The power of people & science

“I kept thinking to myself, as hard as it is, this is a very special time in our history.”

This time last year, Professor Sharon Lewin was “on a high”. The world-renowned HIV researcher and Director of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity was looking forward to a summer break and “thinking that we had a pretty smooth run ahead”.

“Melbourne had eradicated COVID, which was an incredible feat,” she tells The Weekly. “Our freedom at that stage was very welcome, very celebrated, though I knew it was precarious. I thought we would roll into delivering vaccines, which were looking promising as well, with a bit of time up our sleeves. What I didn’t anticipate was Delta.”

In May this year, Australia’s first cases of the Delta variant appeared in Sydney, and the battle was on again, in no small part waged with armour furnished by the team at the Doherty. They were the first scientists outside China to grow the virus and share details of its make-up with the world, and they went on to provide modelling on which the federal government based its road map out of lockdowns.

Sharon is also Chief Investigator with the Australian Partnership for Preparedness Research on Infectious Disease Emergencies (APPRISE), which for more than four years has been researching possible pandemic responses. So, for

Sharon, COVID-19 has been an all-consuming challenge.

And she hasn’t been alone. A number of unprecedented things happened during the pandemic, but one of the most heartening was the sudden visibility of women in science. Watching the evening news, it seemed Australia was being guided, steadied and held safe – not by politicians or leaders of industry – but by wise and wonderful epidemiologists, immunologists and public health experts who, by and large, were female.

“I think, in the area of infectious diseases, epidemiology, virology,” Sharon says, “we’ve got this tradition of women in Australia, and they’re empowered to speak up. We’ve had some fantastic role models and leaders ... but that’s not widespread in science internationally at all.”

It’s been important, she believes, that women’s voices have been heard so authoritatively at this crucial time: “It’s great. It’s inspired girls to do science. I’ve had lots of comments from mothers telling me about their daughters. You’ve got to see it to be it – I definitely believe in that.”

And she says it’s been important to see not only women, “but a diversity of voices speaking about the pandemic” because the task is not just to communicate information, but a sense of trust.

Sharon has hunkered down through the world’s longest lockdowns with her fellow Melburnians, and she’s shouldered some extra pressures both at work and at home. She has a much-loved extended family that revolves around her wonderful 86-year-old Polish mother, Eva, and before COVID, they would gather for a lively dinner every Friday night.

“There was a very long time when we weren’t able to do that,” she says. “So it’s just been the four or five of us – my husband Bob, my sons Alex and Max [both in their 20s], and my older son’s girlfriend. We’ve had dinner together every single Friday night and there’s been something special about it – about just having that inner core of your family together. I kept thinking to myself, as hard as it is, this is a special time in our history. It’s a special time when we’re not as busy and chaotic as usual, and it’s just the people who are really important.”