Knowledge ignores the borders

A student of Samoan history and a researcher into the big bang epitomise the internationalism of 21st century scholars. SIMON COLLINS reports.

New Zealand's first Rhodes Scholar of Pacific Island origin, Damon Salesa, is going to the United States to do his research and teaching on the Pacific.

Another Rhodes Scholar, Jenni Adams, has come back to Canterbury University, and her role in an international research project in Antarctica is helping to bring three or four US-financed American researchers to join her.

Moving in two directions, and liable to move again, Dr Salesa and Dr Adams symbolise the way high-level scholarship has become perhaps the most interconnected, "globalised" activity on earth - even in the most locally specific fields such as Samoan history.

The "Kiwi diaspora" of New Zealand-trained scholars has played a key role in this global network at least since Ernest Rutherford discovered the parts of atoms in 1911.

Many still follow the Rutherford route to the world's top research centres to study anything from astrophysics at Germany's Max Planck Institute, like Sir Ian Axford, to the sex life of female spider monkeys in Panama, like Dr Christina Campbell at Berkeley, California.

NZ research institutes are often cash-starved by comparison. But creative researchers like Dr Adams are working the international networks in reverse, luring foreign backers and foreign colleagues to enjoy the lifestyle benefits of this country.

With lower airfares and the internet, scholars in Palmerston North or Dunedin can be just as much at the centre of leading-edge research as their counterparts in Paris or New York.

Increasingly, they can split their time - like gene therapist Professor Matthew During, who commutes between Auckland University and Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania, or Dr Richard Beasley, who is a professor at Britain's Southampton University and director of the new Medical Research Institute of New Zealand in Wellington.

Dr Salesa hopes to do something similar, spending nine months a year teaching at the University of Michigan and the other three researching in New Zealand and the Pacific.

He grew up in Glen Innes, attended Selwyn College and did his MA in history and English at Auckland University.

He then turned the tables on the British, going to Oxford to study British colonial attitudes to race in the 19th century, much as British and American scholars once studied the sex life of Samoans.

He returned to take up a 12-month fellowship at the National Library in Wellington and has been offered jobs at NZ universities as well as at Harvard. But although his next goal is to write a history of Samoa in the 19th century, he is going to Michigan.

"One of the reasons I'm going is that here you have one of the top universities in the US prepared to make a major investment in the study of the Pacific, not just with me but with four other staff."

He is joining a Samoan diaspora which is proportionately even larger than New Zealand's, partly because American Samoans have the right of entry to the US.

Nearly 100,000 Samoans are in the US, compared with 10,000 New Zealanders.

He believes that when he eventually returns he will have more to offer than he can now. And he hopes that by then New Zealand will recognise the opportunity in Pacific studies.

"You could concentrate a whole lot of expertise to do with the Pacific in one place in New Zealand - global warming, environmental change, medical research.

"This is one of the few things New Zealand can claim to have some leadership in. There is just such a great opportunity here, and we have to grab it because not only is it good branding for us, but it's something that people will be attracted to come here to study."

In Christchurch, Dr Adams has much the same idea in quite a different field - cosmology, the study of the origins of the universe.

"When I came back to get a job here, I decided to get involved with one of the cosmology projects that have experiments in Antarctica, so we can make use of people who fly through Christchurch," she says.

The multimillion-dollar project she selected involves burying measuring devices in holes up to 2km deep all over the frozen continent. It aims to detect high-energy neutrinos which are believed to have been produced in the "big bang" when the universe was created 15 billion years ago.

The problem is that high-energy neutrinos are extremely hard to detect because they have no electric charge and therefore pass through most things without sparking any chemical reaction. But they may interact with ice, turning into negatively charged electrons and producing a "shower" of radioactive particles that can be measured.

Once they detect the neutrinos, scientists believe they will get clues to finding "black holes" which are believed to exist at the centre of many galaxies and are apparently strong enough to hold each galaxy together.

In the first two years no such neutrinos have been detected, but Dr Adams says that is useful knowledge because it is forcing scientists to rethink their theories about black holes.

This may sound obscure, but Dr Adams says the research aims to answer fundamental questions such as what is the future of the universe, and what is it made of.

"In other countries, people are willing to spend money on trying to work out how things work," she says.

"Yet there are spinoffs. The whole laser industry was just some guys trying to work out quantum mechanics who thought, 'If that's how it works, you should be able to do this.' We are saying the same."

Dr Adams has a three-year, $130,000 grant from the Government-financed Marsden Fund, which has enabled her to employ a post-doctoral researcher to work fulltime on theoretical calculations of the rate at which high-energy neutrinos should arrive.

Her work has encouraged another $15 million US-financed Antarctic neutrino detection project to propose locating three or four researchers in Christchurch, so that they can be just one flight away from the ice whenever things go wrong with their instruments.

Dr Adams could have taken her pick of jobs at overseas universities, but chose to come home - despite the frustrations.

"It's harder to get research money. You have to work harder for a lower wage. You don't get as much time to travel to conferences."

She is an orienteer and a mountain runner - but this year most of her running has been "with a head-lamp in the middle of the night" because she has been so busy at work.

"Sometimes I feel the Government is more interested in talking to New Zealanders who haven't chosen to come home. We have lost two staff, both New Zealanders, who came home but have gone back to England because they could have more freedom to do research."

But she hopes things will improve under new Government policies to finance "centres of excellence" at tertiary institutions and allocate some money to "research consortiums".

Canterbury University is proposing a centre of excellence in astronomy and optical instruments, which includes Dr Adams' work on the origins and nature of the universe as well as the proposed American researchers and part of Industrial Research Ltd.

But even before this centre had been proposed, Dr Adams had committed herself to the country that gave her the chance to learn.

"I wanted to put something back as well. It's not just for my own family. I like the idea of teaching New Zealanders and telling people about things."

Damon Salesa

Radio Ice Cerenkov Experiment