"Where Are All Our Number Crunchers?" (December 11, 2004)

    That's the headline question the Australian Broadcasting Company's News in Science asked rhetorically a couple of days ago.

Nocole Manktelow of ABC Science Online went over to have a chat with David Mitchell, research leader at CSIRO' Mathematical and Information Sciences to find out what's up. Dr Mitchell is a molecular biologist not a mathematician but he told Manktelow there are insufficient appropriately trained and qualified people in Australia to analyse the information now being generated by the nation's molecular biology laboratories.

"This sort of data is going to get enormous, but the number of people able to deal with it is tiny," and Dr Mitchell went on to say, "In 2003 enrolments, there were about 3000 PhD students, about half of which are in biological science [which is] not really surprising considering there's a wealth of discovery in there; it's the hot area. But there were only 186 [postgraduate] students in mathematical sciences and not all of those will be statisticians."

Professor Terry Speed who heads the division of bioinformatics at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and is an authority on the application of statistics to genetics and molecular biology, including biomolecular sequence analysis, feels that the principal difficulty is not so much that serious research blunders will be made but rather that progress will be slowed by the lack of qualified analysts.

Over eighteen months ago the Commonwealth Statistician told the heads of several of Australia's academic societies that he can't find sufficient qualified senior personnel for the ABS. Now the Statistical Society of Australia at the behest of the Commonwealth Government is holding a review into the state of statistics at Australian universities and is calling for submissions by January 14, 2005.

So far the lack of qualified mathematicians and statisticians in academe, the public service, and the private sector has gained little notice by the Commonwealth Government. The dearth doesn't have the immediate impact that say a shortage of nurses has on the public, and therefore political consciousness, but in due course it will severely effect the nation's economy.