Peter Doherty has worked on the basic science of infection and immunity for more than 5 decades and shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Swiss colleague Rolf Zinkernagel, for ‘Their Discoveries Concerning the specificity of the Cell-Mediated Immune Defence’. He was Australian of the Year in 1997, an experience that introduced him to public science communication. That led to publishing six books on science and the scientific life for a general readership. These include The Beginner’s Guide to winning the Nobel Prize (2005), Pandemics: what everyone needs to know (2013) and The Knowledge Wars (2015). An Insider’s Plague Year is number seven. He is currently a professor at the University of Melbourne and the Patron of the Doherty Institute.
Today, Peter Doherty is on the blog to answer a few questions about An Insider’s Plague Year. Read on …
Peter Doherty
Please tell us about your book, An Insider’s Plague Year!
PD: Through 2020, I was online 2-3 times a week with colleagues at the Doherty Institute who were leading research into COVID-19, advising government at every level, enhancing Victoria’s diagnostic capacity, caring for patients, screening possible drug candidates, evaluating lab and field tests and developing vaccines. Though I know immunology well, I learned an enormous amount, especially from those of us who were signing up for ‘all-nighters’ with researchers and public health doctors overseas. From April, I put out weekly 800-1,000 word ‘explainers’ (Setting it Straight through the Doherty Institute) written for the broader public, was ‘Zooming’ and talking to journalists and a diversity of groups across Australia and across the planet and, at times, writing longer articles for different formats.
That story, up to the time this book went to the publishers in February 2021, is brought together here, incorporating Setting it Straight pieces, which include ‘lay explainers’ of the underlying science, and fleshed-out with further background, telling, for example how our young Institute came into being and why it was so ‘fit for purpose’ when COVID-19 hit. It’s a ‘dipping in’ book that’s best read using the dog-food model, as ‘handy, bite-sized chunks!’
As an insider who plays a vital role in Australia’s medical response to infectious diseases, how important is it to make scientific knowledge available and accessible to the public?
PD: Apart from the experience of interacting directly with the public on social media – @ProfPCDoherty on Twitter – via talkback radio, or from Q&A sessions with different groups, my experience through 2020 provided an ever deeper understanding of how confusing this situation is for many. Of course, Twitter also gives me great feedback from doctors, nurses, scientists and so forth who are on the front line, so I’m learning something all the time. And what I hear back from the public also drives me to find out a lot more about areas that some find very confusing. Such pointed, ‘short-form’ contact is fine, but I also think that it is enormously important to continue my ‘long form’ writing by publishing a broader synthesis in print, or e-format, that people can go back to as a key reference and information point.
How do you manage the need to keep the public informed in the early stages of a pandemic when a complete understanding of the virus is yet to come to light?
PD: You tell it as best you can. We’ve all been on a steep learning curve with this pandemic. At first, though we knew it ‘wasn’t just a bad ‘flu’, we tended to think of it like the flu. Perhaps because of that, one big mistake that many countries (not Australia, but including China) made early on was to believe the mantra that ‘you can’t stop a ‘flu pandemic by stopping the ‘planes’. Now we know that COVID-19 Delta, which is like ‘flu on steroids’ re transmission, can be stopped by stopping the planes because Australia and New Zealand have done it. At first, we didn’t understand that COVID-19 is, unlike flu, both a pneumonic and a systemic disease, with virus also getting into the blood and damaging organs like the heart and kidney. And we were unaware that a lot of the oxygen deficit was due to blood clots, big clots that cause strokes and heart attacks and micro-clots that limit oxygen exchange in the lung. Some early advice put out re mask-wearing was unhelpful and, of course, a few professionals were saying that a vaccine, if we could make one, was two years off. Then, for the first 6 months or so we heard nothing about Long COVID which is now emerging as a major, ongoing problem. It’s been an evolving story and the public are, for obvious reasons, keenly interested and engaged.
