Understanding microbial pathogenesis: the role of creativity

Ellen Yang: Good evening.  Thank you for joining us for UTS Speaks Tonight.  I'm Ellen Yang, the director of the Creative Intelligence Unit here at UTS and your MC for tonight's event.
 

We are pleased to be presenting this special edition of Shapeshifters as part of the 2014 Ultimo Science Festival.  The Shapeshifters series is a result of the ongoing collaboration between UTS and the Federal Government's Creative Industries Innovation Centre.  The centre is a key contributor of our national understanding of the value of the creative economy and we are fortunate to have hosted it here at UTS over the past five years.
 

Tonight in Shapeshifters Creative Breakthroughs, we continue to engage in the sharing of knowledge about creativity and innovation and explore the relationship between science and creativity.  We live in a world of accelerating change.  Consider the everyday life experiences of millions of today's students and teenagers.  They view live images from every corner of the world and talk with or exchange video images with their friends, families and other people who live many time zones away. 
 

They have more technology in their classrooms and backpacks than existed in the workplace of their parents 20 years ago.  They will study subjects that were unknown when their teachers and parents were students and they're likely to enter careers that don’t yet exist. They will routinely encounter other people of diverse backgrounds and experiences and they will grow up to interact, collaborate and compete with others around the globe.
 

If we expect these young people to become tomorrow's leaders and professionals, how do we, as professionals and leaders ourselves today, nurture, grow and prepare them for these roles?  At UTS we aim to raise lifelong learners, knowledge creators and problem solvers who can live and work effectively in a world of constant change.
 

Our bachelor of creative intelligence and innovation combines creative and critical thinking with enquiry based and scientific reasoning skills.  To create, discover or innovate, whether we come from the arts, sciences or business, we need to be able to understand and question the world we're exploring, draw on ideas from multiple fields of knowledge and experience and combine and recombine these pieces to build new shapes or connect the dots.
 

It is human curiosity and creativity that drives us to ask, what if, and think through the consequences.  This evening you will hear from three thought leaders who will present their different perspectives on creativity and science.  We also want to hear from you, the audience, questions that you may have for our speakers and your views and ideas.  We will open the floor for discussion on tonight's themes and questions once all three of our Shapeshifters have shared their perspectives.

Please also note that the presentations and discussion afterwards are digitally recorded and filmed and these will be made available on the UTS website in the very near future.  I would also ask that out of courtesy could you please keep your questions and sharing of your views brief to ensure that all have a chance to contribute to the discussion.  Last but not least would you please switch your phones onto silent to ensure that you do not actually interfere with the recording.  If you happen to leave early please also close the doors quietly behind you.

Now, let's meet the first of our Shapeshifters.  Dr Cynthia Whitchurch is the NHMRC senior research fellow in the UTS i3 Institute.  She also established and is the director of the UTS Microbial Imaging Facility which provides state of the art imaging and analysis technologies for the study of microorganisms and their interactions with host cells.  
 

Cynthia has investigated bacterial pathogenesis for over 20 years and developed considerable experience with optical microscopy techniques to study bacterial cell biology, biofilms, bacterial collective behaviours and host pathogen interactions.  You can tell I'm not a scientist.

She has a PhD from the University of Queensland and postdoctoral training from the University of California in San Francisco.  Would you please welcome Cynthia.
 

[Applause]
 

Cynthia Whitchurch: Okay, so welcome.  So we're here today to consider the question of what's the role for creativity in science.  So I wanted to first have you think about the definition of creativity and according to the Oxford Dictionary, creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something, in other words, its inventiveness.  
 

So I'm going to get off this very bright slide.  I would argue that creativity is actually the basis of the scientific endeavour.  Yes, science requires experimentation and observation and interpretation of results, but the true basis of the scientific endeavour itself is the initial creation or imagination of the hypothesis and questions and use of imagination to interpret the outcomes and results of the experiments that we perform.  
 

So we also need a really strong sense of curiosity to be scientists.  We need to have the question, why, how, why is that happening?  So curiosity and creativity go hand in hand and therefore creativity is the basis of true scientific endeavour.  Creativity is also the basis of innovation where science meets inventiveness.  So we can't really get to the innovation without the creativity in the first place to be able to translate the outcomes of the scientific questioning.  
 

So I'm sure when many of you think of scientists, you think of people in white lab coats beavering away at lab benches with lots of pretty coloured or multi-coloured solutions in front of them.  Yes, this is absolutely essential for the scientific process to occur and we can have incremental advances that have happened throughout history by the hardworking efforts of many scientists, but really creativity is the driving force behind those really out of the box thinking moments.  The aha, the eureka and the light bulb moments that lead to real innovation and the great leaps forward in science. So as you can tell I would argue that creativity is essential for science. 
 

So in fact I think it's no mystery that when we think of some of the greatest scientists throughout history, we quite often call them creative geniuses and here's that word again, creativity.  In fact I also want you think that many of these scientific advances have come through the effort of just pure observation.  If you think of Newton having an apple fall on his head, he had to have that imagination, that curiosity to go, oh I wonder why that is, and hence we have an understanding of gravity.
 

