The Best Australian Science Writing 2021

By NewSouth

Is there life in the clouds of Venus? How could Indigenous burning practices stave off catastrophic bushfires? What do horseshoe bats, raccoon dogs, and pet cats have to do with the global pandemic? Science writing tells the stories of life and human endeavour in all its marvellous—often messy—complexity. Now in its eleventh year—and with a foreword by Australia's Chief Scientist, the renowned physicist Cathy Foley—The Best Australian Science Writing 2021 is a collection that showcases the nation's best science writing. New voices join prominent science writers and journalists, taking us to the depths of the ocean, the fuels of the future, and to the Ryugu asteroid and back. The collection also brings us straight to the heart of complex ethical dilemmas and the calamitous crises challenging scientists and writers alike. Includes the shortlisted entries for the 2021 UNSW Press Bragg Prize and the 2020 UNSW Press Bragg Student Prize winning essay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742238272

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE IN ANXIOUS TIMES

Dyani Lewis

It was a brisk afternoon in July 2020 when I got the call. A stay-at-home order for Melbourne was in place, and I was watching my daughters, two and five, scamper across the mown lawn of the local school oval for our allotted hour of daily outdoor exercise. My oldest daughter wouldn’t front up to her prep class the following Monday – nor would she for the next two-and-a-half months of Mondays – and the prospect of home-schooling for a second stint filled me with anxiety.

But the phone call stopped me in my tracks. On the line was a spokesperson from the World Health Organization (WHO), calling – as a courtesy – to inform me that my latest article on the coronavirus for Nature was incorrect. My reporting was irresponsible, she said.

I take my job as a science journalist seriously. So when I received the lengthy email enumerating the egregious mistakes and misrepresentations in my reporting, I was horrified. The criticisms cut to my core. Readers rightly expect that those of us who write about science do so with integrity; that we make sure what we report is an accurate reflection of the state of scientific understanding.

This isn’t always easy. And if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that the solid foundations of science can shift under our feet at alarming speed. What we know and understand to be true as we write is so often later revealed as flawed or incomplete. The article that so incensed the WHO told of the immense frustrations some scientists were experiencing. The researchers saw overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2 – the virus responsible for COVID-19 – can waft through the air in exhaled breath and deliver a viral payload into the lungs of others nearby. The WHO saw this as conjecture.

The 2020 calendar year – the year covered by this edition of The Best Australian Science Writing – flung science stories that might once have struggled to find a home onto the front page. The same public that perhaps saw little relevance in science writing in pre-pandemic times became ravenous for information. In her account of the early frenetic months of the pandemic, Fiona McMillan writes that ‘the challenge for scientists working on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is to balance urgency with scientific rigour. We need the right answers, not just quick ones.’

But science isn’t always the realm of right answers, of unimpeachable truths. In the pursuit of understanding – be it COVID-19, or climate change, or the cosmos – there are differences of opinion, hypotheses, and best guesses of what the future may hold. Some of these will bear out, and others will prove – with greater experimentation, finer observation – in need of revision or of complete overhaul. No corrections were ever made to my article – my editors stood by my reporting. And over the past year, evidence for airborne transmission has continued to amass and the WHO has changed its steadfast stance. But with new variants of the virus circulating, the picture continues to evolve.

The pandemic’s swirling, disorienting currents can be felt in many of the anthology’s pieces. Jo Chandler, the editor of the 2016 edition of this anthology, writes about how the pandemic brought the other earthly calamity – of inexorable global warming – into stark relief. Obsessive number watching – of COVID cases and COVID deaths – became part of the daily pandemic routine in 2020. But climate scientists have been at that game far longer, watching with angst and despair as atmospheric carbon dioxide readings tick ever skyward. Chandler writes of their dismay and determination, and of her own experience as chronicler of the observers. ‘As a citizen of burning Earth, I have skin in this game,’ she writes.

Donna Lu’s investigation shows how the pandemic was less of a welcome reprieve for pollution-choked waterways and skies, and more of an almighty spanner in the works for conservation efforts. Lockdowns led to surges in illegal fishing and deforestation, as desperately poor communities who rely on the fruits of their local environment became even more impoverished.

