Marie-Louise Ayres:

Yuma, good evening everyone. And a very warm welcome to the National Library of Australia and to the 2026 Ann Moyal lecture. I'm Dr Marie-Louise Ayres FAHA and it's my privilege to be Director-General of the National Library for another 20 days. To begin, of course, I'd like to acknowledge that we do our work for the nation on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples and I acknowledge especially their custodianship of the land on which we're meeting today. The knowledges, the sciences that have been produced here over generations, and through the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people give my respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

It's such a pleasure to see so many of you here tonight for the fourth annual Ann Moyal Lecture. Ann was a beloved member of the Library community, a Petherick Reader, a Harold White Fellow, and an established historian of science and technology. She was a champion of independence in research and scholarly pursuits, establishing the Independent Scholars Association of Australia in 1995. She's remarkably well represented in our collection, having conducted more than 20 oral history interviews herself and being interviewed three times at different points in her career. We also hold all of her books and her personal papers. Before she died in 2019, and regularly, and I would say being Ann robustly discussed with us, the best way she could support future research, writing, and the communication of research outcomes. And in the end, she decided to fund an annual lecture on the theme 'science in society.' She specified that the lecture should be given by a distinguished speaker and discuss a contemporary question elicited from diverse academic fields such as science, environment, ecology, history, anthropology, art, and technological change.

The work being undertaken by tonight's speaker has the potential to affect the lives of everyone in this room. After all, there are very, very few of us who have not been affected by cancer in some way, either personally or via someone that we know and love. Indeed, a much loved library colleague died as a result of melanoma just a few weeks ago, and very sadly, only a few months after he retired. So this feels very personal.

Professor Georgina Long and Professor Richard Scolyer were named Australians of the Year in 2024 for their groundbreaking world-first research in immunotherapy for melanoma, which of course they shifted a bit sideways. Their research has saved thousands of lives globally and turned advanced and previously almost always fatal melanoma into a curable condition for many sufferers, or at least perhaps a cancer that one lives with for a long time. Professor Long is one of the world's leading melanoma researchers and medical oncologist, and tonight she takes us into medicine's 'third space.' The territory where conventional solutions fail and new evidence must be created. Drawing on her experience developing experimental drug therapies, Georgina explores why breakthrough science requires not just brilliant minds, but extraordinary courage.

So Georgina, I thought I'd check our Trove digitised newspapers to see when the word melanoma first came into common usage in Australia. And for all of you Trove-ites out there, it turns out that our optical character recognition (OCR) thinks many things are melanoma, especially Melanesia. So there are a lot of early false hits. But the first true melanoma reference that I could find came in 1934 in the Queanbeyan Age, and it referred actually to a horse with a melanoma. And then later that year, there's the first one again that I could find (you're better searchers than I am, many of you), to a human case, also in 1934, about a wharf labourer whose widow claimed that a workplace accident during which the labourer scratched a mole and subsequently developed melanoma should be treated as a compensable injury. It's not really until the early 1950s that the term seems to enter common Australian parlance, which I believe coincides with the first firm evidence that exposure to UV via sunlight increases skin cancer risks.

Now, much has happened since then with approaches to cancer that the researchers of the 1950s could barely contemplate, and we are fortunate to be able to hear tonight from a researcher who is working right on the edge of what's possible. Tonight, we'll learn about the patients who drive her work, the researchers who refuse to give up, and why important discoveries happen in the places that no one else dares to go. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Professor Georgina Long AO to the stage.

Georgina Long:

Thank you, Marie-Louise and the team. Thank you for that very warm introduction and for the honour, inviting me to deliver this lecture that recognises Ann Moyal. I too would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are on today. Their focus on intergenerational thinking reminds us that humanity and survival is grounded in connection. Connection to people, to place, and to time well beyond our own, where authority is earned through responsibility to community and humans are embedded within, not separate from natural systems.

Ann Moyal devoted her life to a simple and courageous proposition that knowledge does not belong exclusively to institutions. Nor does it belong to those with formal power. But it belongs to those who are prepared to pursue knowledge with independence, rigour, and courage. In reflecting on her legacy tonight, it is pertinent we explore a question that sits at the heart of both history and science. What lies behind the breakthrough? We often recognise the breakthrough, especially those that reshape a whole field. We celebrate it, the discovery, the publication, the announcement, but rarely do we understand nor seek to understand what precedes it.