So I'm just going to spend a little bit of time right now having you think about the role for funding in creativity and science.  So there's no secret that we require funding for science to occur.  Scientists need to get paid.  They need to eat, but we also need to have tools and resources to actually do our science and all of this costs money.  But many of you may not know that less than one out of every five grants that gets submitted, grant applications that get submitted to our two major funding bodies, less than one of these will actually get funded.  But in fact we know that at least four out of five of every application that goes to these major government funded bodies is actually considered worthy of funding.
 

So that means there's a lot of really good science that are really creative and innovative ideas, things that could end up being hugely important and we don’t know whether they will be or not that are just not being funded and therefore they progress really slowly or if at all.

So what's also worth noting is that many of the grants that do get funded are actually at inadequate levels to really achieve the goals that the scientist had set forth.  So this limited funding leads to really a tendency to fund safe science.  So this is science where there's lots of data already acquired, no real risk involved.  There's a very good chance of success.  There's a lot of emphasis on track record and that's why these things get funded.  
 

So this emphasis on track record tends to lead to this publish or perish mentality, whereas we as scientists are under enormous pressure to continue to publish.  So we break our science up into little incremental pieces so that we can get as many publications as we can to build our track records, but this actually makes it really difficult to do really creative science.  We don’t have the time to sit back and really think and imagine and question, and the real out of the box and blue sky thinking that we need to do, it's hard to do that under the current funding arrangements.
 

So it's even far more difficult then to get funding for these really innovative ideas and certainly very difficult to get funding for just curiosity driven research, which as you will see soon is very important.  I'm not the only one that worries about this.  There's international concern, there's conversations going on by scientists with other scientists and with governments,  There's true concern as to what this inadequate level of research funding is doing to creativity in science and we're really concerned that in fact scientific progress is slowing.  We're actually not having the opportunities to have these great leaps forward in science because inadequate funding is stifling creativity and innovation.  So that was my little political statement for the evening.
 

So I'm a true believer in curiosity driven research.  In fact I really like this quote from Irving Langmuir, history proves abundantly that pure science, undertaken without regard to applications for human need, is usually ultimately of direct benefit to mankind.  Someone rubbing two sticks together invented fire.  We all have to admit that that was pretty important for mankind.
 

So in other words we really can't predict what the future benefits of curiosity driven research will be.  In fact almost all of the Nobel Prize winning research outcomes and the advances that are derived from them have come from curiosity driven research.  

For example, the recent Nobel Prize awarded to the person who found and answered the question, why is it that jellyfish glow green?  Why is that?  He found a protein that has since become one of the most important tools in modern science where we can now tag different proteins and really get to understand all sorts of questions like how does cancer happen?  How do neurons develop?  How do bacteria do these things?
 

Even closer to home the discovery of Wi-Fi or the invention of Wi-Fi actually was an outcome of trying to understand how the universe works, in particular how do black holes - what are black holes and how do they work?  So you can't predict, no one would have predicted that Wi-Fi would be the outcome of research into black holes.  
 

So I would argue that both basic science, curiosity driven science as well as applied and targeted science, are both needed for major scientific breakthroughs to occur and therefore ultimately benefit humankind.  
 

So I just want to spend a little bit of time going through some of my examples of curiosity driven research because I'm a scientist and I run a research group in the i3 Institute at UTS and in the i3 Institute, i3 stands for infection, immunity and innovation.  I think it's important that we understand, we really are trying to find innovative ways to address major problems with infection as you will see, and how to develop that into real world solutions.  
 

So we're very particularly concerned about antibiotic resistant super bugs and we should all be very concerned about this because they’ve been identified as one of the greatest threats to humanity by the World Health Organisation.  
 

In fact we're on the verge of returning to a pre-antibiotic era.  This is an era with just normal surgeries, things that we take for granted, everything that we do in modern medicine, most of it can only be done because of the invention of antibiotics and we're on the verge of antibiotics just not working anymore.  There are bacteria out there that are resistant to all antibiotics and there are none or very few new antibiotics even being invented at the moment.
 

So some of the things we take for granted will be hugely risky.  We need to appreciate this and take it very seriously.  In fact we urgently require innovative approaches to combat bacterial infections.  We need to invent new antibiotics.  We need to invest in research to understand how bacteria do what they do so that we can come up with ways of inventing new antibiotics.  
 

We also need to improve or antibiotics stewardship and we all can play a role in this.  You can go to the doctor for a viral infection and don’t insist or expect to get antibiotics to treat that.  You should be trying to purchase food that doesn’t require antibiotics in the food chain to be able to grow those animals.  So the power of the dollar can go a huge way to improving stewardship for our antibiotics.
 

We also have to come up with really innovative ways to treat and prevent infections and that's one of the areas that I'm particularly interested in.  
 

So we do need to wonder and worry, and I certainly worry about this, are we already in the post antibiotic era?  We now know that antibiotic resistant bacteria kill 23,000 Americans and 27,000 Europeans every year already and we expect that number to continue to increase unless we can do something now and urgently about addressing this issue.   
 