Weeks before the pandemic descended on Australia in March 2020, that other traumatic event – the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20 – stoked the public’s thirst for scientific knowledge. How did this happen? How can we stop the next black summer? It was inevitable that this year’s anthology would include stories of the apocalyptic fires that blazed across 1.8 million hectares of south-eastern Australia, charring an estimated three billion mammals, reptiles, birds and frogs, and countless trees, shrubs, fish and insects. John Pickrell describes the Herculean efforts to stop the fires from obliterating a handful of species whose future is most dire. Among them: the mountain pygmy possum, the eastern bristlebird, the vivid yellow-and-black corroboree frog and the ancient Wollemi pine, whose range is limited to little more than a single gully in the Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

Accounts of environmental destruction are dishearteningly familiar. We know how the stories play out: mountain ranges are denuded of trees, rare species are brought to the brink of extinction, rivers are befouled with industrial waste and corals are slow-cooked like the frog in a boiling pot. Two poets take us to parts of this familiar – if dispiriting – territory. In ten single-line poems, Amanda Anastasi deftly sketches a portrait of climate change’s tremendous reach. And Declan Fry, a descendent of the Yorta Yorta, manages – in six short lines – to wrench our hearts over the death, by fire, of a lone eucalypt. Meanwhile, Clare Watson looks to fire, not as a harbinger of doom, but as a potential solution. She investigates Indigenous fire practices and the efforts to integrate these largely forgotten modes of managing the environment into future land management to avoid the ravages of extreme bushfire seasons.

Nicole Hasham explores a longer-term solution that could help to avert the worst of the climate crisis. As she cruises around in a Hyundai Nexo, she takes us on a tour of the technological, political and practical dimensions of a hydrogen-powered future. On a smaller scale, Ivy Shih shows us how clever engineering – in the form of artificial nest-boxes – might one day replace the owl-friendly tree hollows we’ve lopped from our cityscapes.

Figuring out what we’ve lost and what needs to be restored isn’t always straightforward, we learn in James Bradley’s story of oyster reef restoration off the Adelaide coast. But it’s a crucial question. ‘In a rapidly heating world, our chances of surviving the future often depend on a better understanding of the past,’ writes Bradley. Ashley Hay brings us another story of recalibrated norms. Purple, introduced by the Bureau of Meteorology in 2013 to top out the highs of temperature on the bureau’s temperature maps, has an intriguing past, and is now part of an ominous future. Tim Dean casts his eye back further still, taking us to a world 2.5 billion years ago, before the skies were the familiar blue hue that they are today.

In her beautiful prose, Rebecca Giggs introduces us to the magnificent complexity of whale song. Communication is becoming more difficult for whales, and the reasons might surprise you. There are the usual suspects: diminishing whale populations and seas crowded with ships and cacophonous drilling equipment. But scientists are also gazing skyward into the cosmos for answers, writes Giggs. Other writers are gazing skyward, too. Space archaeologist Alice Gorman writes about how unchecked innovation litters the space beyond our Earthly borders with technology’s flotsam. And Ceridwen Dovey reveals the important, if little known, story of how stars in the night sky – and the work of astronomers – could be crowded out by throngs of commercial satellites.

Writer and bioethicist Paul Biegler tells us how scientists are glimpsing inside biology’s coveted black box, the period when a newly developing embryo attaches to the lush lining of a woman’s uterus to develop into a baby. The work could lead to treatments for infertility and miscarriage. But as Biegler explains, working on live human embryos – or even balls of cells reprogrammed to resemble embryos – is fraught with legal and ethical considerations.

Benjamin Dodds’s poem about Enos, a chimpanzee launched into space in 1961, is another reminder of the ethical dimensions of science. Enos was the first chimp to be flung into orbit around the Earth – after Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov – but his mission was aborted after malfunctioning equipment sent 76 electric shocks through his body. Enos plunged back to Earth – apparently unharmed – less than four hours after being rocketed into space. Mark O’Flynn’s poem introduces us to one further scientific episode of questionable merit: the post-mortem extraction and dissection of Albert Einstein’s brain.

A more rigorous approach to scientific research is described by Jon Brock. Psychology was the first of several fields of science to be marred by what’s known as a replication crisis, where scientists struggle to reproduce the findings of others. The crisis has shaken the research community and thrown bedrock psychological concepts onto shaky ground, but large-scale international collaborations could change that, Brock writes.

Amid the trauma and anxiety of the past year, we can still have nice things. Ecologist Ella Loeffler explores her place in Australia and the world through the flora and fauna that surrounds her. Sonia Orchard, meanwhile, reminds us that animals can evoke in us, as in our ancestors, powerful emotions: fear, awe, amazement. For Emma Viskic, the emotion she writes of is love: love for the ‘shy and glamorous’ phascogale, a tiny marsupial few could readily call to mind. Julie Hollis, meanwhile, delights in the discovery that, at more than two billion years old, the Yarrabubba impact crater in the West Australian desert is the Earth’s oldest.

Bianca Nogrady, who edited the 2015 and 2019 editions of this anthology, brings us the story of how clever scientific detective work revealed the origins of a rare allergic reaction to red meat. Wilson da Silva finds evolutionary serendipity at the heart of our reactions to venom, and Rob Brooks also takes us on an evolutionary jaunt, this time to the origins of the debilitating condition endometriosis. Then there’s Steph Panecasio, who provides us with a watery solution to the icky question of how we should dispose of our earthly remains once we’ve survived all these maladies.

The best science writing doesn’t just lay out facts, or even simply parse competing theories. It propels the reader forward with a gripping story. Jackson Ryan delivers in spades with a thrilling scientific adventure story of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s mission to land a spacecraft on Ryugu, snatch a sample from the rubble-pile asteroid and ferry it back to Earth. Meanwhile, Benjamin Pope’s article about life in Venus’s atmosphere reminds us that scientific endeavours often end not in triumph, but with more questions to answer, more work to be done.

The pandemic has laid bare – in real time – the way that science lurches forward, in fits and starts and uncertainties. Experiments fail. Assumptions about how viruses leap from one person to the next hold true for decades … until they don’t. The science writing in this book dances along with the science it seeks to explain – questioning assumptions, unearthing ambiguities, and reckoning with its place in society. And most of all, delighting in these very complexities.

A MOMENT AT SEA

Sonia Orchard

The water was inky blue and choppy. Waves spilt over onto the nearby reef. I rode up and down on the swell, hunched over, with the other guests lined up along the marlin board. I wasn’t feeling too much excitement; I was concentrating on not being sick.

Given the word, I launched off from the boat, then sat buoyed up in the ocean while icy fingers wormed their way up my wetsuit. Our guide called out again, pointing away from the reef, towards the horizon.

I dipped my mask and snorkel into the water and looked along the surface. And there it was. Appearing mostly as an outline, grainy blue in the sun-dappled, plankton-speckled water: a submarine heading towards us. Then the dark blur in the centre – the oblong mouth – came into resolution. A metre-wide slit, open and drawing in water. As it moved closer, silently, tiny eyes appeared on either side of its mouth, seemingly oblivious to the minute creatures flitting around in front of it. I quickly finned out of its path – it wasn’t about to adjust its course for anyone. Not that it looked sinister – well, not at first – with an almost comical-looking head and a torso you just wanted to run your hands along, patterned with grey and white stripes and spots. But then moments later, as it moved effortlessly past, the unmistakable, shudderinducing silhouette of a shark.

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean, and grow to around the size and weight of a bus. But unlike most other sharks, the whale shark is a filter feeder, consuming only plankton and small fish. They are the true gentle giant.

I’d wanted to swim with whale sharks for decades, ever since I first snorkelled with minke whales in my twenties. I remember lying still at the surface for over an hour as two whales, a mother and calf, circled me, inching closer and closer until I could have almost touched them. Each time one glided past, its large eyes – unmistakably mammalian – locked on mine. So soft, so curious, so different to the empty gaze of a fish. I felt like I was gazing deep into the eyes of a human trapped inside a giant whale suit.

I was working as a diving instructor on the Great Barrier Reef at the time, and became used to seeing people emerge from the water after swimming with minke whales, manta rays or whale sharks, unable to really articulate what had happened, wandering about the back deck with an idiotic grin, still spouting superlatives hours later. I knew exactly how that felt.

Humans are hardwired to respond strongly to animals. Recent research indicates that there are neurons within the amygdala – the brain’s seat of emotions – that fire when a person sees any kind of animal, but that don’t react as strongly to the sight of a person, place or object. It’s thought that this response evolved in our prehominid ancestors, when they lived on the African savanna millions of years ago and needed to be hyper-alert to any animals appearing in the distance. Although this ancient alarm system is rarely needed by modern humans, the sight of an animal still triggers a powerful emotional reaction. And if the creature isn’t a threatening one, that intense tickling of the amygdala makes us feel good.

Interacting with an animal like a whale shark or a minke whale also induces another positive emotion: awe. This experience, of feeling small and humbled in the presence of something vast and beyond immediate understanding, is now thought to be vital to human wellbeing. Awe can give rise to an almost transcendental happiness not found in individual successes and their rewards, but in their exact opposite: feeling insignificant, a self dissolved into the whole. After experiencing awe, people have been found to behave more altruistically and report increased levels of contentedness. There are also signs that awe may have benefits for the immune system.

