'Heart-breaking' closure of Canberra universities has global impact on science
When the announcement was made to close Canberra's university campuses last month to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, it was a welcome step in the fight against infection.ANU biologists were forced to throw away experiments with the closureThe Australian National University alone is home to thousands of students and staff, all who might have unintentionally passed on the virus while at work or study.
But the decision to close campuses posed an unexpected challenge for those who rely on laboratories and on-site equipment to conduct their research. It did not simply halt tutorials and meetings; it paused projects that relate to a wide range of industries around Australia and the world. Now, academics in fields such as medicine, chemistry, education and biology are scrambling to find the best ways to conduct their work from the confines of home.and the projects they were housing.Biology researcher Richard Poire-Lassus from the ANU's Australian Plant Phenomics Facility said the last month had been "very difficult" for the department. Like many other researchers, Dr Poire-Lassus was forced to throw away experiments he had been carefully growing since being hit by the January hailstorm. "The APPF has worked with ANU and CSIRO to relocate critical plants and experiments from the 100-plus destroyed glasshouses to our indoor infrastructure," he said. "This only made the decision to completely terminate all research activities in March even more tragic for our plant science community. "ANU scientists were still licking their wounds, only to be asked to discard all the plants they managed to save from the hailstorm and many more.Material from biology experiments had to be thrown away when the ANU shut down. Dr Poire-Lassus said that some of the research underway in early March will take up to a year to re-grow, while some will never be completed."We can only praise the prompt and effective measures taken by ANU to flatten the curve, and the APPF has done everything possible to mitigate the effects of the shutdown on the plant science community," he said.For Dr Tory Clarke, another biologist, the impact does not simply stall her work as an early-career researcher — it will have flow-on effects that hamper the financial development of people in countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. Focusing on a variety of crops, Dr Clarke's work aims to improve yields in a bid to accelerate financial growth for those working the land in developing nations. "I'm part of this international project that's basically trying to engineer plants to be better at growing the food that we eat," Dr Clarke explained. "[Our] funding stipulates that any technology that we produce will then become available to small holder farmers in countries in Africa. "These are people where their livelihoods depend on what they can grow — and so if we can increase the yields of the plants that they're growing, that's going to increase the amount of food they can eat. "But it will also mean that they will have an excess, that they can then sell, and use that to fund other parts of their life, like their children's education for example," she said.Funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr Clarke's project was also impactedMuch of what had been destroyed then had just started to re-grow, when the coronavirus shutdown was announced. "We just [had to] dispose of them all... so that you're not spreading GMO technologies or anything," she said, noting that her projects would be delayed by at least six months.But as a mother to three young children, working from home had both positive and negative impacts."It's really different and I really miss my office in terms of that uninterrupted deep-thinking time, because I don't really get that at home."It is not just laboratory work that has had to adapt quickly under coronavirus restrictions.The University of Canberra's Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Innovation, Leigh Sullivan, said they were re-evaluating a wellbeing study developed in the wake of the bushfires. He said the study, which was examining the wellbeing of those living in Canberra and the NSW South Coast following the fires, was being adapted to also take in the effects of coronavirus.
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