So is it already here?  If you look at the literature and you look at the internet there are story after story after story about super bugs and unless you’ve been under a rock for the last few years you must have come across this, or if you haven’t I want you to be aware of it.

So in fact the numbers are really scary.  As I said, 23,000 deaths in America every year and over two million illnesses that are completely attributable to antibiotic resistant organisms.  They cost lots of money to treat.  We are talking billions of dollars in extended hospital stays to deal with these infections.
 

So what are we doing or what I am doing in my research?  I'm particularly interested in understanding how bacteria grow as communities, behave as communities because they can form these really antibiotic resistant and really antibiotic tolerant communities called biofilms.  

The movie playing on the left hand side here to me, your right hand side, is a movie of a bacterial biofilm as it's crawling across the surface.  If you can imagine that biofilm migrating across the surface of a catheter, climbing up that catheter, these creepy crawly bugs getting to your blood and causing infection, it's a scary and terrifying thought.  
 

In fact over half of all hospital acquired infections are due to implanted medical devices and over half of these are due to catheter associated urinary tract infections and this is one of these organisms here.  

So bacteria colonise catheter surfaces as these multi cellular structures that are encased in a slime called biofilms and they can actively expand along the catheter to the bladder where they cause UTI infection, not use UTS infection.  Sorry about that.
 

[Laughter]      
 

Cynthia Whitchurch: So this is a problem because many hospitals, they try to deal with these things.  You try to prevent these infections from occurring with antibiotics and those antibiotics are quite often inappropriately used.  This leads to a large reservoir of multi drug resistant super bugs in healthcare facilities.  
 

In fact to deal with this, most of the time if you’ve ever been in a hospital or you know of someone who has a UTI catheter, a Foley catheter, they try to remove that within three days.  That's largely because that's about how long it takes for most infections to form and migrate to the bladder and cause a problem, but three days is not a very long time.
 

So we studied this and during our studies, what we noticed is that these biofilms as they expand along the surface, you can see here, the bacteria are crawling down the screen at this point, you can see they move out in these really multi cellular highly coordinated rafts.  But as they do that behind them they form these really intricate lattice like network of trails that you can see up here on this picture of the biofilm there.
 

Seriously, there was no real question here, other than true curiosity as to how do they do that?  How did little individual bacteria coordinate their behaviour across thousands and thousands of them to form this really intricate network pattern?  

What we noticed in our movies on our microscopes is that you get these cool little trails that are formed behind them as they're migrating out across the screen there, little groups of them at the front edge and then you get these little bacteria that are running up and down those trails.  They kind of get confined in these trails that have been put down by the expanding biofilm.  So maybe that's got a clue, things like to follow trails.  
 

So through the efforts of my great research team and through collaborators we've got to an answer as to how this happens.  What we found is that they build their own little furrows, they build their own roadways.  They actually dig, furrows through the agar as they crawl across the agar and that confines them to those trails, so they’ve made this really intricate roadway network.  That explains at least in part how the trails form, but what we also found is that there's a whole bunch of - there's a lot of DNA in there.  
 

So these bacteria produce extra cellular DNA.  This is DNA that yes it encodes genes, but what the DNA is doing here is it's acting like a slime and that's all its function is.  It's just this slippery slime, a sticky slime that the bacteria are producing. 
 

These are some of our experiments that we showed it has a very important role, where you can see on the top there, they're making those trails that I talked about, the bacteria running up and down like little ants and the trails being highly organised.  

When we put an enzyme into the media and these are the bottom two panels, the enzyme called DNA is it degrades all the extra cellular DNA.  You can see that it dramatically alters the behaviour of the biofilm as it's expanding. If you look on your right hand side there, the bacteria are moving, they're jiggling around, but they're really confused and they're clearly nowhere near as coordinated.
 

So what we know is that the extra cellular DNA has this very, very important role in directing traffic through the roadway network of furrows that the bacteria built themselves.  So bacteria are like little civil engineers and they can do things like we do, we build streets and we have traffic lights.  If we behave, then we can get from A to B really easily, but if we misbehave we can end up in these traffic jams and no one is going anywhere really fast.  A bit like Sydney traffic when there's a breakdown on the bridge.
 

So okay, great, we've got curiosity driven research out of the way.  We can now understand how trails form in bacteria.  So what?  Well, what we're trying to do now is exploit that new knowledge to make better catheters.  So can we alter the surfaces of medical devices to inhibit the migration of the bacteria along that surface by controlling the traffic?
 

In fact, I'm really excited because we've been successfully, at least in the lab, been able to do this and these are some examples.  I won't tell you what we've done to treat them, but let me just say, we've exploited this new knowledge.  We can now significantly inhibit how fast bacteria are able to crawl across the surface of silicone to expand their biofilms. 
 

So on here you’ve got a picture of the biofilm on the left, on the right, left, your left, on the untreated side and on the treated side you can see we've pretty much stopped movement all together.  Hugely exciting, it means that we could probably make better catheters to inhibit biofilms.  What's very important about this is there are no antibiotics.  There's no antibiotic pressure.  There will be no drive for antibiotic resistance and it should be a very cheap method for us to make.  
 

