Good Weekend's Who Mattered 2019: Science

Akshay Venkatesh: this Perth-raised mathematician and Stanford professor is "one of Australia’s greatest minds". Plus: Lisa Harvey-Smith and Jacques Miller.

Akshay Venkatesh

Winning the Fields Medal in late 2018, Akshay Venkatesh became only the second Australian to take home the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians aged under 40, and Venkatesh, 38, won for “his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory”.

“Akshay is one of Australia’s greatest minds, and he’s under-appreciated for two reasons,” says The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age science writer Liam Mannix. “One, he’s based in the US. And two, it is really, really hard to understand his work. When I interviewed one of his friends, a professor of mathematics, I said, ‘Can you explain it to me?’ and he said, ‘Well, no. It’s impossible to explain.’ That’s the level at which he’s operating.”

Venkatesh grew up in Perth, and at 13 became the youngest person to study at the University of Western Australia. They didn’t know what level to start him, so he took home a handful of first-year exams and aced them without having done the courses. “His mother brought him to the brilliant Cheryl Praeger – who won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science last month – because she was concerned about what to do with this gifted child,” says Mannix. “They were chatting. Then they looked up, and Akshay had solved a bunch of equations she’d been struggling with on her blackboard.”

He went to study at Princeton University at 16, and is now a professor at Stanford. He also works with New Jersey’s Institute of Advanced Study, where Nobel Prize-winner Albert Einstein did his deepest thinking. “They basically bring you over,” says Mannix, “and say, ‘You’re one of humanity’s great geniuses. We’re not going to ask what you want to do – just come here and do what you want, because what you’ll produce is probably vitally important to mankind.’ ”

Lisa Harvey-Smith

In her life as an unknown but exceptional astrophysicist, Lisa Harvey-Smith was frighteningly qualified. She had published more than 40 scientific papers, spent a decade working with the CSIRO, and played a leading role in helping Australia win the bid to co-host the Square Kilometre Array telescope, which will survey the sky at speeds 10,000 times faster than currently available.

But Harvey-Smith is no anonymous astronomer. She has become one of the best communicators in Australian science, starting with When Galaxies Collide, her 2018 book about the Andromeda galaxy hurtling towards us. (Don’t worry, it won’t be here for another 5.86 billion years.) Soon after, she was appointed Professor of Practice at the University of NSW, and named Australia’s first “Women in STEM Ambassador” – tasked with promoting gender equity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Her profile is soaring. This year, she was a presenter on the ABC series Stargazing Live and also released a children’s book, Under the Stars: Astrophysics for Bedtime, which teaches kids why the sky is blue, and why Jupiter has stripes. As Mark Dapin wrote in a Good Weekend profile last year: “I have never met a more accomplished PhD in radio astronomy, who’s also an ultramarathon-running javelin champion judoka TV presenter with a background in LGBTI advocacy – at least, not one who is such a fanatical supporter of Arsenal Football Club.”

“Lisa has moved from being an extraordinary scientist to an extraordinary leader in science, which is a step that not everybody is equipped to make, or wants to take,” says science writer Liam Mannix. “But Lisa brought two important attributes to the problem. First, she saw that it was important – she recognised that somebody needed to lead for women in science. Then she simply said, ‘I’m the person best equipped to do this, so I will.’ ”

Jacques Miller

Every year as Nobel Prize season warms up, Jacques Miller, 88, begins fielding calls from all over the world, all with the same message: This is going to be your year, Jacques. “And he always says, ‘No, no, no, I’m just an old man,’ ” says science writer Liam Mannix. “But his contributions to research underpin the way we now treat cancer. In science, you often work all your life at something, you retire, and you don’t know if any of it was worth doing. Jacques knows his toil was worth it.”

In 1961, Miller was studying leukaemia in newborn mice when he realised they were lacking a crucial white blood cell, which he named the T-cell (after the thymus, where they originate). T-cells, he discovered, were distinct from another type of cell he identified, B-cells, which work together as warriors of the immune system. “Nobody believed him,” says Mannix. “One of his colleagues wrote a paper and said the only thing that’s interesting about B and T cells is that they’re the first and last letters of the word ‘bullshit’. This is how other researchers responded to his work, calling it rubbish.”

Almost 60 years later, Miller’s work underpins immunotherapy, the incredible new technology that reactivates the immune system to fight cancer. Earlier this year, Miller was the joint winner of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (considered America’s Nobel Prize), for the work he
did at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Right now, his work is saving thousands of lives around the world, and immunotherapy has only just got going – it will eventually be the biggest breakthrough in cancer research,” Mannix says. “It highlights the truism that sometimes, you’ve just gotta wait for your discoveries to change the world.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.