Dr. Shane Huntington

Junior people are doing work, extraordinary hours that they shouldn't have to do early in their careers just to keep up.

It's become Lord of the Flies, basically.

And it's because we've triaged the system down to such an awful level that it's starting to collapse.

We won't see the real effects of that for a little while.

Research is a long-term game.

And the way I always put this is for every decade of damage we do, it'll take at least two decades to repair.

So we at the moment are carving off whole sections of our research activity.

You look at the cuts to CSIRO and other organisations, the medical research community itself has been heavily impacted.

And what's that going to look like in 20 or 30 years?

Because right now our society is benefiting from stuff we started 20, 30 or even more years ago.

Like what?

So good examples are immunotherapy and cancer.

I remember interviewing people 20 years ago and it was almost a bit of a joke.

People were like, no, you can't do that.

The immune system is compromised when you have cancer.

What are you talking about?

And now it's a frontline treatment.

Yeah, so if I think back 10, 20 years ago, they would never talk about funding.

They're really just there to tell everyone about their work.

Now, almost every single person comes in, brings up the issue of how bad the funding situation is.