So we're hugely excited and this has come purely through just trying to understand how the bacteria interact and form that really intricate network of trails.  We couldn’t have predicted this, but we're very excited by it.  
 

I then want to just quickly talk to you about some other really interesting observations we've made.  Again, curiosity driven research.  We know that the bacteria that I work on, Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, is highly tolerant to many of the very common antibiotics that are used around the world.  These are the beta-lactam antibiotics that are your penicillin type antibiotics and they lead to recurrent infections.  
 

So what we found is that just by looking down the microscope and trying to ask the question like what's going on?  We found that they do these really crazy things.  
 

So this bacteria is normally a rod shaped organism, but as soon as we put it in the presence of these antibiotics it completely changes into a whole other lifestyle that we didn’t know about, but the entire population will shift.  It will go okay, I don’t want to be a rod anymore.  You're attacking my cell wall which is how these antibiotics work.  I'm going to turn into something that doesn’t have a cell wall, but I'm really happy and I can still live. 
 

Scarily though, is when we take away the antibiotic, the whole thing transitions back.  So the whole population very rapidly turns back into the rod shape form and starts dividing again.  So these are how these infections are able to tolerate exposure to the antibiotics.  They just switch form and then they switch back, and then they switch form, and then they switch back.  So they are way smarter than we ever gave them credit for.
 

What we discovered however, is that these things are highly susceptible to a combination of the antibiotic with an antimicrobial peptide, and if you can see the movie here, we blow them up.  We can make the bacteria explode and there's no coming back from that.  That's a dead bug.  
 

So it's simply by understanding what's going on.  We looked down a microscope and went, oh that's really weird and then we went somewhere with it and we now think we've got a new approach to killing bacteria.  In fact many, many different species of bacteria go through this process.  So again we're very excited.  
 

So my experiences with creativity in science, I've had a 25 year long career of just looking down the microscope and being curious about what's going on.  I'm really interested in understanding how bacteria live, how they self-organise into these multi cellular communities and how they switch between these different lifestyles.
 

This basic research has required creativity in all sorts of forms.  We had to form the questions, we had to develop new techniques, we had to interpret the observations, we had to ask the questions in the first place and see what we see and then go I wonder what that is.  So many people see what they see, but then they go, oh that's a bit weird, but I've got to get my grant, I've got to focus on this thing because that's not one of the aims of my grant and you’ve got to keep going.
 

So you can see how the pressure to get funding, the pressure to publish is actually really inhibitory to truly creative and innovative science and it has led to really exciting possibilities of how we may come up with new ways to combat infection.  I'm very excited by that.  It wasn’t the driving force.  It's our ultimate driving force and I'm a true believer that we need to just continue to fund and respect curiosity driven innovative science because we do not know where the next great breakthrough is going to come from.
 

A shameless plug here, this sort of research, I get funded for other things, but this research that I've described tonight has not been funded and if anyone wishes to contribute to my curiosity driven research, please contact me.  
 

So I also want to point out that my need for these advanced imaging techniques has driven - it's the reason why I came to UTS to establish the Microbial Imaging Facility.  I'm thrilled that UTS has supported me in doing that because we've managed to acquire some really sophisticated technologies and developed some really great techniques to study the bacteria. 
 

So I would like to think of our imaging facility a bit like a microbial zoo. We look at what the bacteria do.  You go to the zoo to see what the monkeys do.  We go to my imaging zoo to see what the bacteria do.  So I love my job.  It's fun.  It's exciting.

So we've got these fantastic techniques that we have in our facility, and so on that note I want to leave you with this thought from Einstein, who also happens to agree with me, that to raise new questions and new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.  

So thank you.
 

[Applause]  
 

Ellen Yang: Thanks, Cynthia.  I'm not quite sure whether or not to be inspired or completely frightened.  
 

I would just like to introduce our next Shapeshifter, Douglas Tomkin. Douglas is the development director and business manager of the Designing Out Crime Research Centre in the UTS Faculty of Design Architecture and Building.  He has worked as a designer and academic in Europe, South East Asia and Australia.  
 

The primary areas of his design involvement include consumer products, medical equipment, perhaps you should have a chat with Cynthia, command and control furniture and interactive devices.  Douglas's expertise extends to legal opinion on product related accidents and product copying.  
 

Prior to joining Designing Out Crime, he was the head of the School of Design at UTS.  Douglas has a strong interest in sustainable design issues.  Some of you may be aware that one of our speakers had to withdraw from this evening at the very last minute and I would really like to thank Douglas for presenting on such short notice.
 

Please come up, Douglas.
 

[Applause]
 

Douglas Tomkin: Thanks, Ellen.  Well, I'm glad you know that I was a last minute call in.  So you can excuse anything I've got to say. You know I'm a designer because I wear coloured socks.  I'm not a scientist.  Probably if I was maybe I wouldn’t be wearing coloured socks.

