Biography on dr jim peacock

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But it means that we’ve got to invest more. – and that had helped. It would be of great benefit.

Are these some of the recommendations of the innovation review?

Yes, they’re in there if you look for them. That was fantastic. Did you see a link there, that if people are good enough, you can give them freedom?

Yes, that is right.

We got the cDNA sequence of alcohol dehydrogenase and then the genomic sequence, and we were about the first lab to identify and characterise a gene that was coding for an important enzyme. Just before Christmas 1982 I wrote to her at Cold Spring Harbor and said, ‘Here’s a Christmas present for you. And Lewonton said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you go and work with Novitski?’ I said, ‘I can’t even sex Drosophila; I don’t know the difference between a male and a female!’ ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘you just write to him and I’ll write to him.’ Novitski wrote back saying, ‘You’re welcome to come here,’ that is, to Eugene, Oregon, which was in those days a centre of excellence in genetics and molecular biology.

The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020. It became a big success story.

So a lot of that was about management of the industry?

Both breeding and management, yes, which I liked. I’ve been trying to persuade the previous and present governments that, although we’ve got the universities, the public labs such as CSIRO and AIMS [the Australian Institute of Marine Science] and the medical research institutes, we haven’t got the best way of enabling the very best people in those places to work together.

I enjoyed the time as Chief Scientist – it was a lot of work but as, supposedly, a part-time job; at the same time I had a part-time job in CSIRO. In fact, one day when I was up at the board with Spinny I said, ‘Oh, you silly old man, you just don’t see this, do you?’ But then I turned round and realised the professor of the department was there, and I thought, ‘God, that’s the end of me.’ Later on he said to Spinny, ‘I wish I had a graduate student like that!’ So I really was taught to question and think.

Novitski was the same.

We’ve attracted some brilliant mid-career people from round the world, and I find it great to see the catalytic effect they are having.

One of your skills has been to communicate science to the public, to the community. You don’t want to die in Melbourne,’ or wherever. And so I really wanted to help science in Australia.

What sort of vision did you have of what you would do in science in Australia on your return?

Well, I had made some quite good work in meiotic drive and segregation distortion, and I had another system that I was looking at in meiotic drive.