS) LLB (UWS) Editorial Board Prof. Michael Burton BA MA MMaths (Cantab) PhD (Edinb) FASA FAIP FRSN - Hon. Editor Dr David Branagan MSc PhD (Syd) DSc (Hon) (Syd) FGS Dr Donald Hector BE(Chem) PhD (Syd) FIChemE FIEAust FAICD Prof. David Brynn Hibbert BSc PhD (Lond) CChem FRSC RACI FRSN Dr Michael Lake BSc (Syd) PhD (Syd) Dr Nick Lomb BSc (Syd) PhD (Syd) FASA FRSA Prof. Bmce Warren MB BS (Syd) MA DPhil DSc (Oxon) FRCPath FRSN The Society traces it origin the Philosophical Society of Australasia founded in Sydney in 1821. The Society exists for “the encouragement of studies and investigations in Science Art Uterature and Philosophy : publishing results of scientific investigations in its Journal and Proceedings; conducting monthly meetings; awarding prizes and medals; and by liaison with other learned societies within Australia and internationally. Membership is open to any person whose application is acceptable to the Society. Subscriptions for the Journal are also accepted. The Society welcomes, from members and non-members, manuscripts of research and review articles in all branches of science, art, literature and philosophy for publication in the Journal and Proceedings. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales ISSN 0035-9173/14/01 journal and Proceedings of the Koyal Society of New South Wales , vol. 147, nos. 451 & 452, pp. 1 . ISSN 0035-9173/14/010001-1 Editorial I write this editorial from the high plateau of the Atacama desert of Chile. In this extreme environment, the driest on our planet outside of Antarctica, the view out to the cosmos is superlative. Nations have been flocking to the Altiplano over the past decade to build instruments capable of giving us new insights into our universe, ranging from investigating how stars form inside cold, dense cocoons of dust in interstellar space - and then somehow engender planetary systems, to seeking echoes from primordial fluctuations in the microwave background radiation that pervades all of space. When I am fortunate enough to set my telescope in operation, I am seeing a symphony in motion. The array of skills on display before me is truly magnificent — human insights into science and technology brought together in a engineering marvel that is a telescope and its instrumentation, all to allow me to seek faint signals from exotic molecules existing in environments which can barely be fathomed in the human experience, thousands of light years distant from us. When you have the privilege to conduct this orchestra, a masterpiece of the technological society we live in, it is hard to conceive that there is a parallel world out there where acceptance of science is waning, and belief systems rather than rational argument guide decision making for the human endeavour. Yet that is the world we live in. Many of the great challenges we face as a civilisation, such as global warming and the environment, require rational scientific thinking at their very heart to be tackled in a sensible manner. Increasingly, however, they are being given over to ideology and attacks on the scientific method that underlies our very understanding of them and our ability to address them. This was the subject of the Society’s Fellows Lecture this year, given by Distinguished Fellow Professor Barry Jones at the annual dinner. His lecture leads this edition. Volume 147—1 of the journal and Proceedings. It heads a healthy content list, followed by Professor Brynn Flibbert’s Mellor Lecture on the changing way in which scientists record their endeavours, and Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty in Conversation with Society President Donald Hector. Then follows Council member David Branagan extolling the endeavours the Renaissance writer Georgius Agricola, and papers from three of the Society’s student award winners for 2013: Jak Kelly award winner Xavier Zambrana-Puyalto on how to probe the nano-scale with light, and Society Scholarship winners Jessica Stanley on challenges in catalysis and developing sustainable processes, and John Chan informing us about the subject of biosimilars in medicine. I hope you enjoy reading these articles and sampling some of the worthy endeavours taking place today, guided indeed by the tenets taught us by the scientific method. Michael Burton Hon. Secretary (Editorial) June 1,2014 1 journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 147, nos. 451 & 452, pp. 2-10. ISSN 0035-9173/14/010002-10 Evidence, Opinion and Interest — the attack on scientific method 2014 Distinguished Fellows Lecture Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of New South Wales, The Union, University and Schools Club, 25 Bent St, Sydney, 7 May, 2014 Barry Jones AO, FAA, FAHA, FTSE, FASSA, FRSA, DistFRSN, FRSV, FACE Abstract Science and research generally are given disturbingly low priority in contemporary public life in Australia, although medical research and astronomy may be exceptions. Scientists, especially those involved with climate change, or the environment, have come under unprecedented attack, especially in the media, and the whole concept of scientific method is discounted, even ridiculed. In a complex world, people seem to be looking for simple solutions that can be expressed as slogans, and the quality of public debate on scientific issues has been trivialised, even infantilised. The controversy on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been conducted at an appalling level on both sides of politics. (Debates on refugees and taxation have been conducted at a similar level.) Vaccination, fluoridation and even evolution are hody, but crudely, disputed in some areas. Despite Australia’s large number of graduates (more than 4,000,000), our 38 universities and intellectual class generally have very limited political leverage and appear reluctant to offend government or business by telling them what they do not want to hear. Universities have become trading corporations, not just communities of scholars. Their collective lobbying power seems to be weak, well behind the gambling, coal or junk food lobbies and they become easy targets in times of exaggerated Budget stringency. Paradoxically, the Knowledge Revolution has been accompanied by a persistent ‘dumbing down’, with ICT reinforcing the personal and immediate, rather than the complex, long-term and remote. In a democratic society such as Australia, evidence is challenged by opinion and by vested- or self- interest. Australia has no dedicated Minister for Science with direct ownership/ involvement in promoting scientific disciplines. If every vote in Australian elections is of equal value, does this mean that every opinion is entitled to equal respect? It is easy to categorise experts as elitists, and out of touch. There are serious problems in recruiting science teachers, and numbers of undergraduates in the enabling sciences and mathematics are falling relative to our neighbours. In an era of super- specialisation, many scientists are reluctant to engage in debate, even where their discipline has significant intersectoral connections. Science has some outstanding Australian advocates, Gus Nossal, Peter Doherty, Ian Chubb, Fiona Stanley, Robert May, Brian Schmidt, Ian Frazer, Mike Archer among them, but they lack the coverage that is needed and that they deserve. There is a disturbing lack of community curiosity about our long term future, with an apparent assumption that consumption patterns will never change. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’ W. B. Y eats, "The S econd Coming \ 1919. 2 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture What am I doing here? I was Australia’s longest serving Science Minister (1983-90), I think, in part, because nobody else wanted the job. Before and after that period I have maintained an intense interest in science / research and its implications for public policy and politics generally. I have often been asked about how I came to be so heavily involved in Science policy and thinking about Australia’s future, so let me begin with some personal reflections. From childhood, I was deeply involved, obsessed even, in the history and philosophy of science and read HG Wells, JBS Haldane and Julian Huxley avidly. Jules Verne, too. These names, so important to me then, may be unfamiliar now. I tried to apply much of what I had learned about science in my political career, such as it was. Despite having been a Member of State and Commonwealth Parliaments for 26 years, and a Minister for seven, I left politics with a profound sense of frustration and unease. Political colleagues saw me as too individual and idiosyncratic, totally lacking in the killer instinct, while many in the academic community might have seen me as too political, even too populist. My book Sleepers, Wake! was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, 32 years ago, and its success, both here and internationally, mystified and irritated many of my colleagues. It went through 26 impressions and was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and Braille. Three decades on, my central thesis stands up pretty well. My major fault was in being too cautious about the speed and impact of change. But in trying to predict the social, economic and personal impact of technological change, in 1 982 I was Robinson Crusoe. I’ll amend that in case you have not read Daniel Defoe: I’ll say, ‘I was on my own’. Also, in politics, and in most other areas of life, nobody likes to be reminded: ‘I told you so’. In politics, my timing was appalling. In October 1985 when I became the first, and, so far, only Australian Minister invited to address a G7 Conference, in Canada, the reaction of my colleagues was not celebration but irritation — "Why him?’ I kept raising issues long before their significance was recognised. That made me, not a prophet, but an isolated nerd. I can claim to have put six or seven issues on the national agenda, but I started talking about them 10 > 15 > 20 years before audiences, and my political colleagues, were ready to listen. In politics, timing is (almost) everything and the best time to raise an issue is about ten minutes before its importance becomes blindingly obvious. The issues were: (i) Post-industrialism: the sharp decline in manufacturing as an employment sector due to the globalisation of markets and revolutionary changes in production techniques, leading to a sharp reduction in labour demand. 3 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture (ii) Information Revolution - transition to digital society / economy, with the development of low-cost personal computing, new ICT tools, and the development of the Internet, WWW and social networking. (iii) Global Warming / Climate Change. I began talking about climate change, the impact of greenhouse gases and the human contribution to their production as Minister for Science, in 1984, so I have form in this matter. My timing — being far too early — was a major mistake. In March 1989 I spoke at a Conference in London, at the invitation of Mrs Thatcher, when A1 Gore and I were the keynote speakers. (iv) Antarctica. I argued for the need to preserve it for science, as a global climate laboratory. (v) Biotechnology. I was fascinated by the implications of the DNA revolution and seized the opportunity to have discussions with some of the great figures in the genetic revolution, Crick, Watson, Perutz, Sanger. (vi) Heritage. This involves trying to understand our history, places, environment and social context, and I worked on this area at UNESCO in Paris, on and off, between 1991 and 1996. (vii) ‘The Third Age.’ The social, economic and political implications of the steady increase in longevity, especially since the 1950s, in which there has been a two and a half year increase in life expectancy for each decade of elapsed time. I worked on social policies for an ageing society in Cambridge in 2000 and 2001. I was also heavily involved in securing the abolition of capital punishment in Australia, reviving the Australian film industry and attempting to promote creativity in education. My repertoire has been broad (even shallow) rather than deep and specialised. But I’m not bad at making connections - joining the dots’, to use the current cliche. The role of Science in policy development is a sensitive issue, because I have spent years, decades really, bashing my head against a brick wall trying to persuade colleagues to recognise the importance, even centrality, of Science policy. Science and research generally are given disturbingly low priority in contemporary public life in Australia, although medical research and astronomy may be exceptions. Scientists, especially those involved with climate change, or the environment, have come under unprecedented attack, especially in the media, and the whole concept of scientific method is discounted, even ridiculed. In a complex world, people seem to be looking for simple solutions that can be expressed as slogans, and the quality of public debate on scientific issues has been trivialised, even infantdlised. Gus Nossal sometimes quotes me as saying that Australia must be the only country in the world where the word academic is treated as pejorative. Many, probably most, of my political colleagues had no interest in science as an intellectual discipline, although they depended on science for their health, nutrition, transport, entertainment and communication. When I was Minister for Science, one of my Caucus colleagues, who later succeeded me in that role, took me to a demonstration of a perpetual motion machine in his home state. 4 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture an invention which, he argued, would radically reduce the cost of living and manufacturing. I saw the demonstration but was not persuaded. My colleague was deeply disappointed by my scepticism. He asked why I dismissed the project. I said, Well, it can’t be valid because it is in breach of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’. My colleague responded, We should repeal it.’ I was saddened that in all the tributes to Neville Wran in the past fortnight, there was no recognition of the five years he spent as Chair of CSIRO (1986-91). I took this as a confirmation of how far science has fallen off the political agenda. As you are all well aware, currently Australia has no dedicated Minister for Science, although the title is a letterhead filler for the Minister for Industry. Research, including the ARC, is part of the responsibility of the Minister for Education, and the NH&MRC is under the Minister for Health. The recent National Commission of Audit characterised research as an expense, not an investment. The Commission might have regarded Wi-Fi, developed in the course of pure research by CSIRO, as a self-indulgent extravagance. The lack of a dedicated Science Minister means that nobody in Government takes on personal ownership of science and acts as its advocate in Cabinet. Science, Complexity and the Common-sense View of the World There are major problems about explaining some of the issues in science, and has been ever since science began. Some fundamental scientific discoveries seem to be counterintuitive, challenging direct observation or our common-sense view of the world. Common sense, and direct observation, tells us that the Earth is flat, that the Sun (like the Moon) rotates around the earth and that forces don’t operate at a distance. Aristotle with his encyclopaedic — but often erroneous — grasp of natural phenomena, was a compelling authority in support of a geocentric universe, and that the seat of reason was in the heart, not the brain, and that females were deformed males. His views were dominant for 1500 years. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy, following Aristotle, provided ingenious proofs in support of geocentrism. Then along came Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler who said, "Your common sense observation is wrong. The orbits of the Sun and Moon are completely different, although they appear to similar.’ (Our use of the terms ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ preserves the Ptolemaic paradigm.) By the 20th Century, electronics enabled us to use forces at a distance, do thousands of things remotely, manipulating spacecraft and satellites, or receiving signals (radio, telephony, television), setting alarms, opening garage doors and, one of the great labour saving devices, the remote switch for television. The most obvious disjunction between science and common sense is the question: ‘Right now, are we at rest or in motion?’ Common sense and direct observation suggests that we are at rest. 5 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture But science says, "Wrong again. We are moving very rapidly. The earth is spinning on its axis at a rate of 1669 kph at the equator, and in Sydney (33.5°S) at 1388 kph. We are also orbiting round the Sun even faster, at nearly 30 kps, or 107,200 kph. There are further motions, harder to measure, as the universe expands — and it’s speeding up, as our Nobel Physics Laureate, Brian Schmidt, postulates. But, sitting here in Sydney, it is hard to grasp that we are in motion, kept in place by gravity. Psychology resists it — and essentially we have to accept the repudiation of common sense on trust, because somebody in a white coat says, "Trust me, I’m a scientist.’ I would challenge anyone to reconcile common sense and quantum theory or to satisfactorily explain the Higgs boson or — hardest of all — to define gravity, although I suspect that Michelle Simmons could have made a credible attempt. Scientific/ Analytical Method Scientific method, rational analysis and evaluation of evidence has been a central factor in defining Western society and culture since the Renaissance, and these skills can be / should be applied to a variety of disciplines - politics, law, economics, social sciences, health. Scientists have come under unprecedented and damaging attack arising from the climate change controversy. We must distinguish between scientific scepticism (a central element in testing evidence, for example Karl Popper’s falsifiability test) and cynicism (dismissing evidence, however compelling, to promote confusion, inaction or vested interest.) Scientific vocations are falling in Australia, and this has important implications for our future economic and scientific capacity. Governments have an obligation to take up and understand the challenges raised by science, reach a national consensus in promoting the importance of science in our national life, encourage investment in science- based processes and products for which there is international demand. Political processes work on an assumption of common, or shared, knowledge — and this may be more fragile than we are prepared to recognise. Robyn Williams of ABC Radio National’s Science Show tells the horror story of addressing an audience of teachers — I should emphasise, not science teachers — some years ago when he asked, ‘How many of you have never eaten food with DNA in it?’ More than half the audience put up its hands. The debate on climate change, especially anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has been a particularly disturbing illustration of how ill-equipped we seem to be in conducting serious debate and employing experimental method. There are three areas of attack against expertise and taking a long term, analytical view of the world — from the Right, the Left and the anxious Centre. From the Right there have been systematic and well-financed attacks by lobbyists from the minerals industry generally, especially coal and oil, and electricity generators. This has been highly personal, often abusive, sometimes threatening. The anxious Centre includes people working in a particular industries and particular regions (Hunter Valley, La Trobe Valley, Tasmanian 6 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture forests), understandably fearful of potential job losses, without much prospect of creating new jobs. The trade union movement is deeply divided on this - as is the business community. But from the Left, or some segments of the intellectual left, a deconstructionist mind-set has partly undermined an evidence-based approach to policy making or problem solving. The pluralist or deconstructionist, or post modern, theory of knowledge is contemptuous of expertise, rejects the idea of hierarchies of knowledge and asserts the democratic mantra that — as with votes in elections — every opinion is of equal value, so that if you insist that the earth is flat, reject vaccination for children or deny that HIV- AIDS is transmitted by virus, your view should be treated with respect. Similarly, there has been a rejection of expertise and or taste — rejecting the idea of people like Harold Bloom, or me, that there is a Western canon’ which sets benchmarks. No, say the deconstructionists, the paintings of Banksy, the mysterious British graffiti artist, are just as good as Raphael, that hip-hop performances are just as valid as Beethoven’s Opus 131. Evidence vs. Opinion There is a disturbing conflict between evidence vs. opinion (“You have evidence, but I have strong opinions.’) and political processes tend to be driven by opinion rather than evidence in a short political cycle. The Cambridge political scientist David Runciman argues that ‘opinion, interest and knowledge are too divided, and no event, whether an election ... or a crisis is clear enough in its meaning to bring closure’. Creationism vs. evolution, the age of the earth (Genesis vs. geology), smoking as a cause of lung cancer, the safety of vaccination and fluoridation, whether HIV-AIDS is transmitted by virus, ‘alternative medicine’, controversies about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, the Kennedy assassinations, the survival of Elvis, even the historical truth of the Holocaust, are all examples of recent controversies which promote a confusionist mind-set and earn some people more attention than they deserve. The Welsh geneticist Steve Jones asks an important question: If there is a division of scientific opinion, with 999 on one side, and one on the other, how should the debate be handled? Should the one dissenter be given 500 opportunities to speak? Scientists are not immune from vanity, and some dissenters on climate change have been encouraged by being told: ‘The most important scientific factor in the climate change debate happens to be your area of expertise. Everyone else has it wrong. Only you are right’. There has been a sustained attack from some quarters on scientific research and scientific method, even on rationality and the Enlightenment tradition. The illusion was created that scientists are cormpt, while lobbyists are pure. One of the false assertions is that scientists who take the mainstream position are rewarded, while dissenters are punished (similar to Galileo and the Inquisition). In Australia and the United States the contrary could be argued. Scientists arguing for the mainstream view have been subject to strong attack by denialists who assert that they are quasi- religious zealots who are missionaries for a 7 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture green religion. In reality, it was the denialist / confusionist position to rely on faith, the conviction that there were a diversity of complex reasons for climate change but only one could be confidently rejected: the role of human activity. The Infantilis ation of Debate Australia, like the US, UK, Canada and much of Europe, has undergone a serious decline in the quality of debate on public policy. The British journalist Robert Fisk has called this ‘the infantilisation of debate’. Just over 1,015,000 people (about 900,000 of them locals) are currently studying at Australian universities, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Australia has 4,000,000 graduates, far more than the total numbers of traditional blue collar workers. Inevitably these numbers will shift our political culture, but the process is occurring slowly. Members of trade unions amount to about one million people — 18 per cent of the total work force and about 12 per cent of the private sector. Currently we are, by far, the best educated cohort in our history — on paper, anyway — but it is not reflected in the quality of our political discourse. We appear to be lacking in courage, judgment, capacity to analyse or even simple curiosity, except about immediate personal needs. In the era of ‘spin’, when a complex issue is involved, leaders do not explain, they find a mantra (‘Stop the boats!’) and repeat it endlessly, ‘staying on message’, without explanation or qualification. The word ‘because’ seems to have fallen out of the political lexicon. The killer punch against the Knowledge Nation Report produced in 2001 was the notorious ‘complexity diagram’, all my own work. The decisive argument against the document was to say, ‘But it’s too complex’. Well, yes, indeed, that was the whole point of a complexity diagram. An unexpected result of the ICT Revolution has been the development of social media, personal / self-referential, immediate, material, trivial — the smart phone as the ‘new best friend’, a love object in itself. ICT provides access to the universe with its astounding diversity, but observation of its users suggests that the personal has displaced the universal. The eminent science writer James Gleick in his Vaster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (2000) calculated that in the United States the average time taken by a politician to complete his/her answer to a question on television was 8.2 seconds. I suspect that in Australia it would be longer — closer to 10 seconds. There is fierce opposition in some quarters to the vaccination of children and the fluoridation of water supplies to prevent dental caries, even though the empirical evidence in support of both is overwhelming. But appeals to fear can be far more powerful than arguing on the basis of hard evidence. Evidence-based policies and actions should be a central principle in the working of our system and reliance on populism and sloganeering should be rejected, but in reality they are not. There was a very disturbing debate on climate change between Prof. Ross Garnaut and Clive Palmer on the ABC’s Tateline program on Friday 4 April, and you can view it for yourselves, if you can bear it, on YouTube. Ross Garnaut, an outstanding economist, was 8 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture author of the Gamaut Climate Change Review1, an encyclopaedic work. But the debaters had no common ground. Prof Garnaut relied on evidence. Clive Palmer despite, or even because of, his vested interest as a coal miner, kept repeating the same mantra, over and over again, and never addressed the complex argument that Prof. Garnaut advanced. I suspect that many viewers, even late night viewers of the ABC, might have found Palmer’s argument simpler to follow and to have been turned off by complexity, however compelling the evidence. Tackling complex problems will demand complex solutions (e.g. refugees, climate change) which cannot be reduced to parroting a few simple slogans (‘turn back the boats’, ‘stop this toxic tax’.). ‘Retail politics’, sometimes called ‘transactional politics’, where policies are adopted not because they are right but because they can be sold, is a dangerous development and should be rejected. We must maintain confidence that major problems can be addressed — and act accordingly. Revive the process of dialogue: explain, explain, explain, rejecting mere sloganeering and populism. We need evidence-based policies but often evidence lacks the psychological carrying power generated by appeals to prejudice or fear of disadvantage (‘They are robbing you...’). A voracious media looks for diversity and emotional engagement, weakening capacity for reflection and serious analysis, compounded by the rise of social media where users, typically, seek reinforcement of their views rather than being challenged by diversity. Score Card Australia ranks next to Norway on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), taking account of life expectancy, years of education and gross national income. There is a long list of positives in our national history: democratic parliaments, free elections, probably the world’s best electoral system (the Western Australian Senate poll in 2013 notwithstanding), pioneers of the secret ballot and universal suffrage, strong legal system with internationally respected courts, tradition of religious tolerance (although it could, in part, be indifference), secular education (but with some limits), good research (universities and CSIRO), excellent medical standards, superior public service, the ABC, courageous disaster relief. But there are negatives as well: the long tradition of Aboriginal dispossession, burying their history, using them as quasi slave labour (and even worse), extraordinary rates of incarceration and domestic violence, brutality in the convict system (especially Norfolk and Sarah Islands) and the racism implicit in the White Australia Policy. There has been a strong vein of authoritarianism in our system, often covered by the explanation, ‘we are doing it for their own good’, a rigidity, harshness, cruelty, even sadism in institutions - armed forces, churches, schools, orphanages. Churches, Parliaments, political parties, corporations, the media are all provoking community disquiet, with histories of corruption, suppression, secrecy and violence. The current Royal Commission