Anyway, I would have actually loved to have been a designer, a scientist.
 

[Laughter]
 

Douglas Tomkin: I would have loved to be a designer as well.  My maths is absolutely hopeless so I had to say, well you know science can't be my thing and I ended up doing design.  In retrospect I really wonder whether I could have coped with science, particularly having heard Cynthia's talk, a fantastic passion, a wonderful sense of purpose and direction, but from an outsider I see a fairly strict, maybe inflexible way that you’ve got to work.  
 

I'm not sure that that's true, but when I look at it from an arts sense, it seems like just about anything goes.  You have a freedom to do stuff which you might not be able to do if you were a scientist.  
 

Creativity is everywhere.  I'm not trying to say one is more creative than the other, but when I was preparing this I did ask a question to myself and that was, what could be the most important creative thing that mankind has ever done?  Would it be the discovery of gravity? Could it be evolution?  Could it be a Beethoven Symphony?  What is it?  How do we gauge this thing about creativity?
 

Then I thought well weirdly, maybe the actual concept of coming up with the whole idea of science, a scientific method, a way of understanding everything about everything, how incredible is that?  That's really cool, that's just sort of like a creative discovery of momentous proportions, but it's about the thing of science, it's not so much about the scientific method.
 

If you look at the scientific method, and I went through you know even Wikipedia for heaven's sake to look up to see what scientific method was about, and nowhere could I find the word creative.  It wasn’t there.  In fact there was all things about measurable evidence and systematic and objective and a lot of stuff, it was almost like you weren't really allowed to be creative.  Because if you were creative, maybe you would step out of the line of the way things are done.  
 

Now, obviously this is not true.  Scientists are obviously very creative, but why isn't in there in the description?  I don’t know.  Maybe we can have a look at that a bit further along.  
 

So when you go to creativity, and I think Cynthia gave us a definition of creativity, I think it's a little bit more difficult to come up with a definition of creativity, but I think we would all agree that really it's about producing something that is recognised as original.  It's something that hasn’t been there before that's been done for the first time or it hasn’t been seen in that form before.  There's an awful lot of imagination that has to go into that.  
 

So creativity is a looser sort of term.  Science has got it all nicely laid out and framed and pretty good, but I don’t think the arts has it quite so well.  
 

Snap, you’ve seen this guy before a few minutes ago, but do you know he was a very accomplished violinist and a pianist.  He was very much into the arts was old Einstein, so he had a very strong artistic bent and if you look at lots of the stuff that he says, he talks a lot about - obviously about creativity and everything else, so he really does, to me, he personifies both science and creativity.
 

Was it the scientific method that Einstein used that led inevitably to the discovery of relativity or all of his other wonderful things?  Was it the relentless build-up of all that data that he collected and all of that stuff that he did that ruled out other possibilities and it allowed him to wake up in the middle of the night and say, ha, ha, I know, I've got it?  Was there this flash of light thing?
 

So it's how scientists work.  It's partly a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to understand it and I know that it's lot to do with passion and it's certainly a lot to do with imagination.  
 

I've got another quote of Einstein's and this is that it's really difficult to solve a problem in the same frame as you set it up in the first place.  That's I think a really interesting insight because it suggests that somewhere along the way you have to reframe the problem.  You’ve got to look at it from a completely different viewpoint, because everyone has looked at that problem before in that same way and they haven’t been able to come up with a solution.  You have to be able to somewhere along the track, reframe it, look at it differently.
 

That is a sort of a trick that designers use a lot.  The processes that we go through, we do have this way of looking at something from a different way.  
 

Now, I want to show you another face.  Does anyone know this guy?  Anyone prepared to have a guess at who this is? Ah, she knows, but she's probably been told before.  
 

This person probably has a bigger impact on your day-to-day life than Einstein, but that's a very big call and I don’t really want to make that call because I'm sure you will tell me about all the physics and everything else, but anyway he has had an extremely big impact.  

His name is Jonathan Ive and he heads up the design team in Apple.  He doesn’t just do the aesthetics of the thing.  He doesn’t just present you with an iPhone that looks nice.  He actually reframed the problem of a phone and said, okay, let's make a phone, it can be a phone, but it can do a hell of a lot of other stuff.  It can be something which is much, much, bigger than a phone.
 

So he changed that whole idea into something that was completely different and that's the creative thing, he's using science, he's using technology, but he's creating something that is pretty meaningful for us all.  

This is one of this quotes and that is that in his sense, he didn’t actually say, design, he said a longer thing, Apple and something or rather, brings a simplicity to incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware of the solutions.
 

So that when you are holding a phone, you're not aware of everything that goes behind it.  It's been simplified and it's a hell of a job to do that sort of thing and that's really what a lot of designers are trying to do all the time.

Interesting, Einstein also said, he said, everything must be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.  So he was actually coming at it from a very similar way, this idea of simplicity, complex down to simplicity.  So there really is a synergy between that stuff.  Think iPad, think E = mc2.
 

