The Incidental Tourist Read online

  My most vivid recollection of that first trip to Lyon is, though, of being shown around a unique facility that Mérieux was operating to ‘harvest’ adult human gamma globulin (HGG). Blood product companies like Australia’s CSL normally fractionate HGG (which contains the protective antibodies that a normal person makes throughout life as a consequence of vaccination and/or infection) from the cell-free serum phase of blood given by donors at transfusion centres. Injected periodically into children who are born without a functioning immune system, a condition called Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease (SCID), HGG allows them to live reasonably normal lives outside a plastic bubble. And it can also be used to protect older people who are permanently, or temporarily (due to cancer treatment with cytotoxic drugs), immunosuppressed. But Mérieux had an alternative source of HGG. Spoiler alert: If you are at all queasy about the idea of being in a factory that’s processing minced human tissues, stop reading now, and begin again after the end of the next paragraph.

  Having trained initially as a veterinarian, an experience that (at least in the Australian context) leads to spending some time in slaughterhouses and a qualification as a certified meat inspector, I’d thought that I was pretty much inured to anything. But I did find the Mérieux human placenta processing facility to be a bit off-putting. Placenta processing? After the baby is delivered, the placenta that enables nutrients to pass from the mother to the foetus is soon expelled. Loaded with blood, the placenta is a rich source of HGG. As a consequence, the Mérieux company was collecting frozen human placentas from all over Western and Eastern Europe and bringing them to Lyon. After going though a mincer, the disrupted tissue was lightly centrifuged to separate off the fluid phase, which was then cleaned up and concentrated via various processing steps to extract the filtered (to remove bacteria) HGG fraction. The final product was then dispensed into vials, labelled and sold for human use. That was fine until the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit in 1981 and blood-borne infection (the possibility of HIV or hepatitis virus contamination) made it just too risky to use unidentified donor material like bulk-collected human placentas. So far as I’m aware, the approach is now consigned to history, though HGG, and various other components extracted from human serum, are still very expensive, important for many therapies, and big business.

  The next visit to Lyon was more than twenty years later, when we both attended the joint meeting of the World Veterinary Congress (WVC) and the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA). Though I’m known as a biomedical scientist who interrogates the immune system, my initial training was in veterinary medicine. Soon after the October 1996 Nobel announcement, one of the earliest calls I received was from Charles Pilet, the Dean of the famous French Veterinary College at Alfort. Pilet reckoned that I was the only person with a vet training to be recognised by a Nobel committee and so, to date, it has turned out to be. And that’s what brought us (in March 1999) to Lyon’s relatively new Palais de Congrès. Lyon was a most fitting venue. Though Alfort is near Paris, Lyon was the site of the world’s first veterinary college founded (in 1765) by Claude Bourgelat.

  We flew into Antoine St Exupéry Airport – named after the author of The Little Prince, who was born into an aristocratic Lyon family – from Amsterdam and stayed in the Hilton (now Marriott) hotel at the Congress Centre. My formal job load was pretty light, and all I had to do was give a lecture at the WSAVA event and award a number of prizes funded by Merial. And there was the pleasure of again meeting Charles Mérieux, who still seemed to be very clear in his mind though he was, by then, using a wheelchair. It was also an honour to hand out the Merial Awards, particularly that for Relief of Pain, to Avril Waterman-Pearson, who is still publishing articles about minimising suffering in animals.

  The other great experience was my first encounter with 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug (1914–2009), who was recognised for his contribution to the science-based, 1950s–1960s ‘Green Revolution’. Honoured for his work as a plant breeder while working at CIMMYT, the CGIAR wheat and maize research institute in Mexico, Borlaug was there to award the World Food Prize to a hero of animal agriculture, the veterinary virologist Walter Plowright (1923–2010) for his work with the deadly cattle disease, rinderpest. Though I have an early background in veterinary virology, it was the first and last time I met Plowright, who disliked the limelight and spent much of his professional life in East Africa. Sadly, he did not live to see the formal 2011 announcement, which we attended at UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome, that rinderpest was one of the two virus diseases (smallpox is the other) that have been formally eradicated from the planet. Incidentally, a major reason for starting that first veterinary school in Lyon was to teach eighteenth century principles of rinderpest control.

  Listening to Borlaug on subsequent trips to Lyon as a participant in BioVision conferences, he was a strong advocate for population control and the use of science (particularly GM technology) in agriculture. The French, who pride themselves on being rational, regarded him as a hero, though he was (of course) vilified by those on both the right (pro-infinite ‘growth’) and left (‘GM is evil and will kill you’) of the global political spectrum. It is ironic that his work as a plant breeder during the Green Revolution had succeeded in delaying the negative consequences predicted by the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth publication, a philosophical position that he ardently supported. Of all people, Borlaug also understood the limitations of classical genetics for adapting food plants to the severe environmental stresses associated with rapid climate change.

