‘There’s nothing sexier’: CSIRO head Larry Marshall on changing the future

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Larry Marshall. The scientist, inventor and business leader, 60, is chief executive of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. He has a PhD in physics, has founded six companies and holds 20 US patents.

Larry Marshall: “My mother’s family are all Italian and my dad’s are all Irish, so it’s like being double Catholic.”Credit: Tim Bauer

DEATH

What were you told about death growing up? If you’re good, you’ll go to heaven when you die. If you’re naughty, you’ll go to hell. My mother’s family are all Italian and my dad’s are all Irish, so it’s like being double Catholic. But I had a bit of a difference of opinion with religion after my father died when I was 10.

That’s young. How old was your father when he died? Only 42.

Was it sudden? Yeah, he had a pretty bad accident. Just one of those things that comes completely out of left field and, you know … shit, what do you do?

What do you do? It made me grow up really fast, and it taught me that life is short. When you’re gone, you’re gone. In a way, my dad dying was his final lesson to me. Dad had always said, “Whatever you do, make a difference.” He just lived life beautifully. And, of course, he’s immortal now; in my mind he’s perfect. My memory is just all the good stuff.

What do you want your legacy to be after you die? My children. At the end of the day, my father died young, but everything about him is in me. I feel that way about my children as well. In a sense, children are our immortality. They’re the best legacy we can have.

SEX

If you could intercept a younger version of yourself and tell him about sex, what would you say? For me, at least, it’s about the person. When you’re not thinking about sex as much as you’re thinking about them – being with them – that, to me, is the step up. My wife, Maria, and I have been married for 22 years. She’s easily as smart as I am, maybe smarter. She’s easily as driven as I am, maybe more. We share everything. If I have a rough day, I come home and share it with her, and she gives me advice, and vice versa. There’s pretty much nothing we don’t actually talk about. If you’ve got that, everything else is great.

Scientific rigour requires you to experiment to find solutions. Does the same apply to sex? I think so. Sex is always pretty good, but it can be one-sided, too. When you have a connection with someone, they can tell you: you’re doing this wrong, try this or that. You’ve got to learn from each other.

Give me your pitch: why is STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] sexy? Because you can change the future – especially in Australia, since we’re far away from the rest of the world and somehow feel as if we can’t affect it. Yet Australian scientists have invented things like Wi-Fi and FutureFeed, [the feed supplement for cattle that reduces methane emissions] which is going around the world. To me, there’s nothing sexier than being able to make the future better than the past.

RELIGION

There’s a perception that science and religion are often at loggerheads with each other. What’s your take? I’ve got the contrary view. Science is the search for truth; religion is also a search for truth. Different religions interpret in different ways, but they’re all trying to explain, why are we here? How should we treat each other? And how do we make the world better? Science and politics tend to be more at loggerheads, I think.

Some people lost their faith in CSIRO in 2016, when up to 350 jobs were cut on your watch, with climate research bearing the brunt of those cuts. At the time you said, “There’s a lot of emotion in this debate. In fact, it almost sounds more like religion than science to me.” Why did you draw that comparison? When you’re in the middle of a storm like that, it seems impossible to get the truth out. And scientists really like the truth. So did 300 people lose their jobs? And were they all climate scientists? No and no. In my opinion, CSIRO got too focused on academic excellence, not on the real problems we were trying to solve. We can recognise that climate change is the world’s biggest challenge, but what are we going to do about it? How can science help farmers overcome losing their crops to climate change, or help them overcome drought? To fix climate change, we need every branch of science playing together as a team. Some of the solutions are in agriculture, biology and chemistry.

Australian scientist Brian Schmidt, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, argues that research should be driven by curiosity, not commerce, and that Australian governments are cutting curiosity-driven research in favour of research with a direct commercial application. Discuss. Brian and I are good friends and I agree with him: you need a really broad funnel of science. I prefer to think in terms of impact, otherwise you get stuck with academic excellence on one side and revenue on the other. Commercialisation is one way to create impact: you can make jobs for people, which is great, but you can also help the environment. Some of CSIRO’s best innovations have been around prickly pear [controlling its spread by introducing a moth larvae], the dung beetle [introduced to promote fly control] and myxomatosis [introduced to reduce the rabbit population]. We used science to solve massive national problems. These measures were huge drivers of prosperity for the country.

What’s your personal version of heaven? Feeling like I did a great thing. My family are around me and they’re happy. That’s nirvana for me.

And of hell? Endless Senate estimates.

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