Okay, I want to - it seems like we have to talk about a job that we've actually done each.  So I found this in my camera photo of a seagull which I liked, but it's really just a personal perspective and this seagull represents all birds, but I want to talk a little bit about a job that I worked on with a scientist from actually Sydney U, on looking at bird flu, the transmission of bird flu.  
 

This came up at the time when there was a really bad outbreak of bird flu in Hong Kong and lots of chickens were being slaughtered and everyone was really getting worried about bird flu.  All over the world, I think all over the world, there was a mass manufacture of a particular drug.  I'm sure you can tell me what that drug was.  No?  Okay, anyway, it's something flu, I can't remember what it is, but anyway, samiflu (sic) or mamiflu (sic)?
 

Male: Tamiflu.
 

Douglas Tomkin: Tamiflu, thank you.   Thank you, thank you very much, but yeah, that's a very, very expensive thing and this scientist that I worked with, Euan Tovey was his name, said, maybe we can look at this in another way.  His idea was to filter out the viruses and the concept that he had, his expertise was actually collecting airborne allergens.  
 

So he was actually looking at things like hay fever and stuff and he was trying to examine what goes in your nose and what causes hay fever, but he said, maybe we could devise a little thing that you stick up your nose and it filters out all the nasty viruses.  

So that was the starting point of where we started to work together.  I have to say, he was one of the most creative people that I've ever had the privilege to work with.  Some of the sketches and stuff that we did, I only just included that just to show that designers and scientists all do funny little sketches and have a look at different ways in which things work.
 

For the purposes of this sort of talk I would just like to try to see if I can see a difference between the way we operated.  He was very much a perfectionist.  His thinking was we've got to cut out any possibility of getting flu.  This thing has got to work, if not 100 per cent, 99 per cent. 
 

Whereas I was thinking well that's all pretty good, but we've got to look at the way it's got to be produced, the way it's got to be massed produced.  We want to make it cheap.  We want to make it available for everyone and that might mean that our effectiveness, our efficiency might have to drop a bit.
 

So I was prepared to look at it in terms of getting it out there for lots, but he wanted to keep that perfectionist stuff going.  So that was a sort of a different way of looking at things.  
 

We had to do a lot of different stuff.  One of them was to actually look at everyone's noses.  So we had to take a silicone cast of noses, different male, female noses, big noses, small noses, children's noses and this is one of them.  
 

So these weird silicone moulds so that we could actually try sizes and fits and do all that sort of thing.  So there was a lot of working together in a way that could be regarded as science, but was also very much a design side of things.  
 

The fact of the matter is we ended up with quite a number of patents, but no products.  The reason was we couldn’t find a manufacturer who was prepared to take it forward.  Having said that, I'm a hay fever sufferer, is anyone here a hay fever sufferer?  Yeah, look at that, there's a few of you.  Okay, well out here in Harris Street there are lots of plane trees and about this time of the year if you walk out there and you're a hay fever sufferer, man can it be hard work.
 

I put these little filters up my nose and it disappeared instantly.  It was absolutely brilliant.  These filters actually work.  So we all sort of lost by the fact that we couldn’t get the thing to market, but anyway, getting back to the question of creativity, my feeling was that it was collaboration that was the real big thing here.  Collaboration across disciplines really, really worked well.
 

Even though there were lots of frustrations and misunderstandings and we had to explain what we meant all the time, sometimes having to go through that process actually pushed the whole thing forward and enabled us to come up with different ways of looking at problems that I think if we had been working alone we wouldn’t have done.
 

So this whole thing about collaboration I think is a key and I want to finish on this with this slide which is obviously a chain, but it's a bit of a metaphor.  It's really a metaphor about how I see nature and the manmade world being terribly intertwined.  They're really bound together and to me creation, the whole act of creation, it's not about unravelling the links in this chain, it's about knowing how they fit together.  
 

I think if we looked at that bacteria stuff moving all over the place, it was about that.  It wasn’t trying to pull that little bacteria apart and doing all sorts of weird things with it, but it was about knowing how that worked together and how it all fits together in one big thing,  then using that knowledge to advantage in some way.  Once you’ve got that information then you can be creative and you can use it some imaginative way.
 

I think both scientists and artistic communities do that thing.  They understand something really well and then they disentangle it and they put it up in some other way.  
 

So really I think the practitioners of the arts could really learn something from science in terms of the structure, the way scientists work.  They have a structure.  They have a formula.  They go through the steps and that gives you a body of knowledge and you can work from that.  Artists don’t like - they pretend not to want to do that.  They pretend not to want to have a structure, but in fact I think we all need structure and I think something we could learn from that side would be pretty good.  
 

I also have to say that I think scientists, if they were given a little bit more space to think outside the box, if somehow creativity was part of that process formalised, okay you're allowed to be creative.  We can show you ways to be creative.  It's not just looking at it and hoping you have an idea, there are techniques. If we all work together then I think this idea of the dominance of creativity, is it scientists, is it artists or something, would vanish.  We would work together and we would solve the whole thing.
 

So on that beautiful note I would like to finish.  Thank you very much.
 