about child sexual abuse presents evidence with a horrifying consistency. Treatment of asylum seekers shows unconscionable (but bipartisan) harshness. Vested interest is far easier to promote and secure than community interest. We also have had a poor record in securing economic rights for women, discouraging 1 Written in 2008; see www.gamautreview.oig.au. 9 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture them from entering public life or the professions, our uncritical involvement in foreign wars and our acquiescence and credulity in the surveillance state. Scientists and learned societies have been punching below their weight in matters of public policy, and they have advanced many reasons to avoid being involved in controversies outside their disciplines, the possible threats to grants being among them. We have distinguished scientists who are outstanding advocates, including Gus Nossal, Peter Doherty, Ian Chubb, Fiona Stanley, Robert May, Brian Schmidt, Ian Frazer, Mike Archer, Tim Flannery, Dick Denton being among them. Science must be at the core of our national endeavour and you are well placed to examine the evidence, evaluate it, then advocate and persuade. Our nation’s future depends on the quality of its thinking, and its leaders. I encourage you, whatever your political persuasion, or lack of it, to argue for higher recognition of the role that science must play in our future, and drive your MP mad unless or until he/ she does something about it. Remember Archimedes and his lever. But first you have to find a fulcrum, then you push the lever. Sustained attacks on the mainstream scientific arguments for the need to take action to mitigate anthropogenic climate change have been from groups which could more accurately be described as ‘confiisionists’, than ‘deniers’ or even ‘sceptics’. The opponents do not analyse the evidence and advance alternate hypotheses which are themselves testable: their main goal is to promote confusion. To confiisionists, persuading citizens to conclude ‘I just don’t understand’ is a very satisfactory outcome. The international community readily accepted the argument that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) used as propellants in aerosol sprays were depleting the ozone layer, although their volume as a percentage of the atmosphere is infinitesimal compared to CO2 and methane. This is in striking contrast to the combination of fury, hysteria and mendacity against the evidence of global warming. The explanation is that in the case of CFCs every chemical company was convinced that there were economic advantages in getting in first with HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons) as an alternative propellant, and that substitutes for CFCs could be adopted without economic dislocation and changes in consumption. But to much of the fossil fuel industry the global warming challenge is a fight to the death. Publications by climate change denialists / sceptics mostly fall into two categories, knockabout polemic (mostly ad hominern) and objectors to a particular point of detail. The publications do not appear in refereed journals which suggests sharply alternative explanations - (i) that the material is not credible, testable or evidence-based, or, (ii) that there is a conspiracy by a scientific Mafia to suppress dissent. (Denialists are strongly drawn to the second alternative). Both Whitlam and Keating emphasised the importance of high culture. Other than Malcolm Turnbull, nobody does now. There is a strong anti-intellectual flavour in public life, sometimes described as philistine or — more commonly — Bogan, which leads to a reluctance to engage in complex or sophisticated argument and analysis of evidence. 10 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Jones — Fellows Lecture Paradoxically, the age of the Information Revolution, which should have been an instrument of personal liberation and an explosion of creativity, has been characterised by domination of public policy by managerialism, replacement of ‘the public good’ by ‘private benefit’, the decline of sustained critical debate on issues leading to gross oversimplification, trivialisation, the relentless ‘dumbing down’ in mass media, linked with the cult of celebrity, substance abuse and retreat into the realm of the personal, and the rise of fundamentalism and an assault on reason. The Knowledge Revolution ought to have been a countervailing force: in practice it has been the vector of change. Media — old and new — is partly to blame. Revolutionary changes in IT may be even more important, where we can communicate very rapidly, for example on Twitter, in ways that are shallow and non-re flective. Advocacy and analysis has largely dropped out of politics and been replaced by marketing and sloganeering. Politicians share the blame as well, as consenting adults. In the film Wadjda (2012), the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, directed by Haifaa al Mansour, a woman, the central character, an eleven year old girl with aspirations towards modernity and individual expression, has set her heart on acquiring a bicycle, but this proposition arouses fierce opposition. In Saudi Arabia, it appears to be a known fact that girls who ride bicycles are incapable of bearing children. No evidence is provided but the opinion is strongly held. In the end, Wadjda gets her green bike but the difficulties she faced were comparable to those experienced by the director herself. I have proposed my own variation on Pascal’s celebrated wager on the existence of God, set out in his Pensees , and applied it to climate change, as a way of evaluating the risk of global action vs. non-action about reducing greenhouse gas emissions: • If we take action and disaster is averted, there will be massive avoidance of human suffering. • If we take action and the climate change problem abates for other reasons, little is lost and the world benefits from a cleaner environment. • If we fail to act and disaster results, then massive suffering will have been aggravated by stupidity. • If we do not take action and there is no disaster, the outcome will be due to luck alone, like an idiot winning the lottery. 11 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 147, nos. 451 & 452, pp. 12-23. ISSN 0035-9173/14/0100012-12 Experiences with LabTrove, a researcher-centric ELN: undergraduate possibilities and Twitter Mellor Lecture of the UNSW Chemical Society Delivered on 9 May 2014 D. Brynn Hibbert School of Chemistry, UNSW Australia, Sydney, Australia E-mail: b.hibbert@,unsw.edu.au Twitter: @beardedchemist Abstract Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) are progressively replacing the traditional paper books for recording of data and scientific reasoning in commercial research establishments and academic institutions, albeit not at UNSW Australia. The LabTrove ELN was designed and developed at Southampton University as an open source, web-based, recording system that is researcher-centric and can be tailored to meets the needs of individuals as well as entire research groups. The LabTrove system also ensures appropriate levels of security, and captures the meta-information necessary to establish reliable provenance. It is designed to promote cross-institutional collaborative working, to enable the sharing of procedures and results, and to facilitate publication. LabTrove is being used in a heterogeneous set of academic laboratories around the world. At UNSW Brynn Hibbert’s group has used, in part or in whole, this ELN. An Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC, now OLT) grant allowed the development of a collaborative ELN for undergraduate analytical experiments. With the Universities of Sydney, Curtin, Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Southampton (UK) experiments were developed and tested that involved students from pairs of institutions, sharing data and interpretations but being assessed in their own departments. As an example of the use of social media in chemical education, Twitter has been used as a channel of communication between lecturer and audience of 500 + first year undergraduate students. During the Mellor lecture feedback from the audience was solicited by a running monitor of a Twitter hashtag (#mellor2014) projected on a screen. Tweets from Sweden and other locations were accepted during the lecture. 1. Introduction Professor David P. Mellor (1903-1980) was Head of the School of Chemistry at UNSW from 1956 to 1968, having spent 26 years at the University of Sydney, followed by 14 years as Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at UNSW. His research interests were mainly concerned with the properties and structures of metal complex compounds. He also made considerable contributions to chemical education at the secondary and tertiary levels. David Mellor was President of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1941. Since 1960 UNSW has been active in developing new approaches to the teaching of chemistry within secondary schools through 12 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert — Mellor Lecture its summer schools, the proceedings of which were published in the Approach to Chemistry series, including the commercially published Chemical Data Book (Blackman and Gahan, 2013). Using the royalties from these publications, the David Mellor Chemical Education Fund was established in recognition of the contributions made by Professor Mellor in the field of chemical education. The Fund is used to endow the Mellor Lecture and Medal. This Fund is administered by the University, with the involvement of the UNSW Chemical Society in the organization of the visiting lecturers. Fig. 1: David P aver Mellor (1903 - 1980). Professor Hibbert was the first Mellor medallist from UNSW. A list of Mellor lecturers and medallists is given in Table 1. 2. Recording of Science It may no longer be fashionable to discuss the Scientific Method, or even to explain it to our students, but it must form the basis of any approach to recording and disseminating what we scientists do. The on-line Oxford Dictionary (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014) defines scientific method as: "A method of procedure that has characterised natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing and modification of hypotheses .” Table 1: Mellor lecturers and medallists of the UNSW Chemical Society Date Lecturer Institution 1972 1974 L.E. Strong J.H. Wotiz Earlham College Southern Illinois University University of 1975 D.M. Adams Leicester 1979 D.R. Stranks University of Adelaide McMaster University 1980 R.J . Gillespie 1981 A. University of Kornhauser Ljubljana 1983 P.J. Fensham Monash University 1984 P. Sykes Cambridge University 1987 A.H. University of Johnstone C.A. Russell Glasgow The Open University 1995 1998 T.E. Goodwin Hendrix College 1999 B. Selinger Australian National University University of Cambridge 2003 S. Warren 2008 L. Sydnes University of Bergen 2014 D. B. Hibbert UNSW Australia The results of the application of the scientific method are communicated to the world, and this is how we scientists are known. However from the start of the ‘formulation of 13 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert - Mellor Lecture hypotheses’ we need to document what we do. Not only to provide a historical record, perhaps one day for the Nobel Prize committee, or to establish our patent rights, or to ward off later investigations into scientific fraud, but to get our own thoughts in order and provide a narrative for our research. The paragons of recording their science, according to Bird, Willoughby and Frey (Bird et al., 2013) and starting with Leonardo da Vinci, through Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein (and others) kept diary style notebooks. Paper was the only medium available, and paper was also the means for communicating with fellow scientists, either by personal letter or by publication in a learned journal. Data, obtained by observation and experiment, was also directly recorded in the notebook, as was information derived by analysis of that data. So Faraday had his notebooks, and indeed I had mine. I managed my three-year PhD with just two, and a third for theory. Last year (2013) the School of Chemistry stores at UNSW issued 400 laboratory notebooks at a cost of A$5600 which gives two to three books for each researcher per year. (About 130 PhD and honours were in the School in 2013). Modern instrumental science, and this is certainly true of analytical chemistry, generates results at a great pace. Because of this, I believe it is evident that the trusty lab notebook has run out of pages to record all the data, and unfortunately we seem to have finished up with the worst of all worlds — we no longer can fit the reams of printed out spectra, graphs and so on between the blue covers, and of course cannot use them to store the ‘raw data’, but neither are we writing there the hypotheses, observations and inferences that are the core of the scientific method. To go from an experiment to what is revealed to a supervisor in a research group meeting is these days a long and drawn out process: Instrument — *■ raw data on instrument’s computer transformed data (proprietary software, spreadsheet) on student’s computer — * printed out graphs or transcribed numbers in student’s notebook — > and presented in PowerPoint. What is finally shown by the student to her peers is highly selected (by the student) and not (easily) traceable to original results. Files on the student’s computer are often not adequately backed up, or even decently indexed, and a consultation with the student can be a frustrating wait while folder after folder on their hard disk is searched through. A polite enquiry after, for example, a control experiment, can result in a panic trawl through files, or bland assurances that this has been done somewhere, and they will find it for you later. Since the US Supreme Court passed rules accepting electronic records as equivalent to paper records in 2006, the headlong charge to the use of ELNs has been led by the patent juggernaut, which of course features many big chemical companies. In a review of ELN use, Phillips is quoted by Bird (Bird et al., 2013) as suggesting that the distinction between companies and academia is that large companies typically use ELNs to standardize quality control or establish a legal data trail; while academic labs use them to gain searchable access to, and then share, data. She identifies one of the greatest problems faced by an academic group is the turnover of personnel, resulting in an almost impossible task of retrieving data from only a few years 14 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert — Mellor Lecture back. The ability to share data also has implications outside a group/ laboratory/ department/ university, more of which later. 