In medicine, as in scholarship, breakthroughs do not emerge from certainty. They emerge from unchartered territory, from what I call 'the third space.' 'The third space' is the territory of unfinished knowledge. It sits between what is established and the unproven possibility. Between institutional endorsement and intellectual conviction. In cancer medicine, 'the third space' is the patient who does not respond to our best available therapies. It is the trial drug companies hesitate to fund. It is the hypothesis that challenges established thought and practise.

Ann Moyal was familiar with this territory. She found it between institutional permission and intellectual conviction. She understood that when we ask "What lies behind the breakthrough?" we are also asking "What lies behind what we accept as truth?" Because breakthroughs are not merely discoveries. They are moments when evidence forces authority to evolve. Ann was not anti-institutional. She was anti-intellectual complacency. She recognised that institutions preserve knowledge, but they can also hold it to the point of rigidity. Breakthroughs require movement. That movement invites critique. Critique requires courage. Ann championed independent thinkers working outside institutions and the established academies who offer, in her own words, an open and diverse critique. Open. Diverse. Critique. These are not comfortable words. They imply a friction, a willingness to interrogate, to challenge authority, to include what doesn't necessarily fit the mould. An independent scholar, as she framed it, is not defined by isolation from institutions, but by independence of mind. That independence demanded resilience.

In medicine, the equivalent is continuing to test when results are inconclusive, continuing to question when answers are incomplete and continuing to refine when outcomes disappoint. Behind every successful breakthrough lie multiple negative trials and experiments. Data that did not confirm the hypothesis, outcomes that forced us to reframe. Failure is not the opposite of success in 'the third space.' Failure is its infrastructure. Breakthroughs do not reward in patients. They reward discipline and they demand courage and resilience. Courage is what allows us to work in 'the third space.' Courage is a vital ingredient in what lies behind the breakthrough. Ann knew this, Ann lived this. So I'm Professor Georgina Long AO. I am a medical oncologist. I'm a clinical trialist and I am a translational researcher, which means I develop and use drug therapies to tackle cancer.

Half of the 80 to 100 patients I see each week are on clinical trials at any one time. Finding and creating drug cures is what I do. And every one of those patients has put their life in my and my team's hands. I work with the smallest of biotech startups and the largest of global pharmaceutical companies. I review the drugs. I advise on design and strategy in clinical trials. And if the science is strong enough, I conduct those trials myself to push the field forward and to improve outcomes for people with cancer. There are many trials that pharmaceutical companies will not invest in because they will not improve their bottom line, but those trials might improve outcomes for patients. So I design my own trials to fill that gap, and that gap is what I call 'the third space.' I never stop learning, and learning is what I love to do.

What drives me is not prestige or recognition. It is curiosity and it is purpose. My purpose has always been the same, to make a difference to many, not just one. So I inherited a curious and courageous mindset. I am the daughter of two doctors. My father, Jeff, was an anaesthetist who pioneered the availability of epidural anaesthesia in labour wards in the 1960s. "Amen to him" I hear some other women say. My mother, Ann, was university academic and a public health physician. My father had a simple philosophy. Keep moving forward, especially when things get tough. It was resilience conditioning and it has been invaluable to me. My mother thought on a population basis. Clean water, sewage systems, sanitation, vaccination. She was always asking: "How do we make this better for more people? And how do we do it faster?" Her mantra was, and still is today: "Make a difference to many." For me, that concept has shaped everything. Our dinner table was a place of much debate, curiosity, and frank conversations. Being the fifth of six children, you can imagine my education about the human body and all its capabilities started very early.

But one of the most important markers in my life happened when I was just five years old. Our family was living in the United States. I was in year one at a school in Philadelphia. My teacher, Mrs. Black, kept me back after class. I wasn't in trouble. I just couldn't use a dictionary and everyone else could. So she sat me down until I learned how to find the words and until I understood that the backbone of the dictionary is the alphabet. Something clicked. It was that realisation that if I applied myself, if I persisted, I could actually understand something that had felt impossible just minutes earlier. It was my first aha moment and it unlocked something in me that has stayed with me my entire life. The understanding that nothing is too hard if you are prepared to persist and learn.

