Gus Nossal speaks on being a research scientist, 2008

Transcript of interview

First of all, it goes without saying that you've got to be reasonably intelligent in the conventional sense of that word. You've got to have an analytical brain that's sharp, that is quick to realise and catch on to, you know, the nature of a problem, and can decompose that problem into its component parts - a very conventional idea of intelligence.

Secondly - this one I think is not usually recognised - you have to have drive. You know, nature guards her secrets very, very jealously. I mean, if you want to prise one of those secrets out of nature, you've got to have 'stick-with-it-ness'. You've got to have persistence. Sometimes that persistence has to go on for decades.

And the third, the most precious, the most valuable, the rarest, is what you might call imagination, I might call lateral thinking - the capacity to put apparently disparate facts together in a new way and get a new imaginative approach to a problem. That, I think, is the gift that made my boss, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, unique among Australian scientists. That was the gift that he had, that most of the rest of us lacked, and it won him a Nobel Prize.

And of course the fact of the matter is that science is like an absolutely ever-growing ... I've likened it to a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, if you can imagine such a thing. And, you know, at the edge of the puzzle, where you're putting one tiny little piece into the puzzle, and that's your contribution and that makes you walk tall and makes the Weeties taste good in the morning because you had a good experiment yesterday, but outside that puzzle is a penumbra of darkness that is ever-growing, that is ever-expanding, and what you have to realise is that every question answered begets a new question, every answer begets a new question. The jigsaw puzzle is always expanding. There is vastly, vastly more yet to be discovered than we've discovered to this point.

Now, I'll just give you one example of that. We all feel pretty proud of ourselves because of the Human Genome Project. We've now uncovered the sequence of all the genes of the human being. However, what about the function? You know, we know the sequence of the genes, we know therefore the nature of the proteins for which they code. But for 60 or 70 per cent of those, we haven't the foggiest clue of the function, and that's going to be the work of decades. And then how the whole ensemble works as a system - well, I put it to you, that might well be the work of centuries.