2.1 Practicalities In 2014 we are spoiled for choice. There are app ELNs, cloud ELNs, ones aimed at companies, ones aimed at data intensive research groups, and so on. In 2009 the analytical chemistry group of the School of Chemistry at UNSW started using the LabTrove ELN2 because it was developed by a colleague and collaborator from Southampton University, Jeremy Frey, and he gave it to them for free. Luckily the company they spun out has thrived, and the product is still supported by academics. But in 2009 not all the attendant and required technology was in place. When the School of Chemistry started using the ELN there were no real smart phones as such (the 2G Blackberry was all the rage) and certainly no tablet computers. Voice or even handwriting recognition software was hardly viable. The final killer, at the time, was the lack of a ubiquitous wireless network. So students tended to use the ELN off line, and while the physical cutting and pasting of instrumental output also must be done back in the office, there was never a wide uptake of the ELN. Many of these issues are much improved, but the bottom line always appears to be the social and local political aspects, with resistance to change coming from all levels of a laboratory, from the students upwards. Perhaps Bird and Frey got it right when they wrote last year: “ Unfortunately the evangelists are frequently not the same individuals that will be creating the data and recording their work in the 2 See http: / /' wwwlab trove.org/ (Accessed 13 May 2014) electronic laboratory notebooks” (Bkd and Frey, 2013). (In the lecture delivered on 9 May 2014, a comment followed on proposals from the Australian Federal Government on the funding of higher education and the suggestion that the tertiary sector be deregulated. It is not reproduced here.) Fig. 2: The front page of the ELN used by the author’s group. (Image taken 5 May 2014) We left the direct scientific descendent of Michael Faraday, Brynn Hibbert, doing his PhD in London’s King’s College in 1973, writing in his lab note book without so much as a spreadsheet or printout. He visited the Royal Institution as Daniell (first professor of chemistry at King’s College, and one of the founders of the delightfully named “Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge”) would have visited Michael Faraday there. Not much had changed from a hundred or so years before, with data being largely recorded by hand. Sure he had spectra, assuming the ink in the pen of the chart recorder drawing out the trace had not congealed, but most data were measurements made point by point. The other aspect of science that had not changed was that communication was by physical letter, and publication by book and paper written for a journal. 15 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wat.es Hibbert - Mellor Lecture Now, in 2014, for scientists, publication in a journal (paper or on line) is still the preferred mechanism for enabling wider access to their material and providing the appropriate recognition for their work, although such publication does not constitute a full archival record, and many authors have pointed out the shortcomings of a paper-based mode of making scientific results available (Bartling and Friesike, 2014). Communication in general, though, is wider and faster, invariably electronic and often broadcast. With these possibilities for instant peer-to-peer interaction we have the decision to make about how open we will be with our ideas and knowledge. Indeed in a discussion (Gezelter, 2011) of the definition of ‘open science’ "... the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery procesi\ the point is made that journals are 17th / 18th century technology for sharing scientific discoveries and today, we should be able to do better. Much discussed in the literature is the ‘collaboratory’, defined in 1993 by Wulf as a: "... centre without walls, in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resource, and accessing information in digital libraries (National Research Council, 1993). To what extent this is achievable or desirable, may be debated, but it does now open up the discussion of the real role of the ELN, that of communication. So I have finally arrived at my point. An electronic laboratory notebook has the capacity for immediate open access and sharing. There are many other benefits of security, metadata and audit trails, but in my view the possibility of throwing open the lab doors and allowing the world to help, is the most revolutionary aspect of the ELN, and why no one feels they can go there yet, or at all. The School of Chemistry ELN can be set to allow access by everyone, no one or anyone. If we look at an ELN post, it allows comments to be added — very useful for the supervisor to comment on the fly, but this has much wider possibilities. Access is usually restricted to the immediate research group. When we set it up I (as group leader) hoped there would also be student-to-student interaction, and while there are some examples student-to-student posting has not become widely used. But wouldn’t it be nice if on posting the results of today’s experiments a comment appeared tomorrow from another group around the world with a new idea, or simply some encouraging words? I cannot help but remember the Djerassi and Hoffmann play “Oxygen” (which I saw at an IUPAC General Assembly 2001) that explored the question “who discovered oxygen”? Every English scientist is brought up to know Priestley as the discoverer because of his work “Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air”. But he visited Lavoisier (who named the new gas oxygen and worked out why it was not de-phlogisticated air) in 1774, only to receive a letter from Carl Wilhelm Scheele also describing experiments on the production of oxygen, but from the previous year. It appears communication between people came first (letters and visits) with publication somewhat later. The question of discovery may have been asked at the time (of course Lavoisier was soon busy having his head chopped off), but it seems now a modern fascination of who got there first, rather than why ‘there’ is important. The time it took to evolve Darwin’s “On the origin of species”, or in my field the posthumous publication of Bayes’ paper on “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chance”, suggested our forebears had understood the 16 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert - Mellor Lecture importance of real communication, not just having another paper in the publication list. And if you see where this is leading, the position of the formally-submitted and reviewed and published paper is perhaps under threat, as now being an obstacle to scientific progress. At one end the monograph or lengthy review article will always be needed, and at the other the Nature letter fantastic discovery is more and more electronic first anyway, but what of the interminable number of papers churned out after careful, or not so careful, peer review, simply to document the filling in of gaps in an evolving field? Is there a better way of compiling this knowledge, giving due credit to its originators, than in papers whose main text hardly has sufficient details to allow reproduction of the experiments, but more and more voluminous supplementary material is filling in some of the gaps. Do we have to have the formulaic introduction that is cut and pasted from paper to paper in a series, or the reference to a method that, if you can find it, turns out not be able to be followed? I argue that we now have the means to put in place these new, instant, modes of communication of science, and here I am just echoing people like Cameron Neylon and our own Matt Todd from Sydney. I shall conclude this tirade with a quote: “[the Review would urge]. . . all scientists to learn to communicate their work in ways that the public can access and understand; and to be open in providing the information that will enable the debate, wherever it occurs, to be conducted objectively .” (Russell, 2010) Why this comment is significant is because it is from the Independent Climate Change E- mail Review, occasioned by some unfortunate language about scientific results in internal emails between climate scientists. That is, we must always “show the working” (Hulme and Ravetz, 2009). I learned yesterday (8 May 2014) from Matt Todd, that they have lodged a copy of the relevant posts of an ELN as supporting information for a research paper that is being submitted for publication to a journal. The snapshot (once unzipped) can be browsed, and contains all the relevant experimental data from the original "live" electronic laboratory notebook (Badiola and Todd, 2014). Finally, UNSW is not without its research scandals (thankfully not so many) and I cannot help but think experiments properly captured in an ELN might have saved, certainly the Faculty of Medicine, some pain. 3. Extensions and Additions The LabTrove ELN used at UNSW (Fig. 2) is a web-based highly-linked blog, with layers of metadata. There is not much else to the basic blog page. Files can be attached, and now, through the ANDS-funded ACData project (Fig. 3) it is possible to blog results directly from instruments in the Analytical Centre and some electrochemical instruments in our labs. Fig. 3: A page from the UNSW repository of instrumental data, ACData. (Accessed 13 May 2014) The original driver for this was to satisfy government archiving rules, but it also helps (forces) experimenters to organise their work (Project/ Experiment/ Batch/ Run), and naturally fits with the ELN concept. Those 17 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert — Mellor Lecture who submitted ARC Discovery proposals this year might have wondered what the formula text was for the section “Management of Data”, which reads “UNSW has implemented a data storage solution for every stage in the life cycle of a research project”. Well, ACData is a big part of this for chemistry, and using an ELN makes it easier. Hopefully ACData fulfils the observation of Huynh-Ba and Aubry “0» a practical level, a full electronic notebook, however desirable it may be, is not practical until all the instruments in a laboratory are computerised and networked '.” (Huynh-Ba and Aubry, 2000). Chemspider Info References from Pubmed i Show patenad references Fig. 4: ChemSpider and Pubmed information obtained automatically from an ELN entry containing the chemical ‘methylamphetamine \ (Accessed 19 May 2014). The ELN is evolving with new features such as time-line view, and the identification of chemical substances in each post. The latter was the outcome of a very nice project between Chemistry, the UNSW library and CSIRO. An ELN post turned out to be the ideal test bed for their developed software that falls in the class “semantic text miner and tagger”. A script is run once a day on the ELN to search for chemical key words in the text of any blog. When a substance is identified the ChemSpider record is looked up and main data is displayed with link to the full record. 4. Undergraduate use of the ELN In 2010 a consortium of ELN aware colleagues, from UNSW, University of Sydney, Curtin University, Southampton University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand, with UNSW as lead institution, put together a project proposal “Extending the science curriculum: teaching instrumental science at a distance in a global laboratory using a collaborative electronic notebook”. The goal of this project was to develop a framework for the incorporation of laboratory-based teaching into a global web- based undergraduate tertiary curriculum. The framework provides science educators with the tools necessary to implement an undergraduate course in the analytical sciences across two or more institutions, located within the same country or across international borders. Unlike many web-based projects that focus on doing experiments at a distance we did not concern ourselves with how to control an NMR from the Moon, but on the peer-to- peer collaboration between students (and incidentally staff) in the context of an undergraduate lab. It was originally envisaged to be a series of five-way experiments, with one site actually performing the measurements and all sites receiving the data (via the ELN) and discussing, before individually writing up to satisfy their own assessment requirements. The vagaries of university terms (not so much time zones) meant this was never achieved, but quickly it was realised that this approach was most likely to be pursued in a one-university-to- university mode. 18 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert - Mellor Lecture Fig 5: AJLTC electronic laboratory notebook. http:! ! altc.ourexpenment.org/ (Accessed 5 May 2014) An unexpected bonus of the experiments developed for this project was the realisation that more traditional synthetic experiments may also be delivered via a collaborative web- based laboratory course. This can be carried out either by having local and remote students prepare analogues of the same basic compound, and then provide a collaborative interpretation of the data obtained. Alternatively the various cohorts can develop different approaches to a specific synthesis which is then collaboratively assessed to develop the “best” guidelines for synthesis. Matt Todd from the University of Sydney led this approach, and if you have not seen it, I would commend his open project to resolve the enantiomers of praziquantel, an effective drug against, schistosomiasis (a water borne disease affecting some 200 million people) (Woelfle et al., 2011). The web site for the undergraduate ELN project can be found at http: / /altc.ourexperimentorg/. Experiments on the analysis of caffeine in drinks and mercury in fish are based on traditional laboratory experiments used at UNSW in a third year analytical chemistry course and provide examples of experiments that can be done at one location with the results loaded to the ELN and then used by all. If several institutions that can measure mercury levels are involved in the course then obtaining data for mercury levels in different parts of the world becomes possible, with comparisons of results and resulting cross- cultural discussions. This mechanism has the potential for helping developing countries at marginal extra cost to the host institution. Say a university like UNSW is doing an experiment requiring LC- MS-MS, an instrument not owned by Chiang Mai. In a collaboratory experiment, students at UNSW perform the experiment as they would normally do, but the results, raw data especially, are posted on the ELN for the group in Thailand. With the possibilities of high levels of interaction between the students, it is hoped that peer-to-peer mentoring happens without any fuss and the students in Thailand receive as authentic experience as possible without actually having the instrument in their lab. Fig. 6: Schematic of the electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) interacting with the five participating institutions. Jeremy Frey from Southampton University offered an experiment to measure the extinction coefficient of an organic dye that 19 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert - Mellor Lecture could actually be done over the internet, with a permanendy running laser set up that could be turned on and fired over the web. Although the development came at the end of the project we recognised that ACData could provide a long term and secure archive that can inform future courses. In quality assurance in laboratories, we use data collected over time to measure and monitor repeatability and reproducibility of results. In contrast in an afternoon of experimenting, when the students find themselves taking a standard deviation of three or four results, access to long run data allows a more authentic experience. 