Macfarlane Burnet Medal winner Graham Farquhar ’did it for farming’

WHEN Graham Farquhar was a boy there was never any question of him becoming a lawyer or banker.

Graham Farquhar, this year’s winner of the Macfarlane Burnet Medal, in Melbourne’s St Kilda yesterday. Picture: Luis Ascui

WHEN Graham Farquhar was a boy there was never any question of him becoming a lawyer or banker. To his Tasmanian farming family, these were the “bastards” sucking farmers dry.

But a scientist they could tolerate, and a scientist whose groundbreaking work has created more water-efficient wheat is even better.

“I knew from an early age that farming was the decent thing to do,” Professor Farquhar remembers wryly. “So if I ever had the opportunity to do good things, I had better do it for agriculture.”

The Australian Academy of Science will today name Professor Farquhar the prestigious Macfarlane Burnet Medal winner for outstanding bioscience. The medal, which also comes with the delivery of a high-profile lecture next year, is only awarded every two years.

It is named after Nobel prize-winning virologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and past winners include internationally renowned medical researcher Gus Nossal, Nobel prize-winner Barry Marshall and academy president and molecular biologist Suzanne Cory.

It is one of a suite of prestigious honours to be announced today that will be formally presented at a three-day celebration in May next year, in what is Australian science’s version of the Academy Awards.

It includes lifelong achievement awards and awards aimed at newer scientists where the range of work being recognised includes pioneering research into malaria and obesity treatments, using nanotechnology to make solar cells cheaper and more efficient, understanding how climate change is driving wind and rainfall patterns, and explaining how our galaxy keeps making stars.

Professor Farquhar started out studying physics and applied it to agriculture when he began investigating how plants minimise water loss through the pores in their leaves that take in carbon dioxide.

In the 1980s, with old school friend and plant scientist Richard Richards, he developed a technique to predict the ratio of growth to water use in different wheat varieties that has since enabled the CSIRO to design more water-efficient wheat varieties. Earlier this year, they were awarded the Britain-based Rank science prize.

Commenting on the broader state of science in the country, Professor Farquhar expressed unease at the extent of job cuts at the CSIRO following the Abbott government’s budget cuts. He said he was worried that scientific expertise was in danger of being wasted.

And he echoed Chief Scientist Ian Chubb’s call for a national strategy to drive scientific research. “We need to take a national perspective to ensure we don’t throw out any babies with the bath water,” he said.

Professor Farquhar also said science funding needed to be a mix of support for so-called “blue sky” research driven by researchers and applied research directed more at specific outcomes. “Biological variability in funding is important,” he said. “We can go for the blue sky but we must be aware of the brown dirt.”