There is a lot of punch in this Judy

What is urgent research, and how should we support it without excessive bureaucracy?

It was 1997. It was just one of those days. The then Minister for Health and Family Services, Michael Wooldridge, had just invited me to chair the new National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Strategic Research Development Committee (SRDC). I had the idea that this new committee should represent a slice of the community — creators, marketers and the consumers of research. “Strategic”, “research” and “development” sounded impressive, but what did it all mean?

To get committee gender and geographical balance, I sought “a female researcher based in Sydney”. I asked around and somebody mentioned Judy Black.

I had never heard of Judy Black but the anonymous “they” said she was a respiratory pharmacologist and would be good for my committee.

Anyway, she accepted my invitation to meet in my office and there she was — stylish, assertive tending to feisty, wanting to know what this was all about. Her words were directed towards my ethmoids — right between the eyes — the signature of a ferric will.

Bureaucracy and government red tape were not her favourite toys. She was a researcher concerned understandably with maintaining her grants. This was not “her sort of committee”. So I was a little surprised when Judy agreed to join.

Judy's first task for the committee was to prepare an algorithm for identifying “urgent research”. Nobody had much idea of the committee's tasks except inheriting leftover business from the previous NHMRC; matters like the cerebral effects of mobile phones, hepatitis G and lyssavirus, which is related to rabies. One woman who had been bitten by a bat had died; lyssavirus was isolated. Two words are guaranteed to frighten people — plague and rabies. No wonder the research was urgent.

However, when you start to examine the way government allocates research money — with all the rigmarole of referees and ethics committees and the measures of track record — funding urgent research would mean significant change in the way it was managed and applications for support processed.

I always remember Norman Heatley — one of the team who turned penicillin from an agar plate curiosity into a drug that saved millions of lives — saying that if the Florey team had been required to abide by current rules and regulations, penicillin may never have seen the light of day. Penicillin and Florey provided a benchmark for “urgent research”. In referring to the British Committee on Safety of Medicines, Heatley wrote in 1990: “Is it too whimsical to suggest that our greatest piece of luck might be the fact that this worthy body did not exist in 1941?”.1

In that first year of the SRDC, Judy's role was somewhat that of an existentialist continually asking why she was there — and moreover what the committee intended to do. My agenda was based on assembling a heterogeneous group of people, and seeing whether they could discern new meaning in the words “strategic”, “research” and “development” — even “urgent”.

The NHMRC Research Committee was concerned with those who had traditionally developed a track record in research and for whom the word “Parkville” seemed to have a magical effect. The bulk of NHMRC money still went to basic science researchers.

At that time there was pressure from persons with the ear of government to advocate commercialisation of research products. Marketplace success would justify government funding — a simple, recurring and politically attractive theme.

Once Judy became accustomed to the anomaly of a committee that was there to maintain a broad view of the research agenda, to seek unconventional research questions, to set priority areas of research in often under-resourced areas — a counterbalance to the ever-narrowing agenda of so much basic research — her contribution was invaluable.

Eventually Judy became the SRDC Deputy Chair. She saw the importance of being able to promote a research agenda where translation into real-life settings is an important component.

Whether the SRDC was successful or not is problematic. It certainly made an impact, and for me, there was the added enjoyment of working with such a diverse crowd. As with all innovations, there were those who saw it as an irritant and an irrelevance. The SRDC as an independent entity lasted for 6 years. Judy went on to Chair the NMHRC Research Committee, which contributed to her being made an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2007.

One of Judy's great strengths on the SRDC was that she never pushed her own area of research, although maintaining her funding was always a concern — she embodied what is needed from all those who sit on such committees: shrewd judgement of character and integrity of purpose coupled with a great sense of humour.