5. Social media in large lectures Wikipedia lists 204 social networking sites headed by Facebook, Twitter, &c Linkedln, but then followed by Chinese and Russian sites the author has never heard of. As an aside, if the academic reader is concerned about the accuracy of Wikipedia, the author has just published a paper on the analysis of new synthetic cannabinoids (Lum et al., 2013) in which a table listing these compounds from Wikipedia is reproduced; this listing being far in advance of any official compilation. There are increasing opportunities for use of social media in research and education. Even the most staid journals these days invite you to ‘like’ them and their articles on Facebook. A new project on the social presence of IUPAC has just been approved. Headed by a Young Observer from last year’s General Assembly in Istanbul, it has taken nearly a year to gain approval, perhaps because of a perception that such modes of communication are not necessarily for the peak International body in Chemistry. Yes they are. The idea of using Twitter in chemistry at UNSW appears to have arisen simultaneously between Marcus Cole and myself (Cole et al., 2013). The concept was to open a channel of communication to a group that was too large to interact with individually in the largest lecture theatre on campus (Clancy theatre with a capacity of over 1000). 730 f larger '■'■or' .■(< do ^University clecotrenfrifee • 55% ;oW I EXPERIMENTATION RT News organizations, iournailsts, policy makers, i and thought leaders : are active on : Twitter Fig 7: Info graphic showing Twitter use in science communication. Reproduced from http:/ / visually/ twitter-and-sciencey designed by %atiePhD ’ (Dr CA Pratt) http: i j www . kaiiephd. com! . No student is going to put her hand up half way back in the Clancy to ask a perceptive question. With the hash tag #cheml011 and a Tweetdeck feed projected during the lecture, on the first day for some time absolutely nothing happened. I then asked anyone to tweet anything, to receive a question on how I first grew my beard. Once we had got that out of the way I asked them what was the last element that had been named by IUPAC? Quickly “Copernicus” came back, which I was reasonably happy with. We had just named Copernicium, element 112, so that was pretty good. When I explained the naming rules, a follow up tweet suggested that was what he had written but that the “spell checker changed it”. 20 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert — Mellor Lecture A year or so later we ran some surveys, using my own social network of psychologist Professor Jim Kehoe, and wrote up the paper that appeared in J Chemical Education in April 2013 (Cole et al., 2013). The usage was steady (about 10 tweets per lecture) without being overwhelming. About two thirds of tweets were about the lecture material or at least relevant to the course. The remaining third was an interesting mix of jokes, birthday greetings and general social glue. After the lecture, tweets followed up on questions. An interesting statistic was that only 23% of the class had a twitter account at the start of the project. (Present surveys in the US suggest it is over 80%). The bottom line showed 72% respondents in the survey thought Twitter helped learning, but there was some feeling that in the lectures it had the tendency to distract and intrude. Of course the Twitter feed can also be suspended or simply switched off, and used between lectures. Twitter, and other social media, is increasingly used by scientists to communicate and interact, among their professional communities and to quickly get their message out to the world. Fig. 7 is an infographic from ‘KatiePhD’ called “How Twitter can benefit scientists in terms of effects on publications, communication and outreach”. 6. Conclusions This paper has not been a hard sell for a particular electronic laboratory notebook. In writing this, the author has realised that whether UNSW Australia wakes up to the new technologies sooner or later is no longer the point. The world has advanced. What we do need to think about (as part of the discussion that is not happening either), are the kind of education and activities that should take place in a 21st century institution called a university, and how we expect our students to communicate the products of their scholarship and learning. I argue this should not be just in their theses, or even papers for which their supervisors take equal credit, but in a continuous peer-to-peer exchange of ideas, data and knowledge, conducted, in part, through web-based tools. So if I have in anyway stimulated or interested you, do not forget to like me on Facebook! Thank you! 7. Discussion The full discussion after the lecture is not presented here. The question that created the most debate came from Dr Jon Beeves (UNSW): “Why would I give away all my unpublished results and allow others to publish it first to doom my career?' There is genuine concern about groups, often in nations that are rapidly developing their scientific research, that ‘borrow’ ideas, and even data, from established sources in order to re-publish without acknowledgment. Dr Beeves argued that this would increase in an open science regime. The reply was twofold. First, plagiarism is as old as the proverbial hills, and increases with the amount of material that can be plagiarised. This is not the fault of open science. Second, making data and hypotheses available in an open source is publishing. Each post in an ELN is date and time stamped, and the source can be readily verified. This is more protected than a careless remark in a lecture at a conference, for example. So we are left with the concern that someone might ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, by taking your results and then extracting the great idea of the age before you have had the same thought. Perhaps they might. A possible example of this scenario might have been the discovery of the double helix by Crick and Watson. We learn in “The Double Helix” (Watson, 1968) that Linus Pauling had theorised a triple helix, a structure that was instantly ruled out by the X-ray 21 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert - Mellor Lecture patterns obtained by Franklin and Wilkins, and known only to Crick and Watson. Had these patterns been available to the world as they were obtained, it is possible that Pauling would have overleaped Crick and Watson to determine the correct structure. However the share of the Nobel Prize awarded to Maurice Wilkins (Rosalind Franklin having died in 1958) would still have been given for the data. 8. Acknowledgements The photograph of Professor Mellor (Fig. 1) is reproduced from http: / / wwwxhemistry.unsw.edu.au/ our- s c h oof / his torv-and -alu m ni / ch emic al - society/ mellor-lectures with permission of the copyright holder. The inspiration and information on open science and ELNs for much of the lecture comes from two papers written by Bird and Frey (Bird and Frey, 2013; Bird et al., 2013) and the many papers referenced therein. Fig. 7 is reproduced by kind permission of Dr Katie Pratt. The information in the graphic is based on Emily S. Darling, David Shiffman, Isabelle M. Cote, and Joshua A. Drew, The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 6:32-43, 2013. 9. References Badiola, K. & Todd, M. (2014) Electronic Eab Notebook for Synthesis of Tuberculosis Drug Eeads , http:/ / ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/ 2123/ 1 0461, University of Sydney, Accessed: 8 May 2014. Bartling, S. & Friesike, S. (2014) "Towards Another Scientific Revolution", in Bartling, S. & Friesike, S. (eds.) Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Web is Changing Research , Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, Springer, Berlin. Bird, C. L. & Frey, J. G. (2013) Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences, Chemical Society Reviews , 42, 16,6754-6776. Bird, C. L., Willoughby, C. & Frey, J. G. (2013) Laboratory notebooks in the digital era: the role of ELNs in record keeping for chemistry and other sciences, Chemical Society Reviews , 42, 20,8157-8175. Blackman, A. & Gahan, L. (2013) Aylward and Findlay's SI Chemical Data , 7 th edn., John Wiley & Sons, NY, 240. Cole, M. L., Hibbert, D. B. & Kehoe, E. J. (2013) Students’ Perceptions of Using Twitter To Interact with the Instructor during Lectures for a Large-Enrollment Chemistry Course, journal of Chemical Education , 90, 5, 671-672. Gezelter, D. (201 1) An informal definition of OpenScience , http: /' / www.opensdence.org/ blog/?p "454. The Open Science Project, Posted: 28 July 2011, Accessed: 14 May 2014 Hulme, M. & Ravetz, J. (2009) 'Show Your Working?: What 'ClimateGate' means , http: / / iiews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/ nature/8 388485. stm. BBC Website, Posted: 1 December 2009, Accessed: 14 May 2014 Huynh-Ba, K. C. & Aubry, A. F. (2000) From laboratory notebook to laboratory worksheets: Recording analytical data for stability testing of pharmaceuticals, American Eaboratoy , 32, 24, 13. Lum, B. J., Hibbert, D. B. & Brophy, J. (2013) Identification of Substituted Cathinones (beta- keto phenethylamines) by Heptafluorobutyric Anhydride (HFBA) Chemical Derivatization and Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry, SWATS journal, 34, 7 - 30. National Research Council (1993) National Collaborators Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research, The National Academies Press, Washington DC. Oxford English Dictionary (2014) scientific method, http: / / www.oxforddictio.nati.es.com /definitio n/ english/ scientific-method. Oxford University Press, Accessed: 13 May 2014. Russell, S. M. (2010) Report of the Independent Climate Change Email Review , http:/ /www.cce- review.org' / index.php. Independent Climate Change Em@il Review, Posted: 7 July 2010, Accessed: 14 May 2014 22 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Hibbert — Mellor Lecture Watson, J. D. (1968) The Double Helix: A Personal Resolution of praziquantel, PLoS Neglected Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Tropical Diseases, 5, 9. Atheneum, New York. Woelfle, M., Seerden, J. P., de Gooijer, J., Pouwer, K, Olliaro, P. & Todd, M. H. (2011) Brynn Hibbert lectured at the University of London until 1987 before moving to the University of New South Wales as a Professor and has served the School of Chemistry in a variety of roles, including as Head of School between 1993 and 1996, and Deputy President of the Academic Board 2010 — 2011. Brynn is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Society (RACI), the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society of New South Wales. He has received accolades such as the RACI Analytical Medal (1999) and the Olle Prize (2007). He has served the profession by being the chair of the Analytical Division of RACI, the Australia representative of the International Chemometrics Society, on Advisory Committees for the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA), President of the Analytical Chemistry Division of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the Australian delegate for the IUPAC General Assembly and he is an active member of Australian Skeptics. His research interests include chemometrics, metrology in chemistry, electroanalytical chemistry, sensors, electronic nose technology, self-assembled monolayers and biosensors, electrodeposited fractals, artificial intelligence applied to chemistry and non-linear dynamics and chaos. 