Why I Love Science - and Why It Is Pancreatic Cancer's Greatest Hope
When Paul was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in September 2020 - incurable, inoperable - we learned very quickly how hope-less that can feel. Refusing to live so pessimistically we chose to be hope-full instead, and in doing so I found an unexpected love for science.
I fell into a world of researchers who had given their careers to a disease that has long resisted being understood - most of them working amid constant uncertainty, fighting for funding in a grant system administered by the NHMRC where only 8 per cent of applications succeed. They were brilliant, and many were generous enough to sit with a wife who had no scientific background and was desperate to change her husband's outcome.
What I learned is that science refuses to accept that things must stay as they are. It is, at heart, both curiosity and defiance: the patient work of understanding a disease, paired with a stubborn insistence that what we cannot solve today might be solved tomorrow. Every breakthrough began as something that could not yet be done, in the hands of someone unwilling to leave it there. That is the spirit Paul and I built Dare to Hope on. Supporting the scientists - here in Australia - who will discover the breakthrough.
What gives me confidence is that this country has done it before - not once, but again and again.
A small country that has changed the world
Australia has never been content to sit on the sidelines of medical discovery. For a nation of our size, our record is extraordinary.
It was Howard Florey, born in Adelaide, who took Alexander Fleming's curious observation about mould and, with his Oxford team, turned penicillin into the medicine that has since saved hundreds of millions of lives. An Australian gave the world its first true antibiotic.
In Brisbane, Professor Ian Frazer and his late colleague Dr Jian Zhou developed the technology behind the HPV vaccine - the first vaccine in the world designed to prevent a cancer. Australia was the first country to roll out a national program, and we are now on track to be the first nation on earth to eliminate cervical cancer altogether. A disease that kills hundreds of thousands of women a year is being engineered out of existence, and the science that made it possible was born here. Don't you think that is extraordinary?
Professor Graeme Clark was told by ninety-nine out of a hundred of his peers that a bionic ear could not be built. They called him a clown. He built it anyway, and since 1978 the cochlear implant has given hearing to hundreds of thousands of profoundly deaf people. Two Western Australians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, overturned decades of orthodoxy by proving stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria - Marshall so sure of it he swallowed the bacteria himself to make the point. And in Perth, Fiona Wood's spray-on skin has transformed the survival of burns patients worldwide.
I find these stories almost unbearably moving, because every one of them began exactly where pancreatic cancer has sat for a very long time: at a point where a breakthrough felt impossible. And here is the part that gives me hope - for pancreatic cancer, that point has finally begun to pass. This year, a new drug called daraxonrasib became the first of its kind to meaningfully extend survival in advanced pancreatic cancer, by targeting the faulty RAS signal that drives most of these cancers. (I've written about what it means, and what's now opening up in Australia, separately. Read here) It is not a cure, and it is not yet available to Australians. But after fifty years in which almost nothing shifted, it is proof that this disease can be moved.
A world leader right here
Not long ago I was speaking with a leader in the pharmaceutical industry about the value of funding medical research here in Australia - about how much this country achieves despite our relatively small population compared to other parts of the world. To illustrate the point, he pointed me to Professor Georgina Long, widly acknowledged as the world leader in melanoma research.
Professor Long is Medical Director of Melanoma Institute Australia and, with the late Professor Richard Scolyer, was named joint Australian of the Year in 2024. She was the first woman and the first Australian to lead the international Society for Melanoma Research, and has authored more than six hundred peer-reviewed papers. But the statistic that stops me is this: less than a decade ago, advanced melanoma was effectively a death sentence, with patients given six to nine months. Through the immunotherapy work Long and her team pioneered - turning a patient's own immune system against the cancer - what was once almost always fatal is now, for many, survivable and even curable.
Professor Scolyer, who died on 7 June this year, embodied that same courage to the very end, becoming the world's first brain-cancer patient treated with an approach built on their melanoma breakthroughs. Theirs is science at its most human and its most brave.
Melanoma is Australia's national cancer, and it is now being beaten. I cannot read that and not think: if it was possible for melanoma, why not pancreatic cancer?
The science pancreatic cancer is waiting for
Pancreatic cancer is where melanoma was a generation ago. The five-year survival rate is just 14 per cent - a figure that has barely moved in fifty years. And it has barely moved for a reason as maddening as it is simple: pancreatic cancer receives less than 2 per cent of cancer research funding. Fourteen per cent survival, less than 2 per cent of the funding*. The breakthroughs are not impossible. They are underfunded.
This is the whole reason Dare to Hope exists. We cannot summon a Georgina Long into being, but we can back the early-career scientists who might one day become her equal for pancreatic cancer - people like Dr Michael Lee at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Dr Matteo Golo at the Garvan Institute, supported at the point in their careers when funding is hardest to find and matters most. They work every day on the disease that took Paul, my Dad and all our loved ones. That is our part, and we will keep doing it.
But two fellowships ( soon to be three) from one charity is only a beginning. The talent is here. The institutions are here. Everything Florey, Frazer, Clark, Marshall, Warren, Wood, Long and Scolyer represent tells us the same thing: when Australia backs its scientists, the whole world benefits. We have turned "impossible" diseases into survivable ones before - again and again - and pancreatic cancer can be the next chapter in that story.
Funding our scientists is not a cost. It is an opportunity - a chance to do what this country has always done best, for a disease that has waited far too long. Imagine what Australian researchers could achieve for pancreatic cancer given the time and support that changed the course of melanoma. Everyone who believes in that future - supporters and governments alike - has a part to play in building it.
That is the future Paul and I imagined: that Australians would be among the people who beat pancreatic cancer. It is why I have never stopped believing in the power of science, and in the people, here at home, who keep proving what it can do.
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*https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/publications-and-resources/cancer-australia-publications/key-drivers-funding-trends-cancer-research-2012-2020-final-report