‘After struggling to engage people’s interest on any aspect of science for years, it’s been gratifying to see so many across the social spectrum engaging. Maybe we’ll see the science sections in bookstores grow to the size of the astrology sections!’
Looking back on how the past year has unfolded, what surprised you the most about the reaction of the Australian public to the pandemic?
PD: After struggling to engage people’s interest on any aspect of science for years, it’s been gratifying to see so many across the social spectrum engaging. Maybe we’ll see the science sections in bookstores grow to the size of the astrology sections! Having struggled ineffectually for years to get people to engage with the reality of climate change it has, sadly been no big surprise to see the snake oil salesmen and conspiracy types out there in strength. They clearly have less traction here than in the USA, but some good people will still die as consequence of being confused by this stuff.
What do you think Australians can expect to see in the coming months, as more and more people begin to be vaccinated?
PD: We’ll see a progressive fall-off in the need to lock down as more and more people are protected by vaccination and, eventually, the country will start to open-up globally. That will put the unvaccinated at terrible risk. I want to convince everyone to ‘take the jab’.
Why did you want to write this book? Who do you hope will read it?
PD: I hope that everybody who wants to understand COVID-19 will read it. Infection and immunity is my area of science and my sense from the time (March 2020) I first engaged seriously with COVID-19 was that I must do my utmost to get good evidence-based messages out there. Across the spectrum, print and broadcast journalists have generally been very responsible about telling it as it is from the public health aspect, as have elected leaders at all levels of government. With An Insider’s Plague Year, the aim is to add to, rather than repeat, what’s out there in the media by providing science-based anecdotes and explanations that both ‘humanise’ the investigation game and drill down to the underlying realities. And I also wanted to tell the ‘back story’ of what’s been going on in our research and diagnostic laboratories as people worked their guts out to get on top of COVID-19 and protect the Australian community. I’m uniquely qualified to do this!
Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming an immunologist?
PD: I started out as a veterinarian and spent a decade doing research on infectious diseases of food producing animals, working broadly across the disciplines of virology, pathology (especially brain pathology) and immunity. My lowest level of competence was in immunology, so I took a short-term, junior position at the John Curtin School of Medical research to learn more about the emerging field of cell-mediated immunity. That’s where we made the discovery that led to our Nobel Prize. We became famous overnight following the publication of our first research papers and the remainder of my research career has been spent in basic biomedical research dissecting aspects of infection, immunity and ‘pathogenesis’: how diseases work and what we can do to stop pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 killing us.
What do you love the most about what you do?
PD: Asking and probing questions, looking at new data, being closely associated with very smart people – including my young colleagues and senior researchers with different areas of competence – and writing. Writing clarifies my thinking and is enormously important to me.
What do you hope readers will discover in An Insider’s Plague Year?
PD: Stories and insights that will be new to them and, hopefully, both inform and entertain. In some cases, maybe something they read here will induce them to act in ways that protect both their own health and wellbeing, and the lives of those close to them.
And finally, what’s up next for you?
PD: On the writing front, I’m continuing with the Setting it Straight series with the aim of doing a further book on the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a lot that I haven’t covered in An Insider’s Plague Year and some very big themes that are increasingly taking shape. In addition, I’ve just signed a publishing contract with MUP for my first non-science book, Empire War and Tennis which I was finishing just as COVID-19 hit. I expect to be editing this, my ‘war and peace’ book, later this year.
Thanks Peter!
—An Insider’s Plague Year by Peter Doherty (Melbourne University Publishing) is out now.
Peter Doherty Peter Doherty
An Insider's Plague Year
In An Insider's Plague Year, Nobel laureate and prominent COVID-19 authority Professor Peter Doherty recounts his response to the pandemic as it developed from January 2020-February 2021. As citizens and governments around the world suddenly became acutely dependent on the capacity of scientists to understand and recommend appropriate public health policy responses to the disease, Doherty and his team were at the forefront.
In his always conversational style, Doherty systematically provides a deep understanding of the virus and of the...
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