23 journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society ofNen1 South Wales , vol. 147, nos. 451 & 452, pp. 24-28. ISSN 0035-9173/14/0100024-5 In Conversation with Donald Hector Peter Doherty Laureate Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne Distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales Re-printed from “The Conversation”, 12 May, 2014 http:/ / theconversation.com/in-conversation-with-donald-hector-full-transcript-26294 http: ! j theconversation.com Abstract RSNSW President Donald Hector interviewed by Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty for The Conversation on his views on science and technology in Australia, and the role for the Royal Society of New South Wales in promoting informed discussion on issues relevant to the well-being of society. Peter Doherty: Thinking in terms of Australia’s future, how important is it for us to expand activity in the innovation / high technology sector? Donald Hector: It’s critically important. If you look at countries that have been successful since the early days of the Industrial Revolution they’ve largely done so through having highly innovative industries that maximise utilisation of technology. Peter Doherty: Do you think that an expanded high technology sector should focus solely on areas like IT, encryption, software development and so forth, or should we also be expanding niche manufacturing and both heavy and light engineering applications? Donald Hector: It’s all of the above. ICT is very important because there are enormous business opportunities in the industry; it’s still very much in its infancy. But it’s also important to be developing niche operations and manufacturing capability in areas where Australia has a natural strength. Biotechnology and pharmaceuticals are a good example of that. Also industries that provide capability for areas where we are globally competitive such as mining and agriculture. And doing these on a world scale is also an opportunity that Australia has persistently overlooked. There was a report commissioned by the government in the 1950s to take a snapshot of Australian industry immediately following the Second World War; pharmaceuticals are a really interesting case study. We didn’t really do much in the way of pharmaceuticals manufacturing at all until about 1948. We then started to manufacture penicillin. Australia was only the second country in the world manufacturing penicillin 24 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Doherty — In Conversation with Hector commercially and was the first country to make it available for the general population. We started making penicillin in 1948 and by the mid-50s we were one of the biggest penicillin producers in the world, if not the biggest. In 1950 the value of locally- produced pharmaceutical actives was £6.7 million and imports were £630,000. Over 90% of pharmaceutical actives used in Australia were manufactured in Australia. Today the reverse is so. Over 90% of active pharmaceutical ingredients are imported, and the local content is largely limited to formulation and repackaging. We’ve gone from being in a very dominant position and self-sufficient position to an absolute devastation of that industry. But it need not be like that. [Biotherapy company] CSL made the transition from government-owned enterprise to a highly- successful publicly-owned company, and is now one of the biggest producers of blood products in the world. Tasmanian Alkaloids, which was started in Tasmania by Abbot Laboratories in the 1950s to produce opium alkaloids, was sold to Johnson and Johnson — why did this not end up in Australian hands? Apart from a bit of generic pharmaceutical manufacturing in Australia we no longer make the medication that we need to treat chronic disease such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. If the supply of those were interrupted for some reason we’d be in a lot of strife. Peter Doherty: What could the universities do better, both in the sense of discovery and translating discovery for economic benefit? Donald Hector: I’m rather of the view that universities are best suited to doing pure research, and from time to time really good stuff will come out of that. But I think you need research institutions that are not constrained by a heavy requirement to produce income out of their research. That’s best left to private sector, and possibly government, and that’s why I think the CSIRO and ANSTO [Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation] are so important. They should be the commercial arms as was originally intended, and develop industrial research so that it puts Australia at the forefront of innovation. Peter Doherty: What could CSIRO and other government research agencies like DSTO (Defence Science and Technology Organisation), ANSTO do better to promote greater economic activity? Donald Hector: I’m not sure I’d include DSTO in that because they have very specific purpose. I think CSIRO and ANSTO, and particularly CSIRO, are much maligned. They’ve created very innovative inventions over the years, and have been responsible for some truly fantastic technological developments. But we expect them to deliver success with every project, and research is not like that. We also expect them to do so on shoestring budgets. There’s nothing worse than funding a project that might be expected to cost $50 million and finding out that it needs twice that, and then saying that you don’t have the money to continue and killing the program. The reality of research and development is that if you think you’ve got a project $50 million then you’ve at least got to have a couple of hundred in the pocket to take it 25 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Doherty — In Conversation with Hector through, if you think once you get to $50 million it’s still got potential and that with more money it can deliver success. I’m not suggesting that we should be trying to pick winners, nor am I suggesting that we should hesitate in killing off research programs that aren’t going to deliver. There needs to be a very critical examination using some sort of stage gate process to do that. But you’ve got make sure that you focus your funding on areas that are likely to be a success, kill off the programs in the early stages when they look like they’re not going to succeed, and heavily fund the ones that show potential until they are successful, recognising that that usually takes a lot more money than you originally expected. Peter Doherty: What are the barriers from the business side? Donald Hector: We’re not particularly good at managing risk in Australia. We’re not particularly good at taking risks, nor are we good at managing them. What Australian companies, particularly the top 300 of the ASX, have historically done is to have very strong government lobby groups and the Australian governments, irrespective of their political persuasion, have been very heavily persuaded by them. Historically, the argument was that Australia’s not a big enough economy to have a fully competitive market place and so oligopolies and duopolies have been the flavour of the day. But that’s no longer the case. We have a population of 25 million, we can have a fully open and competitive economy and there’s more than enough room to have full competition without looking after these duopolies in the way that’s been done in the past. What I think that’s led to is a lack of entrepreneurship. We lack a mittelstand in Australia of the type they have in Germany. I think there’s three million smallish, family owned companies in Germany that typically that have a few hundred employees and they’re world leaders in a niche area. They supply world marketplaces and the big German manufacturing sector. We’ve never developed that here because we’ve been too eager to look after the larger companies that feel that the Australian government owes them a living. Peter Doherty: Are we too risk-averse? Donald Hector: I don’t think we’re risk averse — I think we don’t understand the nature of risk. In managing risk you’ve got to be very skilled and have the capacity to understand the extent to which you know the ambiguities of situations and the likelihood or otherwise of success. That’s very difficult. It requires a great deal of judgement and a great deal of experience. In Australia we tend to be fairly gung-ho and somewhat undisciplined, but the people I’ve met when I’ve worked overseas are generally people who manage risk well are not risk takers. They know when to take steps and when not to take steps and they generally have very good business judgement. I think we often lack that in Australia. Peter Doherty: Do we persistently under- invest? Donald Hector: We often under-invest and then don’t make sure that we get adequate return on the capital that we do invest. We often think that a project is going to cost a certain amount of money, and then when we get to the point where we’ve either run out of money and there’s no more available or 26 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Doherty — In Conversation with Hector people get cold feet and don’t want to take it through to completion. Peter Doherty: What can government do better? Are the tax settings right? Donald Hector: I’m not sure that a general tax policy in terms of support for industry is a good idea. We certainly need research-and- development tax concessions. We need to have some public funding to encourage research and development expenditure, and we’ve got to recognise that issue and get a tax break on that. I’m also of the view that if you’re going to develop competitive industries you’ve got to have early-stage government support to do that. Virtually every major industry around the world is a consequence of government research programs, very often in defence sector. If you look at the US, a lot of the industries there have their origins in defence industry. It’s not uncommon to have in engineering faculties in the leading US universities to have hundreds of millions of dollars from government research funding for defence projects. Australia could decide to be a much bigger player industries where we have some very clear internationaUy-competitive positions. For example in agriculture and mining, why aren’t we more fully integrated into those industries? Why aren’t we the manufacturers of agricultural and mining equipment as we were once? Why was the government response to the car industry crisis not more visionary? We could have taken the several hundred millions of dollars of car industry subsidies and made that money available to a couple of the big earth-moving companies like Caterpillar or Komatsu to establish their global research and development and world- scale manufacturing facilities here. To me you need government policy to encourage the development of those industries, but you’ve got to do so in a way that will be internationally competitive and is going to develop an industry for the long term. As occurs in countries like Singapore, and in the various US States, should government be actively pursuing financial and tax relief packages to persuade high-tech R&D to locate here? I’ve been involved in one instance a billion dollar project that didn’t get built in Australia, even though it would have been a good place to build, because there was too much bureaucracy from the federal government and the state governments to agree what sort of tax incentives and regulatory incentives would encourage investment. Eventually that plant went to China. Peter Doherty: How do we encourage greater philanthropy, “angel investors” and so forth? Donald Hector: I’m not sure that there’s necessarily a place for philanthropy in developing technology, but certainly there is for angel investors. One of the problems in finding angel investors in Australia historically is that there’s just not enough private wealth here. But I think that’s changing now because of the very great economic growth that’s taken place in the last decade. My guess is that there’s no shortage of angel investors if you’ve got good managers that they’ve got the risk of the 27 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Doherty — In Conversation with Hector project under control, and they’re good, professional, capable managers. We probably don’t have enough experience of that here, so we’re probably going to be relying on bringing people in from overseas, particularly the US, to manage start-up companies. Peter Doherty: How important is it that we get a much better public buy-in to the idea that science and technology are important for our future? Donald Hector: It’s very important because science and technology nowadays are so complex that it’s hard for lay people to really understand what the issues are. They get heavily influenced by special interest groups that might have an axe to grind about technologies coming to fruition. I think we’ve seen this very much with issues like climate change where scientists have been vilified for speaking their mind and special interest groups are very quick to distort facts and throw misinformation into the debate to muddy the waters and pursue their own interests. It’s very important to have institutions there that can lead the discussion and make some of these things more readily available to the general public and more able to have the information accessible. Peter Doherty: What are you aiming to achieve by re-invigorating the Royal Society of NSW, and how do you see such long- established institutions functioning in modern Australia? Donald Hector: We want the Royal Society of New South Wales to be true to its original charter of encouraging “... studies and investigations in science, art, literature and philosophy . . .”. The main aim behind that is to advance knowledge and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship to develop the resources of New South Wales and, more broadly, of Australia. We see our role as providing a forum where we can bring together people who are interested in seeing those things happen and being a facilitator so that we can bring important issues to public attention and to influence policy. We want to provide a place for people to meet who are engaged in those areas of human knowledge, for them to exchange ideas and to learn from one another. journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales , vol. 147, nos. 451 & 452, pp. 29-54. ISSN 0035-9173/14/0100029-26 Signal to Noise Ratio in Renaissance Writing: an example concerning Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) D.F. Branagan1*, D.W. Emerson2, 1. Kelly2 1 School of Geosciences, University of Sydney 2 Independent Research Scholar, Sydney * Corresponding author. E-mail: dbranaga@mail.usyd.edu.au Abstract The modem term ‘Signal to Noise Ratio’ — a measure in science for comparing the level of a desired signal with that of its background noise — is used here with reference to the views of Adam Siber expressed in an elegy comparing the scientific and literary output of mediocre writers with that of Georgius Agricola (1494 — 1555). Written in Latin, much of Agricola’s important work still remains untranslated into English, but his numerous works formed the basis of the understanding of many geological and mineralogical principles. The authors, in the process of translating one of his works — De ortu <& causis suhterraneorum — found the prefatory elegy which is also written in Latin. This paper outlines salient aspects of Agricola’s life, including the social, ‘scientific’ and technological milieu in which he worked, and the influence on him of writers, both contemporary and ancient. This serves as background to our translation of Siber’s elegy, wherein Agricola’s communication skills are compared most favourably with those of lesser communicators. Keywords: Agricola, Elegy, Siber, Hertel, Renaissance, Mining 1. Introduction This paper has as its genesis the authors’ foray into a translation of De ortu <& causis suhterraneorum (about the origin and causes of subterranean phenomena), a Latin work of Georgius Agricola (1494-1555). The volume from which we worked contains a prefatory elegy written by Adam Siber (1516 — 1584) and dedicated to Valentin Hertel (ca. 1500 — 1547). It, like most of Agricola’s works, is written in Latin and we decided that it, too, deserves to be translated. We chose the tide - Signal to Noise Ratio in Renaissance Writing — because in our view this scientific phrase provides a most apt analogy for Siber’s contrast between the clarity and significance of Agricola’s works and the ineffectual and often pointless efforts of lesser writers. The information torrent and its often irrelevant vortexes and eddies are not modern phenomena: the itch to impress ink on papyrus, palimpsest, parchment and paper has a long history, producing results of varying quality and utility in