How her bright pink hair helps Dr Siouxsie Wiles read people

Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles says injustice and social inequality makes her wrathful. Photo / Photographers Inc

Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles on greed, wrath and envy

GREED
What are you obsessed with owning?
Lego, I can't have enough of it. I love Lego, I loved it as a child but I gave it up as a teenager - as you are supposed to do, I guess. Then when I became a parent, I rediscovered it. Being a grown-up and past the age of 40 and not really caring what people think, I have realised how much pleasure it gives me and how awesome it is that, as a grown-up, I don't have to wait for Christmas or birthdays to get new Lego. It's something my daughter Eve and I do together but I feel like I'm not going to give it up again [even when she does]. She's 13, she's really creative and at the moment her obsession is a television series called Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, set in the 1920s in Melbourne, about a lady detective. Eve said we should make Miss Fisher's house and it is quite large. It's a real house and we have pictures of it. My daughter is focusing on the interiors and I am building the structure. Lego seems like a fairly benign thing to spend money on.

It's not cocaine.
This is the thing, I don't really spend money on clothes or shoes. My two big spends are on my hair and Lego. They are not bad things to be spending money on, they just feel trivial.

Your hair is your trademark - you are famously the scientist with the pink hair.
I have had pink hair for nearly 20 years now and it's not going to change. I started colouring my hair when I was 16 and I went through various stages of pinks and purples and plums and then I went back to brown for a little bit. Then I decided I wanted blue hair. I went to the hairdresser and she took one look at my complexion and said, "No, it will not suit you. I will do pink or red." She did this colour called pillarbox red, which is supposed to be the colour of the postboxes in the UK. It clearly is not that colour but that is the name of the dye. It was early in my career and I got pushback from a lot of people - you can't be a serious scientist with pink hair. There were a couple of times I almost missed out on opportunities because of people's biases. If this is how you feel about my hair, what other biases do you have?

ENVY
What pushes the envy button for you?

Mostly it's around not being able to do things I want to do research-wise. It's awful to say but I almost hate going to conferences these days because I have all these ideas and I can't realise them because I don't have the funds and it's so frustrating. Whenever that little monster appears I have to stop myself and go, "No, whatever you are envious of, that is no reason not to support that person or spread their message or whatever."

Does that envy spur you to greater creativity?
It definitely spurs me to be more creative about getting funds, which has brought pushback from some people. They see me raising money through crowdfunding and getting donations and they think, "Why are people giving her money?" They don't see the time and effort that has gone into building relationships and getting people on board. It's been interesting to see who's really supportive of me doing that and who's been sniffy about it.

WRATH
Injustice makes you angry. What's an example?
My family are really into musicals and for a very long time my daughter has been harassing me to watch Les Miserables. When the musical was coming to Auckland it was really clear she wanted me to be there, so I got tickets. And then when I saw that there was a BBC adaptation of it that wasn't a musical, I thought, I can watch that and then progress on to the musical. I found it utterly traumatic, it was difficult to watch. The social injustice! The scenes where Fantine is selling her teeth and her hair… it still upsets me. So what an incredible thing the welfare state is. Each of us should be willing to put some of our wealth aside to help everybody. Seeing the welfare state and beneficiaries being attacked really makes me angry, that brings out my wrath - argh, I don't even know how to articulate it. As human beings the decent thing to do is to look after each other and that should be dismantling the billionaires and sharing the wealth between us.

Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland.