ICML Conference 2009: Keynote Speaker

Professor Ian Frazer

Biography:

Ian Frazer, trained as a renal physician in Edinburgh, Scotland, emigrated to Australia in 1981. After 4 years at the Walter and Eliza Hall institute, he moved to the University of Queensland where he is director of the Diamantina Institute of Cancer Immunology and Molecular Medicine, a translational medical research institute.  He is currently the inaugural holder of the Queensland government Smart State Premier's fellowship, and president of the Cancer Council Australia.

Dr Frazer's laboratory research is focused on development of immunotherapeutic vaccines for virus associated cancers. In 1990, he and his then postdoctoral scientist, Dr Jian Zhou, developed technology for producing human papillomavirus virus like particles, the basis of vaccines recently brought to market to prevent cervical cancer. Dr Frazer is also developing vaccine delivery programs for these vaccines in Vanuatu and Nepal. In 2006 he was named Australian of the Year.

Presentation: Fossilised knowledge? Libraries as repositories of knowledge in biomedical research in the cyberspace era

There has been a dramatic shift in the method of dissemination of knowledge derived from research over the last millennium. Letters between scientists in the renaissance era were largely supplanted by published proceedings of face to face meetings in the 17th and 18th centuries, and subsequently in the 19th century by journals of collected papers on a topic, designed to enable transmission of ideas and data to a worldwide audience, albeit slowly and at some cost. Now, ideas and data are distributed freely and rapidly over the internet, and thinking is advanced largely through face to face meetings and tele-meetings. Rarely read, and even less rarely cited, the majority of articles in journals, which have largely been transformed into e-information, are used mostly as a metric of research success – a milestone towards the next grant. Nevertheless they provide the basis of the evidence chain behind current opinion, and should be preserved to enable training of the next generation in the use of knowledge, and to ensure a clear understanding of how we have reached the beliefs we currently hold. Knowledge on the internet is evanescent, a truth too easily re-written to suit the need of the day, and the challenge for the librarians of the future will be firstly to select the key material from the internet that have shaped current scientific thinking in face of an exponentially exploding volume of e-information, and then make this permanently available.