There were always people looking out. So I think that’s probably...

There were always people looking out. So I think that’s probably coloured a lot of what I think about. The importance of communities, whether they’re residential, or work, or sporting clubs. They’re parts of civil society that we undervalue.”


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Now Hilton lives in an environmental living zone outside of Melbourne within a national park. Pets are banned, and weeds are killed on sight. There are mud-brick homes, swamp wallabies, koalas and phascogales, small insect-eating marsupials.
“I run a light so I can see what moths are there. It’s amazingly diverse – 600 moth species that have been documented by this passionate guy who lives next door to me, Frank the moth man,” Hilton says. “These are my people.”
The moth fixation illustrates a key trait of Hilton’s: he likes to go deep, not broad. Even as a science student in the early 1980s, anything outside the scope of his current obsession would paralyse him with boredom. “I was this close to dropping out of my degree, like, so demoralised and disenchanted,” he says. Then, his mum showed him an ad for summer work experience at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“I went there and worked in a lab that was working on blood cells and how they talk to each other. This was a job they would pay you to go deeply into one thing.
“It was like falling in love. I honestly get tingles about it. I loved the elegance of the blood cell system, the beauty of it. I went back to Melbourne with a purpose.”
He ended up pursuing honours at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI), working as a trainee protein chemist in molecular hematology.
“They didn’t treat you as a student. You were there to make a discovery. I’ve always been somebody who left to their own devices, probably wouldn’t challenge myself enough. But being surrounded by really talented people who expect a lot, you rise to the occasion, right?”
He tells me about some of these early discoveries with an Adam Spencer-esque gift of the **, sipping a tall glass of nonalcoholic beer as I squint at him with the regret of someone who’s just discovered sauvignon blanc and the complexities of serology don’t mix.

Hilton’s early work in the mid-1980s focused on purifying a protein called leukemia inhibitory factor, or LIF. The protein helps embryos implant in the uterus, but it also pauses the differentiation of embryonic stem cells, allowing researchers to genetically manipulate them in culture. Before the gene-editing technology CRISPR, scientists used LIF to freeze stem cells, chop out a gene, and then implant the embryo into a surrogate mother to create a mouse pup missing that gene. Breed two of these genetically modified mice together, and you get an animal missing both copies of the gene – and now you know exactly what that gene does.
“It ended up being manufactured and one of the biggest selling laboratory reagents in the world,” he says of LIF.
Another big hit Hilton oversaw during his 14 years as director of the institute was the commercialisation of the leukemia drug venetoclax, which earned a US$325 million ($486 million) royalty deal – one of the largest in Australian history – announced by the then-health minister, Greg Hunt.

One early patient, he says, was a woman diagnosed with leukemia in her 30s with three kids under six who flew to Britain to be part of the second clinical trial. “She’s healthy 14 years later. Her kids are teenagers. It’s unbelievable.”
The institute has about 90 labs, he says, “working on everything from malaria to dementias and childhood and genetic diseases. It’s like CSIRO. Both institutions have a lot in common”.
The people he’s met so far across the CSIRO’s more than 50 sites are “as absolutely passionate and driven about their quarter of science as the people I worked with in Melbourne, trying to kill brain cancer”.



Botanic House’s lemongrass and tumeric chicken skewer.© Steven Siewert
The institute had 1500 staff compared to the CSIRO’s 6000. “It’s a step-up, but it’s not like going from 100 to 100,000. Fifteen hundred to 6000? That’s a rounding error.” An immediate problem for Hilton, however, is that headcount has to fall. He warned staff earlier this year that labour and operation costs within Enterprise Services – the corporate support sector of the organisation – had to be reduced by 25 per cent.

“We’ve talked about the need to rationalise the non-research side,” he tells me. “That has grown a bit over the last four years through the pandemic.”
It’s important, he says, that any leadership change within an organisation brings new emphasis. But recent history demonstrates making those changes can be fraught. Hilton’s predecessor, Larry Marshall, unleashed a storm of scorn early in his reign in 2016 when he moved to axe hundreds of climate scientists from the CSIRO as he sought a more commercial tack for the organisation. Scientists revolted, the World Meteorological Organisation denounced the move, and The New York Times ran a blowtorch editorial titled “Australia turns its back on climate science”.



“I’m still a scientist”: Doug Hilton in 2020, when he was director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.© Jason South
The current changes, Hilton says, will be focused more on firming up the research side rather than cutting it back. “I ran a lab till last year at WEHI. I still do my moth stuff. I’m still a scientist ... it’s about remembering the reason the organisation exists.
“The government gives us $900 million a year. That allows us to be a cornerstone on big research problems. We can decide we’re going to work on a problem for five, 10, 15, 20 years.

“How do we do research that transcends governments, that the community and future generations are going to need?”
Not that he didn’t admire Marshall’s Silicon Valley-style focus. “I was excited about commercialising my discoveries as a medical researcher because it was the way you got things into hospitals to treat patients who were dying.
“But there are also other ways of generating impact. I suspect Larry and I don’t see the world too differently. We just have different styles. He was more razzmatazz than me.”
One thing his predecessors have avoided, though, is admonishing opposition leaders. In March, the nuclear wars were raging. A CSIRO report had found the Coalition’s favoured small modular nuclear reactors would produce more expensive energy than coal and gas, and that renewables represented the cheapest power source.
Dutton ripped into the “discredited” report, claiming the cost of transmission lines for renewables had not been considered (in fact, they had). “It’s not a genuine piece of work,” Dutton said.

Hilton hit back in an open letter that didn’t name Dutton but urged political leaders to “resist the temptation to disparage science”.
So when did Dutton cross the line?
“I think when you stop debating the scientific merits of ideas, you are almost dog whistling that the science itself is untrustworthy,” he says. “And the scientists are untrustworthy. And that there is some grander conspiracy that organisations like CSIRO are part of. I think that’s dangerous.
“CSIRO and other research institutions are trying to help us as a nation navigate profoundly difficult problems. Transitioning the energy grid is difficult. Protecting our biodiversity [and] understanding our biodiversity is difficult. Curing brain cancer is difficult. These are highly reliable people working ethically, assiduously, creatively, genuinely for the benefit of the Australian people. So I think it’s disrespectful.”
Another wine and beer arrive. Cheers.
Liam Mannix’s Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.