  Back at the WVA/WSAVA meeting, we enjoyed dinners catered by four grand chefs Lyonnaise. The first featured maître de cuisinier de France Paul Bocuse. Held in the Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine, the main course was chicken, though without the pig’s bladder this time. And we also ate lobster, goat’s cheese and chocolate cake, accompanied by Champagne (Laurent-Perrier), Pouilly-Fuisse (Georges Duboeuf) and Côte Rôtie (Etienne Guigal). Then, the following evening we were in the ornate grand hall of the seventeenth century Hotel de Ville (town hall), where the (much larger) dinner was the creation of Jean-Paul Lacombe, Pierre Orsi and Jean Paul Pignol. Featured on the menu in various forms were truffles, pigeons, marcellin (cheese) and ginger cake. And here I drop my dubious attempt at being a food writer – though I remember two pleasant events in impressive settings, my recollection of the degustation is totally from the menus that we kept!

  Our latest visit to Lyon was for the 2009 BioVision conference, with the accommodation, as always for this event, being at the Sofitel Lyon Bellecour. Not on-site but within walking distance of the Palais de Congrès, it was a particular pleasure to enjoy coffee and croissants or pain au chocolat for breakfast as, high in the Bellecour dining room, we looked down on the Rhone and the newer part of Lyon arrayed on the right bank of the river. The food and coffee were no better than we experience in Melbourne, but the ambience is impressive.

  The BioVision meetings were great for hearing a spectrum of different insights. Apart from encountering the complexities (positive and negative) associated with UNESCO, listening to water engineers, town planners, agriculturalists, renewable energy developers, sanitation specialists, and so forth, was immensely interesting. A lot of what needs to be done to ensure a sustainable future for humanity is neither dramatic nor especially newsworthy, but it does require resources and political commitment. In this city, where two great rivers merge, it was illuminating to be informed by the intersection of such diverse streams of thought and best practice.

  A further memorable experience at BioVision was meeting François Jacob (1920–2013). A genuine hero of France (Croix de Guerre), Jacob broke off his medical studies, fled to Britain (in 1940) and joined the medical company of De Gaulle’s 2nd Armoured Division. Injured in a German air raid, he returned with the Free French liberation of Paris in August 1944, completed his MD and (in 1950) joined the laboratory headed by Andre Lwoff and Jacques Monod at the Institut Pasteur. The thr
ee shared the 1965 Medicine Nobel for their ‘Discoveries concerning genetic control and virus synthesis’. A modest man, Jacob tells his story in The Statue Within, which is a good read for anyone who is thinking of a career in science, or holds the mistaken view that most scientists are tunnel-visioned, colourless nerds.

  While I saw the interiors of some spectacular old Lyon buildings, encountered intriguing examples of public art on display at the Palais de Congrès and had the pleasure of walking along the banks of the Rhône, these multidisciplinary meetings were fascinating and generally took most of my time. Penny did better in that sense as she spent more time in the old town and saw, for instance, the historic Jacquard looms from Lyon’s past as a centre for silk making, particularly the production of elegant silk damasks. As any convention spouse knows, being the accompanying person is often the better option for the dedicated traveller.

  CHAPTER 16

  Steely resolve

  PROMINENT IN THE PLANE window as, still low, we turned and tilted after take-off, I guessed that the piles of coal and iron ore portside at Pohang in November 2007 were likely from Australia. I’d heard a story that Western Australia’s Hamersley Iron had been a big help in getting the Korean steel industry going, and Queensland was a big supplier of the high-quality anthracite required for steel production. That’s the steely component of our gift to South Korea.

  We still produce some steel in Australia, of course, though the need to renew old plant and the inexorable reach of the twin and unforgiving gods of free trade agreements and globalisation has greatly diminished our local industry. No sense crying over spilled milk, but it’s more than a bit of a worry that Australia relies so much on a resource-depletion, dig-it-up and sell-it-off economy. South Korea has a mining industry but, like other nations (Japan, Israel) that place technical innovation and manufacturing at the forefront, the economy is not based on the massive extraction of non-renewable resources.

  Though it will be centuries before the planet’s coal reserves run out, any sane person understands that we have to get off the fossil fuel-burning kick as soon as possible, while realising at the same time that this is very hard to achieve. Among the most technologically difficult challenges are to replace the energy concentrated in coking (not thermal) coal for steel production and the jet fuel needed to power the Korean Airlines plane that, after a stay-over in Seoul, would take me non-stop from Inchon airport back home to Melbourne. Otherwise, though some of the technology has a way to go, Australia enjoys enormous potential for tapping renewable energy from solar, wind, ground heat (geothermal), tides and biomass. Maybe in the longer term we’ll be exporting hydrogen or electricity in fully charged battery ships or via cable to nearby nations like Indonesia. After all, we live on the planet’s biggest solar collector.

  Even with an Australian focus on mining that progressively withdraws from fossil fuel extraction, the two countries are natural economic partners. South Korea needs a spectrum of metals, including uranium and (hopefully) as new reactor technologies develop, the less risky thorium. The Republic of Korea currently operates twenty-five U-235 fission plants and, by 2029, the aim is to supply 70 per cent of its electricity from that source. And, in collaboration with the United States’s Argonne National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute, the South Koreans are planning an advanced, liquid sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor that uses metal pins composed of low-enriched uranium and zirconium. Such new-generation reactors are designed to be safe and to shut down without operator intervention, avoiding the type of disaster we saw at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant when the tsunami hit in March 2011.