[Applause] 
 

Ellen Yang: Thank you very much, Douglas.  I would like to introduce our next Shapeshifter, Dr Alison Beavis, a senior lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Forensic Science and director of undergraduate programs in the UTS Faculty of Science. 

Alison is an analytical chemist with research interest in explosives, chemical warfare agents, firearms and illicit drugs using various analytical techniques.  She's a CSI walking bomb.
 

[Laughter]
 

Ellen Yang: She maintains a strong interest in the area of trace element analysis in biological tissues, continuing on from the work she completed during her PhD.  Alison is also part of the transdisciplinary team involved with the development and delivery of the UTS Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation.  Please welcome Alison.
 

[Applause]    
 

Alison Beavis: Okay, well a very good evening to you all.  I'm really excited to see that there's so many people here interested to hear about science and about creativity and I wanted to start the presentation by picking up the clicker and taking you back to my childhood and I'm sorry about the white slide.
 

I grew up in a household where my older sister was the creative one.  She was really, really talented in terms of visual arts and languages and I was just the budding little scientist.  She was the creative one, I was the scientist.  I never really challenged that when I was growing up, but it always made me wonder as I've got a little bit older, why are scientists not creative?  Well, I think we've demonstrated tonight that indeed they are and I think we've been demonstrating that for a number of years that scientists are indeed creative.
 

It was my mother that was, yes, your sister, who is now represented by a little French man, whereas me and my little conical flasks, I'm not creative.  Well, I want to turn the cross into a tick and I think that we have started to demonstrate the creativity that really is part of all science endeavours.  
 

One of the reasons why - and I will just move that forward just so you you're not blinded, one of the reasons why scientists aren’t necessarily considered creative and science isn't considered one of the creative industries really comes down to our education system.  I'm certainly not alone in sharing these views.  
 

It's nice to be able to put up here on the slide an image of Dr Ken Robinson who really is one of the greatest proponents of creativity and the role it plays in education.  
 

I had the pleasure of seeing Sir Ken Robinson present at a conference up in Brisbane in early June and I did share with the guys earlier tonight, and I will do it again, it's a bit of an over share, but I had a total professional crush on Ken Robinson.  I think he's fabulous.  I think the message that he sends and what he has to say about creativity and its role in education is a really powerful one.
 

He believes that creativity is just as important as literacy and numeracy and he has this great quote here that - where are we, children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds and a willingness to take risk with what they think.  What then happens?  Well, he claims that we actually educate them out of creativity and the fact is that we need to stop doing that.
 

There's another prominent educationalist, Cathy Davidson, who has made the point that preschool age children at the moment, two out of three of these children are going to be working in industries that don’t exist yet and pursuing careers in areas that really haven’t been thought of.  So it is really our duty to start giving them the creative tools to take them forward.
 

There's also loads of other data supporting these views. [Leonard Sumner] interviewed a range of educational futurists, and I think there were over 100 of them and two thirds were recognising that really our current education systems are not future proof.  A staggering 85 per cent believe that creativity is quite a minor focus and really is actually the education system is stifling creativity.
 

So I had to put the numbers there.  I am a scientist, but there's not too much data I promise you in this talk, but what we're really at risk of is generating graduates and future citizens that are not going to be able to make connections. 

So Douglas touched on the fact that collaboration is such an important aspect, but it's not just bringing people together, it's also connecting things and I really love this Steve Jobs quote here.  Creativity is about connecting things, it's about connecting people and I really think that a lot of good things happen when you connect people from different disciplines.
 

My interest in promoting and having an interest in creativity, not just in science, but in education, has really been overhauled in recent times, the emphasis that we really have to place on facilitating this through learning. 

Ellen mentioned that I was invited to be part of very much a, well it was quite a large team headed up by Ben Hunt and Louise McWhinnie, Kees Dorst  and Tanja Golja in developing a new transdisciplinary degree and it's four letters, BCII and that stands for the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation.  This has seriously changed the way I see education and the way I see science education.

We've only just finished delivering the first of the intensive schools, it was the winter school and it was the most incredible experience and I say that I'm sure on behalf of the students, but also the staff, I don’t think we have come away from a teaching experience in that it was such an immersive experience.  

What I loved was seeing what the students got out of it in such a short period of time.  In two weeks, what they achieved was just remarkable.  It was the most inspiring, thought provoking and really rich learning experience, and I say that for the students and the staff.  

One of the things about this particular degree, it's all about thinking outside the box.  It's also about not being afraid to fail and recognising that along this path you're going to make mistakes, but that's okay, that's what being creative is about.  It's about taking risks and it's about being willing to fail.
 

Now, the word fail, I would like to actually reconceptualise it as a first attempt in learning.  That's what to me failing means.  It's not something to fear.  It's something to embrace and it's purely about learning.  Do we think our current education system rewards or values failing?  I think that's a hell no.  
 

This is what I remember about my education system.  A lot of exams, it was cramming, perhaps at the last minute, learning a lot of material and really that is something that stifles creativity and free thought.  So really, we need to rethink the way we deliver our classes.  