From that point on, I actively sought out those moments. I love them. That one gesture on a Philadelphia afternoon shaped my relationship with learning, with challenge, and with possibility. I have been fortunate to be shaped by remarkable people at every stage of my life. My clever parents, my children, who have taught me more about being a parent and a leader than I have possibly taught them about being kids. My husband, Greg, who has been the steady presence that makes difficult decisions possible. In him, there is not only deep friendship and absolute trust, but the honesty necessary to move through difficult times and challenges. That partnership, built on truth telling even when it's hard, has been foundational. At school, leaders like Sister Judith and my chemistry teacher, Diane Reed, did something powerful. They expected excellence. They made curiosity safe and they treated ambition as something to be nurtured, not managed. Later, my PhD supervisor at the University of Sydney, Professor Margaret Harding, taught me structure and discipline to compliment my persistence. She showed me that creativity flourishes when ideas are supported by rigour. These women did not just teach me content. They taught me how to think. They taught me to ask better questions, to relish the challenge when things were difficult, and to have courage and believe that my ideas were worth pursuing.

Ann [Moyal], a fellow alumni, graduated with first class honours in history from the University of Sydney in 1947. She was appointed research assistant to the University of Sydney Vice Chancellor, Professor Steven Roberts, who had been her history professor. Two years later, she travelled to the University of London with a scholarship to the Institute of Historical Research. But after just one year, she took a role as a research assistant to Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian British newspaper publisher who was working on an ambition project. The book, 'Men and Power, 1917-1918' (1956), which chronicled the work of British politicians in conflict with generals as World War I was ending. Ann's years with Beaverbrook are documented in her first memoir, 'Breakfast with Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent Woman' (1995). In his teachings, well, his teachings defined her professional life and in her final book, 'A Woman of Influence: Science, Men & History,' Ann reflects on his instruction. Be independent. Do not take establishments and the established as seriously as they take themselves. Do not be snowed by authoritative figures. Sorry - authoritative figures. Examine and question the sources of power. Put irons in the fire and take risks. "And so I have made my way," Ann wrote. I'm sure many of you are familiar with William Arthur Ward's musings about learning. "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. But the great teacher inspires." And like Ann, I too was inspired by my teachers to make my way.

This inspiration led me back to the US after my PhD in chemistry, where I completed postdoctoral studies at Scripps Biomedical Research Institute in California after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship. And at Scripps the expectations for achievement, well, they were extra. In fact, extra was normalised. It was expected. I was taught yes, there is huge possible failure, but there is also huge possible success. And aha! I realised that the extraordinary is only achieved when we think big, think outside the box and take big risks.

What I love most about my American experiences was the celebration of clever people and clever ideas. The US environment is about accelerating opportunity and embracing innovation, fostering excellence and generating change. Ann Moyal knew this too. Ann eventually founded and was the first president of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia from 1995 to 2000. The motivation for setting up such a formalised group was inspired by her own international experiences and foreshadowed in her first memoir where she wrote: "We have too small and intelligentsia in Australia. We have too, an unhealthy dependence on a handful of visible pundits and discussants. We lack the vigorous intellectual criticism that can so richly characterise British, French, and American public life. The time is ripe to consider an academy of independent scholars in Australia." And so that's what she did.

My international experiences inspired other things for me too. Optimism, confidence, ambition. These attributes are not always celebrated in women, but they have given me important cut through throughout my career. And in return, I learned to celebrate clever people and clever ideas. There is nothing better than an idea, but more about that later. The lessons I learned early in my life are why I'm drawn to 'the third space' and have the courage to work there. 'The third space' is the place where problems persist, where standard solutions fail, where guidelines end, and where evidence gaps begin. In business, it's the transformation that stalls, despite the activation of every best practise and framework and model. In technology, it's the ethical dilemma no one wants to own. And in cancer, 'the third space' is the patient who does not respond to our best available therapies. 'The third space' is uncomfortable. It's uncertain and it carries much risk. It's also the space where innovation and discovery begin, not with answers, but with hope.