It was three years ago when I swam with the whale sharks, twentyfive years ago when I eyeballed the minke whale mother and calf. These days, I spend most of my hours not bobbing around at sea, but inside a house staring into the glow of a computer screen, trying to fill it with words, in between ushering kids out the door in the morning and welcoming them back in the afternoon, then heading into the afterschool extreme sport we call modern-day parenting. But during the day there are sulphur-crested cockatoos that interrupt my work, cackling from the eucalypts outside my window, and if I stumble upon an online video of a cat, goat, dolphin or baby elephant, that can sometimes be enough – I can say goodbye to the next half hour. It’s just too addictive. That feeling of being humbled. That feeling of being amazed.

A reef history of time, p. 129

The Biyula novels, p. 178

Soundings, p. 242

INSIDE BIOLOGY’S BLACK BOX

Paul Biegler

I count six little ziggurats side by side, stolid and squat and obviously man-made. They are not going anywhere, but in between them things are on the move.

Circles of dots have begun to roil and rotate, angry blimps rising up among the static trapezoids, their contents swirling in a frenzy of disorder. Then, in each one, a ring solidifies and grows in the chaos. It’s fleeting, and the jiggling hoop is soon churned back into the mass as the riot spreads unchecked.

These dots are human cells and their acrobatics are the beginnings of human life, though not as we know it. There is no womb, no pulsing maternal heart. Instead, the cells are born in an elaborate plastic chamber under constant video surveillance, and I am witness to their first two days of existence, compressed into a sparse 18 seconds by the wonders of time-lapse video.

The architect of this dazzling piece of cellular music hall is bioengineer Jianping Fu, whose field of expertise – mechanobiology – tries to understand how living cells change in response to physical forces.

Working from his University of Michigan lab on the outskirts of industrial Detroit, Fu is bringing the measured mindset of the machine-builder to the job of constructing life. He is one of an elite cohort of scientists trying to build a replica of the human embryo from the ground up to try to understand just how we are made – and where it can all go horribly wrong.

This area of science aims to alleviate the gamut of reproductive misery, from the anguish of infertility and miscarriage to gathering information about drugs like thalidomide, which seem innocuous but have grave consequences if taken during pregnancy.

Fu’s bundles of cells, dubbed embryoids, could be used to screen drugs for toxicity in the womb. They might also unravel the mystery of why two out of every five pregnancies fail before 20 weeks. But these scientists, tinkering at the dawn of life, don’t know how far the cells can develop. There is talk their creations could one day provide a source of organs for transplant. The spectre of a baby in a dish looms ominously in the public imagination.

Which is why Fu’s bit of kit, written up in Nature in September 2019 and described by leading embryologist Ali Brivanlou as ‘a major advance in the knowledge of early human development’, is also an invitation for humanity to do some circle time on what it means to build a human.

* * * * *

The invention that’s created this excitement is a simple-looking chamber with three channels. In one, Fu places pluripotent stem cells, blue-sky building blocks that can become almost any human cell. They are immortal and can be frozen and thawed, forming a renewable resource that can be used for years.

Some of these are embryonic stem cells, originally derived from human IVF embryos. Fu also uses ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’ – iPS cells for short – that come from adult skin cells reprogrammed back to a primal state.

In the second channel Fu pours a liquid containing morphogens, the fertilisers that hurry stem cells on with the job of remaking themselves over and over. In the third, he lays a gel to support the growing masses, each one hived into its own mini-domain by evenly spaced support posts – the ziggurats.

In many respects there’s nothing novel about this. Researchers the world over are growing stem cells into structures that mimic the early embryo, before getting them to switch course in the first few weeks and become heart, brain or kidney cells.

These grow to make mini organs or ‘organoids’, about the size of a stunted chickpea, that are used to model diseases on the lab bench and test if drugs or gene tweaks might be a cure.

But Fu is aiming to make the whole shebang. There’s no diverting cells off into hearts and brains – rather, he wants them to run their course and become something that resembles the early human embryo.

Fu has pushed these embryoids as far as anyone’s been yet and, true to his engineering pedigree, he’s done much of it by inventing a new 3D world for the stem cell colonies to grow in.

‘Most excitingly … in this first set of experiments, is the fact that in a subset of those colonies we start to see some asymmetric tissues, asymmetric embryonic structures,’ he tells me by phone.

Embryologists tend to get breathless about symmetry, or lack of it. After natural conception, when the sperm fuses with the egg to form the single-celled zygote, there follows a cascade of dividing, with new cells budding outwards in a uniform ball which, at day three, becomes the 16-cell morula – Latin for mulberry, which it resembles.

