From the moment he turns up for our lunch appointment, Sam Berkovic is self-effacing. We’re here because he’s just been appointed the next president of the Australian Academy of Science. It’s a prestigious role, and when I congratulate him he bursts into a robust laugh and replies, “I hope so!”
The offer to take the job, he says, settling into his seat, came “out of the blue” last year. He’d recently retired as a research doctor and was contemplating the “horror stories about people not knowing what to do and having an empty life”.
“And, you know, I’m a doctor, but I’m a disgrace to the regiment – I don’t play golf.”
So with the encouragement of his wife (“I don’t want you around my feet”), he agreed.
The academy is a decades-old independent organisation of 624 elected fellows which acts as a bulwark against anti-science thinking and policy. Based in Canberra, it provides advice to government, lobbies for scientific rigour in decision-making and honours excellence. In recent years, most notably in the Kathleen Folbigg case, it’s pushed for better use of science in courts.
Berkovic takes up his post in May. He’s a slightly unusual choice – doctors, as one scientist points out to me, are not often considered pure scientists and most don’t conduct research. Berkovic is different – something I’m keen to get explore once we’ve ordered our meal.
The restaurant goes by the slightly ungainly title From Here by Mike. It’s on the ground floor of the 1 Hotel in the Melbourne suburb of Docklands, and I’ve chosen it because it’s new, well-reviewed and within walking distance of the office. It turns out it’s also in a lovely location and has a focus on fresh local ingredients.
Berkovic and I both cavil briefly about drinking wine at lunch, then order a glass of a crisp, 2022 riesling. For the meal, we’re happy to take the suggestions of the wait staff, ordering two entrees to share and a main course each.
As we wait, we talk family history. Berkovic is the son of Holocaust survivors, and his family’s arrival in Australia was founded on a lie. Two lies, actually.
His father – “a very honest, straight guy” – from Slovakia survived Auschwitz but lost most of the rest of his family in the camps. After World War II, he seized an offer to come to Australia on a program where the requirements were to be an orphan and to be 18 or under.
“Well, he was about 23 … so he had his incorrect date of birth on his papers, right?” Berkovic says. “And I remember that, basically until his death, he was worried that this would come out.”
Berkovic’s mother survived the war by in hiding in Belgium. She was brought to Australia by family friends who pretended she was their daughter.
Berkovic’s parents were not well-educated – the Nazis had seen to that. But his father made a comfortable living importing jewellery, and the family put great emphasis on academic success. To Berkovic, what came after his stellar school results required very little thought.
“I’m not sure whether it’s Jewish, but there’s an old joke, you know, if you can’t stand the sight of blood, you do law,” he says.
Young Sam didn’t mind the sight of blood, and one of his favourite books as a child was called Men of Science. “It was a simple kid book, but I was addicted to it,” he says. “I just loved reading the stories of people making those discoveries.” So he chose medicine.
By now our sharing-plate entrees have arrived – a crunchy, slightly sweet choux pastry puff with chicken liver pate and a twice-baked souffle made with one of my desert island foods – Meredith Dairy goat’s cheese. Both are delicious. We’re in good culinary hands.
After graduating from university, Berkovic drifted into research. Whereas many “purely trained” scientists in the biological sphere worked with rats in a lab, he says he did clinical science working “directly with patients”.
“You’re developing hypotheses and working on them and using people as the experimental subjects,” he says. “I like telling my students that every patient is trying to tell you something biologically about their disease. And if you can figure it out, it’s great.”
Like the heroes of his childhood, Berkovic had put himself in the discoveries business. His special focus was epilepsy. At the time the condition was heavily stigmatised and wrongly associated with madness.
“It was almost a no-go area. It was very difficult to talk about,” Berkovic says.
He and his research collaborator, Ingrid Scheffer, started looking for a genetic cause. Working with one, large family living across Victoria and South Australia, they spent their time “talking to everyone, examining them … ferreting out all the information from the relatives”.
The best people for the task, Berkovic says, were the grandmothers. The grandfathers tended to remember who won the Brownlow Medal in 1935 – interesting in its own way, but not much use in science. The grandmothers, on the other hand, “They remember everything that everyone had.”
‘Traditionally, you’re taught in science … don’t blow your own horn. Be conservative … But I think that ethos has been detrimental in this crazy era that we’re in now.’
Sam Berkovic
Once Berkovic and Scheffer identified a suspect gene, they linked up with a researcher in Germany and, “soon enough, we found other families with it”.
Was there a bingo moment?
“I kind of remember being in my study at home and having a phone call and rapidly pulling out some papers that talked about this gene and looking at where it was. That was pretty cool,” Berkovic says.
“I didn’t go out and get drunk or something,” he adds, anticlimactically. “I probably had to take the garbage out.”
As the main course arrives, Berkovic admits to a prejudice – he regards cabbage as peasant food. Nevertheless, he’s ordered it. The wood roasted sugarloaf cabbage turns out to be a revelation – soft, smokey and flavoursome. “I’d have that again,” he says. I feel the same way about my confit of dry-aged duck leg, which is moist and delicately salted.
As the munching sounds subside, our conversation moves to his new job.
I’m interested to know if he’s got any special insights into the growth of AI. It turns out he’s as warily uncertain as the rest of us. On one hand, he says, it might make research quicker by tooling through the menial tasks much more swiftly. But he insists that it must only be used “as an adjunct to the human driving the idea”.
“It’s really very hard to know where it’s headed, and is a little bit scary. And as you know, it’s sort of, it’s accelerating now, after a lot of talk over the last few years. But we’re in it now,” Berkovic says.
On more familiar territory, Berkovic is keen to continue the academy’s existing push for better use of science in the legal system. The organisation intervened in the Folbigg case, prompting the NSW system to take seriously new evidence about the genetic link to her children’s deaths. The intervention helped secure Folbigg’s release from prison after 20 years.
“Some of the so-called experts in courts are not really experts,” Berkovic says. He believes people giving scientific evidence should be unaligned with the prosecution or defence – whereas now they are hired by one side or the other.
Broadly, he says, in the post-truth era science needs all the friends it can get.
“Any decline in trust in science would be a worrying thing for all of us,” he says.
And in Australia, he complains, we suffer from a “pitiful” investment in research compared to our OECD counterparts.
“The success rate for grants from the Australian Research Council, which funds basic research, and from the [National Health and Medical Research Council] which funds more medical research, is about 10 per cent … that’s pretty dispiriting,” he says.
“We’re just not doing it well, and we’re losing a lot of young scientists because they’re just not getting support.”
Promising youngsters are either fleeing overseas and, in some cases, establishing stellar careers there, or are lost to science entirely.
So in his four-year term at the academy, Berkovic wants to take this fight to the government. The academy can make arguments like this forcefully, whereas individual researchers, on the lookout for grants, might find it more difficult.
That said, he concedes it’s the kind of lobbying and public advocacy that scientists are not always good at.
“Traditionally, you’re taught in science … don’t blow your own horn. Be conservative. Give the information when it’s as rock solid as it can be. But I think that ethos has been detrimental in this crazy era that we’re in now.
“Now you really do need authoritative science voices to speak up.”
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