For me, the most profound expression of hope has always been with my patients and my research. Every clinical trial, every clinical trial, every hypothesis tested, every new therapy designed, that is hope structured towards a breakthrough. Research is the bridge between what we know and what we dare to imagine. It's how we turn despair into discovery.

Back in 2009, I started a phase one, that means first in humans, clinical trial of targeted therapy for advanced melanoma. That's melanoma that is spread around the body, for example, to the liver, the lungs, the bone, the brain. I started this with my then mentor, Professor Rick Kefford. At that time, advanced melanoma was essentially incurable. The median survival was six to nine months. The challenge was not just scientific. It was about maintaining team morale and patient hope while navigating constant uncertainty. But the real test came with immunotherapy. I was developing treatments in human cancer trials that unleashed the body's immune system to fight the cancer. Melanoma was the pioneering cancer for this approach. It happened in melanoma first. The results were extraordinary. Survival rates for advanced melanoma went from less than 10% at five years to more than 50%, but success brought its own challenges. How do you scale breakthrough innovations? How do you maintain that startup mentality that drives innovation when many people think the job is done? It's not. It takes courage to hold two opposing forces in tension, the discipline to follow rigorous scientific processes, but at the same time, challenge established thinking. Create the evidence that suggests there is a better way.

The NADINA clinical trial exemplified this. This is a trial that I designed with my colleague from the Netherlands. We hypothesised that giving immunotherapy before surgery rather than after would be more effective. We had been working together for years on trials that demonstrated that this was highly likely, but NADINA was the ultimate proof. It was a phase three randomised controlled trial. The NADINA trial challenged the entrenched acceptance of decades old cancer and melanoma doctrine: "resect the tumour immediately, cut it out now." In breast cancer, as a comparison, chemotherapy given before versus after breast cancer surgery did not improve survival rates, yet preoperative chemotherapy offered one important advantage. It enabled less invasive surgery, allowing women to undergo lump removal surgery rather than a mastectomy. But the results of immunotherapy before surgery in melanoma, we reduced the risk of recurrence and death from melanoma by 68%, by simply changing the order of treatment. We reframed the problem and saved more people from suffering from their cancer or dying. And since August 2025, this regimen of immunotherapy before surgery has been on the PBS (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and is available for all Australians with stage three melanoma, not just clinical trials.

But in 'the third space' solving, verifying and innovating is not always enough. I had to push to have this research become a benefit for all Australians. I had to lobby the health minister, the Therapeutic Goods Administration. I did not have $250,000 to put in an application. And the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee to get it approved. And all agreed this was great for Australians and it was approved in record time. And just last week, the New Zealand government announced its intention to fund combination immunotherapy before surgery from 1 May 2026. In a country that does not have powerful combined immunotherapy regimens for treating advanced cancers such as metastatic melanoma, this is a game changer for survival rates for New Zealanders with melanoma.

But all of this does take time because 'the third space' is the territory beyond the known and the comfortable. It's the space that demands the most courage from everyone. 'The third space' has many faces for me. For example, my friend and colleague, Professor Richard Scolyer AO. When Richard, a pathologist, a father, a fitness fanatic, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, medicine had nothing left to offer that could change the odds. Average survival with the standard treatment was 12 to 18 months. No new treatments in two decades, but not for want of trying, but simply nothing had worked that had been tried. So when I offered to look into 'the third space' for Richard, he chose hope. He became Patient Zero for a first in brain cancer immunotherapy regimen that I designed. It was untested. It was uncertain. It was unprecedented. It was straight from 'the third space' and in every sense, courageous medicine.