  In addition, the South Koreans are constructing four new nuclear plants in the United Arab Emirates and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is looking at the possibility of supplying two (or more) SMART reactors to Saudi Arabia. Costing about US$1 billion, the modules for these smaller 500-megawatt generators are built in a factory, and then shipped for assembly on-site. It is intriguing that these hot, dry Middle Eastern countries are not opting solely for solar. They must have done the math (or contracted others to advise them) and are preparing for the fact that, by the time the oil runs out, there will be an even greater need for air conditioning and water desalination.

  Since 2007, South Korea has also been experimenting with a research tokamak (like the one at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, see chapter 1, ‘The incidental tourist’) as part of the global effort to solve the problem of exploiting the energy derived from nuclear fusion (the H bomb is a nuclear-fusion device) for electricity generation. Though fusion still produces radioactive waste, this has a short half-life and is soon dissipated. Nuclear fusion provides, of course, the light and heat from our sun that ultimately enables all life.

  The molten core at the Earth’s centre is, on the other hand, thought to be a uranium nuclear-fission reactor that heats the hot rocks and lava we see spewed out in a volcanic eruption. That natural power plant provides at least half the heat for our planet, and is what we try to access better by drilling deep wells for harvesting geothermal energy. It’s considerably less demanding in the technical sense to use ground-sourced, heat-pumped technology to harness the energy available at much shallower depths, an application that, currently used for domestic (and some industrial) heating and cooling, could be greatly expanded.

  At the end of the 1949–53 Korean War, the International Monetary Fund regarded South Korea as an economic basket case. With the help of the United States, Japan was already establishing itself as a substantial economic power and the Philippines was number two in the Asia–Pacific region. Now, if we consider that part of the world, South Korea (50.5 million people) is third after the People’s Republic of China (1.35 billion) and Japan (127 million) and well above the Philippines (102 million). Why is this so? My time in Pohang provided an obvious lesson.

  Pohang is home to one of Asia’s top soccer teams (Pohang Steelers) and the POSCO steel company, the reason for the coal and iron ore I saw on the wharves. My visit resulted from an invitation to give a seminar at Pohang’s POSCO International Center while visiting the prestigious Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). Based on the US model of Pasadena’s Caltech, POSTECH was established by POSCO in 1986 to provide advanced education for budding engineers and to drive South Korean technological development. Yes, that’s right: acting from enlightened self-interest, an entrepreneurial and imaginative company started a top-quality, research-intensive university!

  Australia has a number of major, high-ranked universities and, though a local POSTECH would be a plus, we can build what we need from that model into our existing institutions. A successful strategy for securing a reasonable slice of the advanced technology pie in this globalised world is to forge strong ties between business (big and small) and financial, science/engineering entrepreneurs and our universities. That’s happening in Melbourne via collaborations with, for example, US companies like IBM and Boeing. Still, the Asian/Korean investment model, with government, industrialists and academia working together to foster long-term thinking and development (rather than selfish libertarian anarchy and short-term profits) makes a lot of sense.

  POSTECH is not the only higher education institution with a primary, advanced technology focus in South Korea, but it is an extraordinary place. Small and, following the Caltech model, with an equal number of postgraduates and undergraduates, it provides a subsidised, accessible education for South Korea’s most gifted students. In the Times Higher Education supplement for 2016, POSTECH, Seoul National University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAST) rank seven, eight and nine for Asian universities, with numbers one and two being the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. Like South Korea, Singapore is dedicated to the idea of an economic future based in flexibility, working smart and innovation. Compared with the next biggest institution on that list (KAST), POSTECH has about one-third the number of students.

  Th
ough started as an engineering school, POSTECH’s initial physics, chemistry, metals and materials oriented remit has been broadened to encompass the molecular technology and genetic engineering approaches central to innovation and problem-solving in the life sciences and biomedicine. That’s why, of course, I’d been invited to speak in Pohang. And apart from the opportunity to talk about the current findings from our viral immunology group, I also met a number of interesting and very smart people. One particularly memorable conversation was with a senior POSCO executive who observed that the useful output from their research division was pretty unpredictable. But, like industry leaders I’ve spoken with in Singapore, he also made the point, ‘What other options do we have?’

  Additional to seeing spectacular examples of POSCO’s innovative work with steel, the other ‘different’ event I experienced that day was being issued with white gloves, a gold-plated (or painted, or novel alloy) shovel and being asked to plant a tree. Though I’ve not been back to check, I’m told the tree is doing fine. And I guess it’s taking at least a little bit of CO2 out of the atmosphere!

  This was, in fact, my second visit to South Korea. We’d been there two years earlier when I’d given a lecture in a Hyundai-Kia Motors series celebrating the centennial of Korea University. Established in 1905 as Bosung College, the facility survived through the 1910–45 period of Japanese rule and is now a private research university with some 20,000 undergraduate and 10,000 postgraduate students. We were driven around in big black Hyundai limousines, received the visiting dignitary treatment, and were also taken on a two-day conducted tour of significant historical sites.