prose, poetry, philosophy, theology, engineering and science. Over against much fruitless and unoriginal work, any work of clarity, originality and utility stands out and persists as a work of distinction. In present day terms such relative measures are taken into consideration, even if largely unconsciously, when editors and reviewers rate a paper as worth publishing. In this paper we have taken the concept back to a time when publication was largely the prerogative of the writer himself (there were few female 29 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola authors). The Latin ‘Elegy’ by Adam Siber introducing Agricola’s De ortu ... deals with this problem in considerable detail and calls on writers to be self-critical, even to the extent of withholding their work if it is not of sufficient quality. This is the burden of Siber’s Elegy written at a time of dynamic change: the Renaissance. Immersion in the classics of ancient Greece and Rome was considered essential to the standing and influence of learned scholars and this period produced prominent writers such as Erasmus, Thomas More and Rabelais, to mention but a few. It was also a time of religious turmoil: Martin Luther’s Propositions drove a wedge among the Germanic people and, elsewhere in Europe John Calvin had initiated religious reforms. Scientific thought grappled with three competing mechanisms of the recognised universe: the ancient geocentric view of Ptolemaeus; the heliocentric one of Copernicus and Kepler, and Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric compromise with the sun revolving around the earth and the other planets revolving around the sun. Educated elites believed in Aristotle’s four elements of fire, water, earth and air, and all materials were believed to be mediated compounds of these basics. Amidst this restless, developing intellectual milieu, Georgius Agricola researched and published works that laid the foundations of modern mineralogy. Siber’s Elegy is a fitting paean to Agricola’s intellectual rigour and painstaking observations, as it lists many questions the answers to which had previously been based on speculation rather than exact observation. Siber’s praise of Agricola’s lasting contribution to the body of knowledge of minerals resounds all the clearer when balanced against his persistent condemnation of writing that is of no significant value. Indeed, Virgil’s comment about Lucretius could justifiably be added to Siber’s paean: Felix qui potuit cognoscere causas. Virgil ( Georgies , 2, 4900) [Blessed the man able to know the cause of things]. A translation of the elegy has in itself very little meaning — apart from justifying the title of the paper — unless it is prefaced by a brief summary of Agricola’s life and work: the embodiment of clear communication. To this end, the first part of the paper describes his background; his achievements and the significance of his writings and researches in the development of the geological sciences. The translation itself presents the links between Agricola and many ancient written sources which he consulted and commented on in his works. 2. Agricola’s Works (major and minor) Georg Bauer, better known as Georgius Agricola (Figure 1), was the author of the well-known De re metallica , published posthumously in 1556. Although important for its text, this book’s reputation is perhaps due largely to the fine woodcut illustrations which adorn the book and which have been widely reproduced. These woodcuts, showing technical mining devices, were prepared at St. Joachimsthal (now Jackymov), under Agricola’s supervision. Skilled artists, led by Basilius Wehfring assisted by Rudolf Manuel Deutsch and Zacharias Specklin, prepared the mirror images for printing, all re-published in the first English translation by Hoover & Hoover (1912 and reprinted 1950) (Figure 30 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. - Agricola 2). 3 Preparation of the illustrations delayed the original publication of De re metallica until shortly after Agricola’s death (Lefevre, 2010). It should be noted, however, that illustrations such as these were a common feature of the mining literature of the period (see for instance Urban (1980), Bork (2005)). However Agricola was well respected during his lifetime for other important works on geological subjects, published much earlier, and essentially lacking diagrams, and this paper deals specifically with such a work. Figure 1. Agricola , reproduced from Dibner (1958; original source unknown). As quoted by Dibner (1958) Agricola wrote “Those things which we see with our eyes and understand by means of our senses are more clearly to be demonstrated than if learned by means of reasoning”. 3 The University of Sydney (Rare books) has an original copy Figure 2. This illustration from Book Fill (Hooper <& Hoover ; 1912, p. 330) typifies the woodcuts which made Agricola's De re metallica famous. Here Agricola points to the 'reality' of the Argonauts' search for the Golden Fleece. In the water emerging from an underground stream (lower left - letter A) carrying material from a mineralised source a fleece is being used so that it traps gold particles. As the Hoopers point out Strabo gape a similar explanation centuries before Agricola did. 4 In 1546 Agricola put together five separate works in Latin — one of which {Berm annus (1530, 1541) had previously been published (Michaelis et al, 1971) — to form an important volume which we refer to as Opuscula (‘minor works’, which they certainly are not) because this is the title on the copy which is the source of our study. However the title Opuscula seems to be rarely used by other scholars, who refer instead to the volume in terms of one or other of the five separate ‘essays’ it contains (see for instance Morello, 2006). 4 Glover (2003) noted this fact about the illustration. 31 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola In total this volume consists of: 1 . Introductory Elegy 2. De ortu et causis subterraneorum libri V, first publication 1 546, Basel; (pp. 1 - 82) 3. De natura eorum quae ejfluunt ex terra libri IV, first publication 1 546, Basel; (pp. 85 — 164) 4. De natura fossilium libri X, first publication 1546 Basel; (pp. 167-380) 5. De veteribus et novis libri II , first publication 1546, Basel (pp. 381 — 416) 6. Bermannus, sive de re metallica Dialogus , first publication 1530, Basel (pp. 417 — 468) 7. Interpretatio Germanica vocum rei metallicae addito [List of Terms (pp. 469 - 487; including the names of previous writers)] 8. Indice faecundissimo [Unpaged Index 49 pages]. There were later Latin editions (essentially reprints: 1558, 1612, 1657), an Italian translation (1550), and a German translation (1806 - 1810) of Opuscula. There was no extended English translation of any part until 1955, when Bandy & Bandy (1955) published their translation of De natura fossilium , the third ‘essay’ in the volume.5 There is a modern translation of Bermannus into French (Halleux & Yans, 1990). Although no English translations of the other essays have appeared, some of them have clearly been read, at least in part, by various English-speaking scholars, and their importance recognised, most notably by the Canadian geologist F.D. Adams (1938), who discussed some of the volumes’ main themes. Later scholars discussing the works include Eyles (1955) and Davies (1968), with fuller studies by Ellenberger (1988), Schmidt (1995a), Morello (1994, 2006) and Mottana (2006); and brief comments by Oldroyd (1996). Eyles (1955) attributed the lack of recognition of Agricola as a pioneer of geology to the general neglect of the history of geology by historians of science, although this neglect has been reduced since Eyles made the comment. Following his detailed biography in 1956, Helmut Willsdorf continued leading the way with his editing, in association with W. Quellmarz, of Georgius Agricola — Ausgewahlte Werke E rgansqmgsband 1, Bergwerke und Huttenanlagen der Agricola-Zeit (Willsdorf and Quellmarz, 1971). In this work they deal specifically, inter alia, with Joachimsthal (pp. 157 and following), presenting information about the geology from recent research. Horst et al (1992) present the correspondence between Agricola and many associates, while H. Prescher (1994a, 1994b) has followed as the principal researcher on Agricola since the 1990s. The celebration at Chemnitz, in 1994, of the 500th year since Agricola’s birth, saw considerable research publications on his work, and this stimulated continuing studies. See, for instance Morello (1994), Vai and Cavazza (2003), Conolly (2005) and Vai and Caldwell (2006.). Related publications includes Aldrich et al (2009). A major work is that of Neumann (1994), consisting of the papers presented at the Dresden meeting celebrating Agricola. The comprehensive list of works on Agricola, published between 1819 and 1977, prepared by Sarjeant (1980) is very useful, but is overwhelmed by the 1520 — 1963 bibliography (in German) by Michaelis et al (1971). 5 Bandy & Bandy (p. 82) point out Agricola’s ground- breaking recognition of ‘mineralizing solutions’ [succus lapidescens] in the formation of mineral veins. 32 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola 3. The Royal Society of New South Wales Connection As far as we are aware the Royal Society of New South Wales holds the only book copy of this work in Australia.6 Although its source has not yet been traced an inked note on the flyleaf indicates it had been in French- speaking hands earlier. It was obtained by the Society some time prior to 1 889, and has been re-bound and boxed (Branagan, 2007). The title Opuscula was possibly suggested by Archibald Liversidge of the Royal Society at the time the work was acquired by the Society and rebound. With permission from the Society’s then President, John Hardie, all the pages, including blanks (536 pages, containing only several ‘formal’ or decorative illustrations) were photographed in natural light, late 2010 - early 2011, with the assistance of Elizabeth Ellis (formerly State Library), and the Society’s then Administrative Secretary, Brittany Cooper. Two missing pages were obtained later from Dr. Angela Kiesling (Bergakademie Library, Freiberg). Three copies were printed, with the view to translate into English at least some of the previously untranslated essays [to date the emphasis has been on De ortu & causis subterraneorum] ; to examine their significance within the history of the Earth Sciences and to make the texts more readily available to English-speaking scholars. Our intention is to complete separate papers on some of these previously untranslated individual ‘essays’. Some pages were quite difficult to work from as they did not reproduce well. 6 The University of New South Wales has a microfilm copy. 4. Available Sources concerning Agricola Hollister-Short (2000) points out the paucity of studies by English-speaking researchers about Agricola, and comments that even much of the available work in English ‘is seriously flawed’, although space did not allow him to do more than point out what he regarded as incorrect in that respect. He suggested that the biography (in German) by Wilsdorf (1956) had been ‘scrupulously researched’. Hollister-Short’s brief review pointed to important aspects of recent research on Agricola’s life, mainly in French and German. We have been able to access only a limited number of these publications to date, notably works by Wilsdorf and Quellmarz (1971), Michaelis et al (1971), Horst et al (1992), so some minor points we make are open to revision. However some reviews in English indicate a growing interest in Agricola’s works among English-speaking scholars (see, e.g. Hannaway (1992) and Beretta (1999)). Other German language biographies of Agricola’s life (notably Hofman (1905), and Hartmann (1953)) are useful, but there are only brief biographical essays in English. We have relied largely on Wilsfdorf (supplemented by Prescher) in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1985 vol. 1, 77-79; Hannaway (1992); Prescher (1994, a & b), the summary by Killy & Vierhaus (2009), but also Hoover & Hoover (1912, 1950) for the biographical information, although other sources, notably Horst et al (1992) have been useful for certain aspects of Agricola’s life. 5. Agricola’s Life: Social and Religious Context and Influences Agricola was born Georg Pawer (Bauer) on 23 March 1494, one of four sons and three daughters of textile manufacturer Grigor 33 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola Pawer (his mother’s name has not been identified) at Glauchau (on the right bank of the Mulde River, 12 km (7 miles) N of Zwickau, and 26 km (17 m) W of Chemnitz) (Figure 3 and Table). Zwickau is a district where there is strong mineralisation associated with a massive occurrence of serpentinite. Callenberg, a locality in that region, has been the site of recent (1952 to 1990) extensive mining of nickel occurring in a weathered serpentinite body. The region is also known for the occurrence of fine crocoite (lead chromate) specimens, first discovered at Ekaterinberg, Russia in 1786. Dundas, Tasmania, too, is known for its famous crocoite specimens. Figure 3. The Saxony region, showing localities related to Agricolas life [modified from Mitten in Sachsen pamphlet, B rand-E rbisdof, Freiberg (n.d., ca. 1988)]. Of particular significance to Agricola’s life was the turbulent religious environment in which he grew up. The long period of relative religious calm within the Holy Roman Empire was shattered by the upheaval caused by the thirty-three year old Augustinian friar and university professor, Martin Luther, when he posted his ninety-five propositions concerning the theory and practice of Indulgences on the door of the University Church, Wittenberg on All Saints’ Eve (October 31, 1517), when Agricola was just twenty-three. The consequent activities of the Reformation split the Germanic region in two. Despite growing up in what became essentially a major Lutheran stronghold, and later working at times on diplomatic missions for the Lutheran Duke Maurice, Elector of Saxony, whose patronage he enjoyed, Agricola clung firmly to his Catholic faith, strengthened perhaps most notably by his long-term friendship with the scholarly humanist Dutch priest, Desiderius Erasmus (1466 — 1536), whom he probably first met in Bologna. It is a tribute to the tolerance of all involved that despite his firm adherence to ‘Rome’, Agricola maintained the respect and long friendship of many adherents of Protestantism. However his death was purportedly brought on by apoplexy, when arguing with a Protestant divine, and his site for burial became controversial. In the early 1 520s Agricola’s travels took him to Italy, where, in addition to completing his training in medicine (doctorate awarded 1 523, according to Beretta, 1999), he, like so many contemporaries, became aware of the rich history and culture of classical times. He also learnt something of the art of printing in Venice, particularly through being involved there in the editing of Galen’s works for publication by the Aldine Press. This work gained the praise of Erasmus, who later proofread and recommended for publication Agricola’s first mining study, Bermannus (1530)7 7 For a detailed discussion of Agricola’s bermannus see Morello (1994). 