In my cancer research and clinic, 'the third space' represents those patients whose cancers resist both single agent and combination immunotherapy. This treatment resistant group represents a sobering reality, nearly 50% of melanoma patients and a substantially higher proportion across other tumour types. They fail to achieve the durable responses with our most advanced drug therapies. These are the patients for whom our current best isn't good enough. Richard is one patient, but he represents countless others who have sat across from me receiving diagnoses that shatter their understanding of their future. In Richard's case, I faced a choice. Accept the status quo or take unprecedented personal and professional risk to attempt to make a difference. I chose to apply everything I knew about cancer and immunotherapy to develop an experimental treatment protocol for the worst kind of glioblastoma. It sounds simple, but the reality was far more complex. I didn't know whether this could possibly help Richard or instead rob him and his family of his last few months of lucidity. I had to convince pharmaceutical companies to provide drugs, regulatory authorities to approve my unprecedented approaches and a multidisciplinary team to follow me into completely unknown territory. Would this impact my ability to secure future trials? In 'the third space,' you take responsibility for outcomes in uncharted territory. This wasn't bravery or recklessness. It was a carefully weighed decision, underpinned by reason, my long experience, and my outstanding team. And here's something I rarely discuss publicly. Nearly all of the team who helped me execute that plan were women.

I met with my international colleagues a week after Richard's diagnosis at the Prestigious American Society for Clinical Oncology Conference in Chicago. I go every year. ASCO, we call it. They had concerns for my reputation, for the risk of designing a therapy untested in glioblastoma, a cancer outside my expertise. But when I laid out the idea, not one of them said they would not want it for themselves if they were diagnosed with glioblastoma. Patients with glioblastoma were no different from my patients still dying from melanoma today. Both were in 'the third space,' the focus of my research and clinical trials that I designed for nearly my whole career. So began the Peloton, like a cycling team where members take turns leading against headwinds, protecting each other and maintaining momentum even when individual riders falter. And we were peddling flat out into 'the third space' toward the only destination we had. Hope. It sounds bold, but the truth was much quieter and much heavier. We didn't know if the treatment would help Richard or harm him, but I did know this. Doing nothing would have been a greater failure. So that's why courage is so important in 'the third space,' not the absence of fear, but the decision to move through fear. Not a reckless leap, but a deliberate step toward the uncertainty of 'the third space.' I was guided by science and anchored by humanity.

So I'm sure most of you know that sadly, Richard's time now is limited, but the impact of the approach is limitless for brain cancer. In December just gone, the first ever patient was enrolled in the GIANT trial for glioblastoma, the approach I designed and secured the drugs for. This is an Australian trial that Dr Jim Whittle, a neuro-oncologist and colleague, accepted my challenge, and he is now leading this trial across the world.

Last month, we opened recruitment for my next major melanoma trial, NeoIRENIE. It uses deep biological profiling to decide which patients need standard treatment and which need something more potent from day one. The thinking, the reframing, the applicability is across all cancer. Defining 'the third space' early, experimental, novel, but rational drug therapies early in the cancer journey. Later this year, I will present results for the world's first neoadjuvant immunotherapy in even earlier stage melanoma, stage two at the most prestigious global cancer conference, ASCO.

Every one of these innovations began in the same place, 'the third space,' a space where everyone knew there was a problem, but no one yet had a solution. In Ann Moyal's 'third space,' she refused to wait for institutional permission. She did something radical. She changed the rules instead of expecting the individual to conform. That is 'third space' leadership. At a time when authority, credibility, and academic security were tightly bound to universities, and certainly not to women, Ann chose intellectual independence. She challenged, entrenched academic hierarchies and legitimised scholars outside formal power structures. Ann found her 'third space' between what was recognised and what was real. And progress depends on those willing to question authority, respectfully though, rigorously, and particularly today, unapologetically seeking facts.