There is only one more number I promise, 14,854.  I came across this number when I started doing some work for BOSTES, which is now the rebadged New South Wales Board of Studies.  Part of my work with them was around - was a consultative role in reimagining what the HSC science course could look like or courses I should say.  That number represents the number of candidates that we lose in science between Years 11 and 12, almost 15,000 students and that's about a quarter of the candidature.  
 

So these are quite significant numbers.  Now, is it that students aren’t seeing how creativity can be applied?  Is it that the teachers aren't ready and prepared to deliver the material in an exciting and authentic way?  Or is it something to do with the way that we deliver the course?

So currently HSC science is delivered, sorry white light again, is delivered in quite a, I will say a fragmented way.  It's delivered according to discipline.  I like the fact that chemistry, because I am a chemist, has two volumes there.  There's probably because there's so many facts that we have to remember about chemistry, but I was asked, well what could the future look like?
 

I started thinking, oh we could do this, oh but timetabling, and then I basically threw all of that out the door and went, let's just put some ideas out there where it doesn’t actually matter whether or not they're possible or not, let's just go and explore and see what is possible.

So one of the ideas that was put forward was - and I would have loved to - this is basically the course I would have liked to study.  Imagine you could take modules from a number of different sub disciplines. It would be a blended mix of learning, so some online, some face to face.  You then take part in an open ended enquiry orientated project.  
 

Teachers will hate it.  That's what I was thinking the whole way along, but the students will love it and really, ultimately that's what I was consulted on.  Design something that is going to engage students with science.

So it's not just at the high school level, that's obviously one place to start, but we've also got to think, well what's happening here on campus at UTS?  I think it's fair to say there's a fair bit happening.  This is the new home of UTS science.  We're expanding.  The family is getting a little bit bigger.  We're welcoming in a few more disciplines into the mix, but this is our new building and it will come online in autumn 2015, but it's one of quite a number of new spaces that the campus master plan has bought us.  

These new spaces are new opportunities.  They're new opportunities for us to roll out our various learning initiatives, Learning 2014 and Learning 2020 and these are all about using these spaces in a really exciting way that we can engage the students and put them at the centre of the learning process.

One of the spaces that we in UTS science are gaining access to and it doesn’t look particularly super in that picture, but that's our new super lab, it's a 240 seat theatre, laboratory sorry.  What we're going to be doing in that lab is delivering a new subject.  The new subject is called Principles of Scientific Practice and it's very much been designed in keeping with the BCII concept of bringing people together.
 

So the idea of transdisciplinarity, well we're mimicking that at the local level, at the science level. Mathematicians, biologists, chemists, physicists, bring them all together.  We're all scientists at the end of the day and it's about designing this new subject where students are going to work on open ended projects.  
 

One of the ideas we're throwing up at the moment is a clean water project.  So how could they design a system to produce clean water?  One of the real social problems that we face at the moment.  So they're seeing how their skills can be applied down the track in real life.

So this all happening here on campus, lots of excitement, lots of nervous energy I would say.  We are probably going to be taking people out of their comfort zone, but that's a good thing.  
 

So what is our role in designing a new - the new face of science and what could it, what should it, what will it look like?  Well, I think one of the things that we have to be conscious of is not to teach them how to gamble which is what somebody thought this slide represented.  No, it's about taking risks.  It's about rewarding students for taking risks and actually valuing that, to remind them that the risks need to be calculated.  
 

So you’ve got to keep your eye on the prize, that is important, but to be prepared.  It's about thinking outside the box.  It's also about thinking inside the box.  I don’t care where you think.  It's about thinking.  It's also about thinking outside the bowl in this case, but being courageous, being willing to put yourself out of your comfort zone because that's honestly where some pretty amazing things can happen.
 

It's about collaborating. So it's about finding likeminded people and that has been what the BCII degree has taught me.  The Monday after, there was a two week intensive, the Monday after we're all feeling very - a little exhausted yes, but also missing that interaction that we had for two weeks.  
 

It was very fortunate, there was a Learning 2014 Festival event, so we all got to catch up, but the idea of bringing people together from all different in this case faculties was a really powerful thing. What was amazing, it was the intersection of those speech bubbles, where we crossed over, where there were opportunities for us to fertilise each other's activities.  
 

So I think in summary there needs to be that focus on creativity.  We need to value it.  We need to embed into what we do.  It has to be enquiry orientated.  That's, as we've heard, it's about curiosity and it's about nurturing that sort of natural curiosity.  I had it when I was a little one.  We have to put process over product, that's something that I'm constantly telling my students, I value the way you get to the answer, not just the final answer and it's probably taken them a couple of years.  I think they believe me now.
 

Encouraging mistakes, valuing them, valuing how students reflect on the mistake they’ve made, that's really important and overall it has to be collaborative.  That's really, it's how we exist as professionals and I think we need to demonstrate that in the way we develop and build a course.
 

Now, I have two quotes to end on, literary masters absolute literary genius.  So the first one, I couldn’t decide which one, but I thought I would leave you with Dr Seuss.  
 

Thank you everyone.
 

[Applause]