34 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola Table showing key events in Agricola’s life 1494 Georg Pawer (Bauer), born 24 March 1494 at Glauchau 1506 Bauer family moved to Chemnitz, attended Grammar school there 1511 Bauer family moved north to Magdeburg, Agricola schooled there 1514 Bauer enrolled at Leipzig University 1518 Graduated, moved to Zwickau, teaching, studying philosophy, published Latin textbook, possibly acquired the Latin name ‘Agricola’ at that time 1522 Returned to Leipzig, studying medicine, physics, chemistry 1522-24 Travelled to Italy (mainly Bologna/Ferrara), qualified as medical doctor 1524 Moved to Venice & Padua, worked on the publication of Galen’s work 1526 Returned to Zwickau 1527 Moved to Chemnitz 1527-1530 Moved to St. Joachimsthal (then a newly important mining centre), as medical doctor, began a detailed study (and recording) of mining 1530-1533 Travelled, (touring central European mining districts), but with residence at Chemnitz 1533 Returned to Chemnitz, remaining there, apart from short visits away 1546 Opuscula published 1555 Died 21 November, refused local burial; buried Schlosskirche, Zeitz (Halle), 45 km SW of Leipzig 1556 Agricola’s last work, De re metallica , published posthumously 1 527 was a significant year when Agricola was appointed the town physician at St. Joachimsthal8 in Bohemia, on the south side of the Erzgebirge mountains (Figure 3). As Hannaway (1992) says, it was an unusual move for a Humanist, but it suited Agricola who was ‘concerned not with eloquence or rhetoric but with the recovery of knowledge’. The presence there of the humanist schoolmaster Petrus Plateanus (1505-1551), a Brabantine, provided a supportive friendship for Agricola. It was a newly flourishing mining town, where mining on a large scale began in 1516, producing mainly silver (Urban 1980), but the miners would probably 8 Silver from the Joachimsthal mines was the source of coinage that was named the ‘thaler’. This name was taken over by Dutch banks, and from this the word ‘dollar’ came. have puzzled over another ‘mineral’ present in the orebody. This was pitchblende, the radioactive substance which was to be the source for the important research by Pierre and Marie Curie in the 1890s (Curie et al, 1898).9 It is highly likely that some, at least, of the miners would have been affected by radioactivity, but there is no recorded indication that Agricola had any hint of this threat to the miners’ health.10 However in the 9 Mme. P. Curie, ( Comptes rendus , vol. 126, p. 1101) expressed gratitude to Eduard Suess, [1831 - 1914] ‘Correspondent of the Institute and Professor at the University of Vienna. Thanks to his benevolent intervention, we have obtained from the Austrian government the free gift of 100 kg of a residue from the treatment of the Joachimsthal pitchblende, containing no Uranium, but containing polonium and radium. This gift will greatly facilitate our researches’. 10 For a surprisingly full detailed history of Joachimsthal mining history and the problems of radioactive minerals (including the discovery of uranium by Martin Klaproth 35 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola early pages of De re metallica ... while admitting that miners are sometimes killed by the ‘pestilential air which they breath’ or that ‘their lungs rot away’ Agricola gives a strong defense of the safety and value of mining. At Joachimsthal (now Jackymov) Agricola began to take a serious interest in mining and geology during his leisure hours. He became friendly with Lorenz Wermann (ca 1490- 1531/32), an earlier graduate from Leipzig, and an expert in metallurgy and mining who tutored Agricola (as probably also did Plateanus). Wermann soon appeared as the mining expert and protagonist Bermann in the Platonic -like dialogue Bermannus sive de re metallica Dialogus [Bermannus or about matters metallic] (1530), Agricola’s first foray into publications on geology and mining, which he reissued in 1541 and in Opuscula five years later. Three years were apparently enough for Agricola at Joachimsthal, and he travelled extensively again, gaining experience and knowledge on mining and geological matters before settling in Chemnitz. But there are few details of these times. Probably following on from Bermannus, Agticola, in 1533, announced his intention to write a larger work on metals and mining technology (essentially what finally appeared as De re metallicd). He had apparently been thinking about such a project in 1529, and might have already begun it. However it seems to have been put aside, or only worked on slowly while other publications appeared. Ellenberger (1988, pp. 195-196) placed Agricola’s life in its regional and economic context: in 1789, its later exploitation and consequent health problems during and after WWII) see the internet site Joachimsthal and pitchblende , [h@g2, approved entry A 1045 1099]. the region of central Europe stretches from Bohemia to the Har% embracing Saxony and Thuringia, at that time the richest in metal mines and the most advanced in mining technology. While the mineral concessions had belonged to the feudal rulers or to private capitalists, the mining communities had the use of franchises and considerable autonomy. . . . The Saxon (s. lat.) miner was not a convict, but a man proud of his occupation, and whose competence was recognised throughout Europe. When one speaks of mines, one speaks also of interest in the reality of the underground. Now, differing from the Greco-Roman intellectual elite, Renaissance man began to integrate the best of practical knowledge into the higher levels of knowledge. The mining knowledge of central Europe (and just a little later, of Sweden) contributed, in a decisive fashion, to the birth of modem Geology, in particular causing the theoreticians to take into consideration that the underground was a developed framework, essentially a vast underground \ 'architecture ’ [our translation]. 6. Relations with Contemporary ‘Scientific’ Authors While Agricola was perhaps the best informed of the authors of the Renaissance who both studied and interpreted the works of ancient writers interested in mining and geology, he was by no means alone. However it is not appropriate in this paper to do more than touch on this subject. Suffice to mention only works such as Pirotechnia (1 540) by Vanoccio Biringuccio (1480 - 1538?) and the later Treatise on Ores and Assaying (1574) by Lazarus Ercker (1528 — 1594), which deals with matters similar to those discussed by Agricola in De re metallica , the last-named justly regarded as a masterpiece of early technological writing’ (Hall, 1984). Also worth mention is The Schwa^er Bergbuch , 1556, for which see Lefevre (2010), where the colourful illustrations bear comparison with those of Agricola’s De re metallica. As Sprague de Camp (1963) points out, Agricola and 36 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. - Agricola Biringuccio influenced each other, not an uncommon phenomenon then as now. Dibner (1958) considered the difficulties met by Hoover & Hoover (1912, 1950), Bandy & Bandy (1955) and others in translating and understanding the many new Latin words coined by Agricola to name previously unnamed substances and mining terms, and to explain his ideas on numerous matters. The Hoovers had the advantage of a series of professional translators, and Herbert Hoover carried out laboratory experiments to test some of Agricola’s statements (Lerud, 1995). The problems posed by Agricola’s Latin were also considered in some detail by Morello (1994, p. 24). The major claim that Agricola was the first to put geology on a firm footing hinges on his abandoning speculation in favour of direct observation, as mentioned above. 7. Adam Siber and Valentin (e) Hertel, Source and Inspiration of the Elegy The Elegy was written by Adam Siber to his friend Valentin(e) Hertel. 11 Siber (Siberius) (1516 — 1584) was born in Schonau, son of a First Reformed preacher, Stephan Siber, of that town. In 1546 Siber came from Halle to Chemnitz, and became an Assistent to Agricola. For a summary of Valentin(e) Hertel’s life (ca 1500-1547) see Horst et al (1992). He was one of Agricola’s younger friends, born at Glauchau, studying at Leipzig from 1515 and appearing as a disputant on the subject of the Triune God where he is noted as being a graduate of Leipzig.12 He 11 Hertel is not mentioned in any of the standard German biographical works such as Killy & Vierhaus Dictionary or Killy’s Uteraturlexikon. 12 See the tide page of De Aere Theoremata Physica qua favente (& fovente Deo Triuno , a debate between M. Georgius Golner and Valentino Hertelio. Published Leipzig, 1620. Collection of Ev angelical Preachers. No portrait of Hertel has been located. was twice,over several periods, cantor of St Mary’s Church, Zwickau, and teacher at the Latin school there. From 1 539 he was Rector of the Latin School at Chemnitz where he is buried. Hoover & Hoover (1912, p. xiv) make a brief mention of letters Hertel wrote to the leading scholar Georgius Fabricius (1516 — 1571), author of the introductory ‘poem’ in De re metallic a. Following Hertel’s early death Siber became Rector at Chemnitz until 1559 when he moved to Grimma, dying there on 24 September 1584. Siber was also a friend of Fabricius, and is referred to as a humanist and pedagogue. He was a teacher and minor poet whose dedication to Hertel appears not only in the prefatory section of Agricola’s De ortu et causis subterranaeorum (1546) but also - in revised form - in his Aeolostichon , possibly written in 1550, and published in a collection of his works (1612). In translating the elegy we have occasionally turned to the revised edition (see Appendix) in an attempt to determine as accurately as possible the meaning of certain 37 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola fairly abstruse couplets. Siber (Siberius) (Figure 4) is much better known than Hertel. 8. Siber’ s Elegy and its Structure In addressing the ‘Signal to Noise Ratio’ of this paper’s title we now consider and translate the introductory Elegy to Agricola’s De ortu et causis subterraneorum. We are quite struck by the sentiments expressed by Siber, who was clearly an admirer of Agricola. Siber was apparently satisfied enough with the elegy to have it reprinted, with modifications, some years later with other of his poetical works, as mentioned above. In comparing Agricola with other writers Siber recognised the natural human desire to burst into print, but lamented the prevalence of psitticistic mediocrity in contemporary writing and rejoiced in Agricola’s original work. Many earlier writers on bookishness and scribbling have decried writing that is obsessive, vainglorious, or lacking in lucidity; writing that is a vehicle for vanity and even an impediment to the spread of knowledge, motivated purely by vanity. Several such are quoted here: qui de contemnanda Gloria libros scribunt, nomen suum inscribum [those writing books about the duty of despising glory, [don’t forget to] inscribe their own name (on the title page)]. [Cicero (I use. Disp., 1,15)] Catullus, too, criticised the 10,000 lines written by Suffenus on royal papyrus: neque idem umquam / aeque est beatus ac poema cum scribit / tam gaudet in se tamque se ipse miratur Pie is never so happy as when writing poetry, so much does he delight in and admire himself]. [Catullus 22: 15 — 21.] The Latin elegy is a form that imposes considerable constraints upon the poet because of its metrical requirements: that is to say, it is to comprise a series of couplets each of which has the first line in hexameter and the second line in pentameter, with each pentameter consisting of two halves of two and a half feet each (see below). These criteria proved quite challenging to Siber with the result that several couplets seem clumsily constructed and, ironically, their meaning also consequently becomes by no means crystal clear. For these reasons our translation is a free one. 1 2 3 4 5 6 -KJKJ | ™ W G | V./ V J j j - - Kf 12 12 -yy | ~yy | - J -uu ) -ww | - Figure 5. Fatin Elegy metrical requirements Siber’s Elegy — dedicated to Hertel — consists of forty-one couplets. The first fifteen directly relate to our title, Signal to Noise Ratio , in that the poet laments the proliferation of worthless works that produce nothing that has clarity and meaning. Couplets sixteen to nineteen list the requirements for good writing and express the hope that (like Agricola) Hertel will distinguish himself by producing, through diligent and painstaking effort, work that will justly earn him praise. The three following couplets offer a paean to Agricola whose work is rightly to be valued. Then couplets twenty three to thirty three introduce a list of the many contributions Agricola has made to the current body of knowledge of mineralogy. The couplets take the form of indirect questions and outline the many solutions to age-old questions that Agricola developed 38 Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Branagan et al. — Agricola through direct observation and careful recording. Throughout this section, and indeed, through the entire elegy, Siber liberally resorts to literary allusions the better to illustrate how effectively Agricola demolishes mythical explanations for the earth’s phenomena. There follow three couplets remarking on the lack of knowledge displayed by the eminent thinkers Theophrastus author of ‘On Stones ...’, Aristode and even Pliny the Elder (a major source for Agricola), and then four couplets (thirty seven to forty) constituting an accolade to the value and deserved permanence of Agricola’s work. The final couplet validates the choice of title for our paper: so much that is worthless simply fades away, while Agricola’s signal is received loud and clear. Although such introductory poems are relatively infrequent in ‘geoscience’ publications, there are several such in Agricola’s works, this one in De ortu ... and that in De re metallica. The Hoovers (1912) dismiss Fabricius’ relatively long introductory poem to De re metallica , written in 1551, as ‘of little intrinsic value’ and ‘not poetry of a very high order’ and they simply reproduce it in Latin. 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