Seeking facts. We are living through a profound shift in how we innovate, how knowledge is created, shared, and trusted. Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyse, accelerate, and amplify information at a scale humanity has never experienced. In seconds, AI can scan thousands of sources, compress complex ideas into neat paragraphs, and generate answers that sound authoritative and complete. But here is the danger. AI is brilliant at pattern recognition, but it is not brilliant at truth. It does not yet understand context, consequence, or copyright. It cannot distinguish between what is popular and what is correct. In this environment, truth becomes a random computation. An attribution becomes fragile. Ideas are stripped of origin, nuances lost, and the people who did the hard work of thinking, testing, and refining can be erased. In medicine, this is not abstract. It is existential. Evidence is not just something we consume. It is something we create and creation requires accountability to patients, their families, my colleagues, regulators, and society. That accountability cannot be automated. And yet, we are increasingly surrounded by systems that reward speed over scrutiny and narrative over evidence. Specialist science reporting has diminished. Fewer journalists can interrogate methodology or statistical significance or determine the facts. Meanwhile, everyone has a platform. Everyone's an expert. This creates a paradox. We have never had more information, but we have never been more vulnerable to misinformation. We need to ensure that we are all inoculated. Think of it as intellectual inoculation, exposing our minds to rigorous inquiry so we develop immunity to misinformation and blind acceptance. Why? Why? Because misinformation does not just mislead. It steals time. It steals resources. It forces us to reprove what we already know instead of discovering what we do not. Every hour spent debunking misinformation is an hour not spent on solving critical problems in 'the third space.' In my profession, every dollar spent on redundant studies to counter false claims is a dollar not advancing care, not finding cures.

For example, the single false narrative that vaccines cause autism has diverted billions in research, lowered vaccination rates, and caused preventable deaths. A single lie with generational consequences. The question is not "how do we get more data?" It is "how do we think better?" Tomorrow's evidence will be shaped by extraordinary technologies. Artificial intelligence will diagnose faster. Genomics will predict earlier. Big data will map disease at a scale we once dreamed of. But my credibility as a clinician, a researcher and a leader will always rest on transparency and trust.

The responsibility to generate knowledge that society can rely on has always evolved with technology. The wheel changed how we moved. The printing press changed how we shared ideas. Industrialization changed how we produced. The internet changed how we accessed information. Each shift expanded possibility, but also magnified risk. Centuries ago, the naturalist Henry Baker warned of it through his own technologies. In his publication cautions in viewing objects. He wrote: "When you employ the microscope, shake off or prejudice nor harbour any favourite opinions, for if you do, it is not unlikely fancy will betray you into error and make you see what you wish to see." The warning remains true. The instrument does not create the bias, the observer does. But today, our instruments do more than magnify. They decide what we see and what we never see at all. Algorithms are trained on historical data. Historical data carries historical bias and bias when coded into systems does not merely distort an observation. It can scale it. Artificial intelligence does not ask whether the patterns it finds are fair, ethical, inclusive, or true. It optimises for probability and probability is not the same as truth. When bias is embedded in code, it becomes invisible. It's harder to detect, harder to challenge, and far more powerful.

That is why the challenge of protecting truth and earning trust has never been greater. Technology will continue to accelerate, but it is courage, intellectual discipline, and human judgement that must keep pace. Ann Moyal understood something that feels almost prophetic in an AI age. As mentioned, she wrote in her memoir that "to be independent means not to take establishments and the established as seriously as they take themselves, not to be snowed by authoritative figures." In other words, authority is not the same as accuracy. Visibility platforms is not the same as validity, and power is not the same as truth. In an era where algorithms rank ideas and digital systems amplify dominant voices, the independent scholar, curious, sceptical, method driven, becomes more important, not less. Because someone must still ask, who designed the system? What assumptions underpin this model? Whose voice or voices are we missing? Ann's legacy reminds us that intellectual independence is not rebellion, it's responsibility.

There is a country that understands this deeply. Finland. Finland has made a deliberate decision to treat misinformation as a national security threat. Their response was not regulation alone. It was education. From primary school, children are taught how to evaluate sources, recognise manipulated images, question headlines, and how to sit with uncertainty when answers are not clear. They are taught how to think, not what to think, and how to seek fact. This has resulted in one of the highest levels of trust in media and public institutions in the world, and that trust is not accidental. It is designed. That matters because without trust, evidence cannot lead to action. Without trust, even the best data will be ignored. It will be politicised. It will be dismissed, essentially erased.