But around day six there is a major break from the order of symmetry, as the front-to-back, belly-to-spine axis appears. Anyone aiming to make a human embryo needs to nail this. Fu didn’t just meet the milestone; he also produced the cells that become the amniotic sac – the fluid-filled bag in which the foetus floats.

‘These asymmetric structures, basically they resemble the core of the peri-implantation human embryo,’ he says.

Implantation. It strikes at the heart of this project. Somewhere between six and 12 days after conception, the human embryo nestles into the fleshy wall of the uterus. This is essential if the pregnancy is to continue. But when it goes wrong, it’s disastrous. Nearly three quarters of all pregnancies that miscarry by 20 weeks are a failure to implant.

And the two months after implantation are when the embryo is most vulnerable to the effects of drugs or maternal infections that cause birth defects.

Given the gravity of these issues, you’d think an avalanche of research would have shed light on them. In fact, we know so little about the period it’s called the ‘black box’ of embryology.

The implanted embryo, key to the enigma of early life, is mostly invisible to science. The first reason is structural: the embryo is sequestered in a uterus beyond our gaze. The second is ethical: scientists have grown human IVF embryos for 13 days in the lab, but no one has gone beyond two weeks.

Endorsed by the UK’s Warnock Committee in 1984 and then by the US National Institutes of Health’s Human Embryo Research Panel in 1994, the 14-day rule bans lab research on embryos beyond that point.

It is around this time that a groove called the primitive streak appears in the embryo: among other things this marks a cut-off beyond which twinning is impossible. This is the defining line of the individual human which, some believe, is morally significant. The 14-day rule is enforced by legislation in at least 12 countries.

The reasoning is clear, but the effect is to keep the black box in shadow; science hasn’t had a way to illuminate it.

* * * * *

Now the spotlight falls on Fu’s plastic channels, properly called microfluidic devices. In Fu’s earlier experiments, only around 5–10 per cent of his embryoids reached that asymmetry waypost. But in his lab just a short drive from the factory where Henry Ford christened the first of his Model Ts, Fu has rewritten the rules of embryoid production.

‘With this microfluidic system, now we can generate such human embryo-like structures with very high efficiency, up to about 95 per cent,’ he says.

Fu’s system isn’t just meeting quality benchmarks, and this is where the parallels with Motor City’s early denizens become a little more pronounced. ‘It is a scalable system,’ he says. ‘I would even say that now … it becomes a manufacturing system, depending on the needs, right? Depending on how many you need.’

Fu’s tone is measured, matter of fact. But on this moonshot to the dark side of our collective beginning he carries the interests of Everyman, so be reassured that he tells his tale with deep concern for our wellbeing.

When he says the system ‘will be very useful for high throughput screening’, that clinical parlance describes the potentially vast benefits to real embryos of testing hundreds of drugs on embryoids first. His work could also show why so many pregnancies miscarry – and improve our measly IVF success rate of 20 per cent.

Indeed, his precision-tooled temperament may be a prerequisite for the kind of slog needed here, to get an embryoid to trace the footsteps of a real human embryo, in something the scientists call recapitulation. It is only by mimicking the true-life course that a dish-bound doppelganger can give test results that are valid.

And that is a big ask, not least because there is no gold standard; the ‘black box’ means there is no definitive embryo library to provide reference points for the journey. Then there are the endless variables in embryoid research: the physical layout of the device, when to add morphogens and chemical signals, and countless other tiny details.

Which is where Fu took his Enterprise into deep space. His embryoids reached the early phase of another critical developmental stage called gastrulation. When the furrow-like primitive streak appears at 14 days, it signals that the cells below, a little like the settling of ploughed earth, are falling into three layers: the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm, respective precursors of skin and brain, muscle, and internal organs. Their emergence heralds the laying down of the body plan.

But Fu’s embryoids also showed something else undeniably human. Budding off from those furiously dividing balls were the barely discernible outlines of germ cells. These define the male and female sex – they are the cells that go on to produce sperm or eggs.

Megan Munsie is Deputy Director of the Centre for Stem Cell Systems at the University of Melbourne and has been entangled with the stem cell story for two decades, first as a researcher and now as an expert on policy and ethics. The appearance of these sex cells left a deep impression.

‘This is a part of human development that we just really can’t follow,’ she says. ‘The start of the germ lineage I think is absolutely fascinating.’

Nor was it the only aspect of Fu’s achievement that gave her pause.

‘When we looked across his images I found them quite extraordinary,’ she says. ‘In almost all the clusters in the