And circling back to what lies behind a breakthrough. One of the many things most vulnerable to erasure in a world of unvetted social media and AI is intellectual provenance. Particularly women's intellectual provenance. Examples like Rosalind Franklin's uncredited discovery of DNA structure instead attributed at the time fully to James Watson and Francis Crick and research showing that ideas are attributed to males over females nine times out of 10, despite an idea being generated by the female. These will not be relics of the past. These will be and are amplified. Our new systems of communication and information reward virality over rigour. They will not correct the historic distortion. They will amplify it. It will be harder, for women particularly, to own their leadership, to own an idea or own their breakthrough.

When I started in melanoma, the median survival, as I mentioned before, an advanced melanoma was less than one year. Today with immunotherapy, half of those patients are alive 10 years later, essentially cured. That transformation did not happen because one lab stumbled on a miracle discovery. It happened over decades of shared ideas, incremental progress, seeking facts, and being courageous in 'the third space' to propel the field forward. I suspect I would find many different careers rewarding and interesting, because what I'm most passionate about is ideas. I love being around people who are open to ideas and will explore them. Curious people are not threatened by new ideas. They are energised by them. They ask better questions. They tolerate ambiguity. They understand that certainty is often the enemy of advancement. Every major breakthrough in my career began with curiosity, not confidence. "What if the order of treatment matters? What if the problem is not the drug, but the system around it?" And so I build teams of people who share that commitment to tackle 'third space' challenges.

Great leaders, like Ann Moyal, create systems and structure that generate sustainable innovation and develop talent. Ann's system legitimised independent thinkers operating beyond institutional boundaries. True leadership is not just about solving problems. It is nurturing the untapped capacity in others to solve problems. I look for people energised by meaningful risk, people willing to fail boldly in the service of something bigger than themselves. I do not trust anyone who has not made a mistake.

Early in my career, I did not only make good decisions, I also made bad decisions. As an intern, I will never forget not turning off the intravenous nutrition immediately when a post-surgical patient showed early signs of sepsis. The patient survived. These types of examples are burnt into my mind, but they have made me the doctor I am. Every bad decision I have made, I have learned from. A delicate balance of self-flagellation and self-forgiveness to keep moving forward. In 'the third space,' if you're not making some decisions that turn out to be wrong, you are not making enough decisions, nor are you taking meaningful risks. The goal is not to avoid all bad outcomes. It's to build decision-making capabilities and an experience base that consistently produces better outcomes over time. The highest form of leadership is taking responsibility for outcomes that matter more than your own career, that leave a legacy for future leaders to build upon. It is 'the third space.' The measure of leadership is not necessarily the breakthrough. It is whether others are safer, stronger, and more capable because someone had the courage to go first. That's what Ann Moyal did. She built her legacy and a future for others through her 'third space.'

Ann's work offers us a simple instruction that is more relevant today than ever before. Examine the source of authority. Interrogate the assumptions. Protect intellectual independence with rigour, with facts. Seek facts. Ann understood that authority must always remain examinable. That knowledge must never calcify, that independence of mind strengthens institutions rather than weakens them. In medicine, I have learned that breakthroughs are not just moments of triumph. They are moments of accountability. They are earned through years of many negative experiments. Uncomfortable questions, professional risk and moral weight.

What lies behind the breakthrough? Discipline. The relentless testing of ideas that do not yet have permission to exist. Courage. The willingness to stand in the space where evidence is incomplete, but need is urgent. Trust. The unspoken contract between society and those who generate knowledge and create evidence. Behind the breakthrough, knowledge is unfinished. The uncharted territories of 'the third space' endure. And while artificial intelligence will change how we discover, it cannot decide what we value. That remains our responsibility.

Ann Moyal changed the rules, not by shouting at institutions, but by strengthening inquiry. If we are to honour her legacy, then we must protect the conditions that make breakthroughs possible. Independence of thought, discipline of evidence and courage in 'the third space.' And we must remember this. The breakthrough is never just the discovery. It is the character of those who stood behind it because breakthroughs do not change the world on their own. People do. What lies behind tomorrow's breakthrough is the courage we model today so that the next generation inherits not just our discoveries, but our discipline, our independence, and our responsibility to the truth. Thank you.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

Thank you very much, Georgina. And of course, you've gladened my heart because we exist to satisfy the curious. Really, that's our mission. So we're on the right track. I believe we've got time for two questions tonight. Now, those who are in the audience, you know that we're live streaming. So please, if you've got a question, put your hand up and wait until the microphone comes to you before you start speaking. So okay, who's going to be the lucky two? Always a shy lot.

Audience member 1:

Thanks, Georgina. That was absolutely wonderful and very inspiring. I was wondering, how do you hold onto hope when you do lose patients in your trials and you are faced with some of those failures?

Georgina Long:

I think it ... Can you hear me? Yeah. It's a philosophy. We're all only human on this planet. And I think one of the most important things is to face one's own mortality. And certainly as an oncologist, that's what we've had to do and sit comfortably with that, which one can never be completely comfortable. And think of it as we're doing our best. That's all we can do on this planet. We can only do our best with transparency and honesty, and sometimes people make mistakes. So that's the framework I come from. That's how I think. I do not have all the answers. I'm only human, my team's only human, but we sure are passionate, they're amazing people I work with, a team of people. We put a lot of time into the teams and the people I work with and we're just doing what we can to help, to push the field forward incrementally. Nothing ever happens quickly or suddenly. I hope that answers your question, but it's a philosophical approach really, because it's devastating when you lose people. And one other point on that, as I've got more mature in my career, I will feel the sadness my patients have and their families, and it's not unusual for my whole team to shed a tear. Yeah.

Audience member 2:

Georgina, your lecture triggered a whole raft of questions in my mind, but the one I'm choosing is around AI. I applaud your scepticism about large language model AIs that we use every time we Google. But there's also other forms of AI, particularly neural network AI used in, for example, sequencing proteins and genetic work and so on, which seemed to me to be more amenable to being companions in that 'third space' with researchers like you. So I'd just like you to perhaps explore that idea.

Georgina Long:

Oh, absolutely. And I think I said this in my lecture that we evolve with our technologies. We have to. But with everything, there's pros and cons. So AI is brilliant. I mean, it's going to change so much for the good. But there's also the flip side where there are some cons that we have to be aware of. And it is us humans who need to assess that and look at the risks and what is our purpose and what's our goal and why are we doing this, etc. So I'd absolutely agree. In fact, I was just speaking with Marie-Louise [Ayres] about the library and intellectual provenance, right? So how do you know where an idea came from? And converting, and this has only really been in the last six months, I believe, being able to use AI to read texts, written texts. I mean, that means we can go back centuries and then it becomes searchable. And so then we were even sort of bouncing ideas about, well, then you can look at where ideas came from geographically as well. If you know the provenance of the bit of paper that was written in 1300, for example, and it was written, let's say Bologna and I'm just making that up, you gave a specific example about mental health with postpartum depression. I mean, when did that really become a thing? And being able to have AI read these texts much more accurately than we can. And we've been using it in our electronic medical records. And I tell you, some of the doctors writing from like 20 years ago, and even my fellows today, they're writing. If it's all digitised and AI does a much better job of reading it than us humans. So these are all useful tools. So I'd agree with you. We absolutely must embrace technology, but we need to question parts of it and we need to think. We need to think ourselves, not be told how to think or what, not be told what to think. So that's more my message. I'm a great believer in embracing tools for the good. Absolutely. I hope that answers your question.

Marie-Louise Ayres:

I think we've run out of time now, but we will be able to continue conversing upstairs over refreshments. But actually, Georgina, you mentioned your dad's work. And another curious researcher came to the library some years ago, one of our research fellows, looking at when chloroform was introduced in Australia for women in labour and which collection was the evidence in? It was in the papers of Henry Handel Richardson because she had inherited her father, the doctor on whom the fortunes of Richard Mahony was based, had inherited his handwritten notes and he was actually the person who introduced this in Victoria. So I mean, just ideas stretch out over time, don't they? New things are introduced and there's always an antecedent for them, and that's also what we're here for to find the antecedents. I hope you'll join me tonight in thanking Georgina for a really inspiring lecture for asking us to think about that space where you're needing to be accountable, you're needing to use evidence, you don't have the answers, and where you might get it wrong, 9 or 99 times out of a hundred and you have to persist because you're curious and you have hope. So Georgina, thank you very much.

Georgina Long:

Thank you.