We used to kill plants, Rosco and me, except he was much better at it.
It involved inoculating the plant — a pasture legume — with a disease, until we found one that could resist it.
Rosco was your quintessential nerdy scientist, looking the part complete with his greying curls behind a balding pate, the spectacles not only sufficiently 1970s (it was the 90s) but also slightly angled on his face, the awkward wardrobe, the even more awkward mannerisms and the awkwarder staring off into space completely at random, his eyes ever so slightly crossed.
One day, we even found ourselves in a clichéd moment in the lab where we mixed a spore suspension by pouring it from one beaker to another, each back-and-forth for five minutes — in white lab coats — until it dawned on me what we looked like.
I began my slow maniacal laughter a la the TV cartoon characters mixing potions and when he joined in, we had one of few pop-culture moments together. He even chuckled.
We travelled a few times up north to a farm where we’d follow handwritten mud maps (no mobile phones back then) through tall pasture into a willing farmer’s paddock where Rosco would wander off from the only tree that he used as his yearly landmark muttering ‘if they cut that tree down, we’re toast’.
If Indiana Jones was an agronomist. Rosco would tread carefully looking for ...
Bingo. A solitary rusted steel peg, and then we’d be at it for hours in the hot sun, measuring tapes everywhere, face down in the grass counting lesions on leaves and collecting the more interesting ones.
The landowner phoned me once.
“You’ve been doing this for a few years now, so I was just wondering something,” he said.
“Yes?”
“What have you discovered?”
Which was a fair enough question back then to sell the science to the masses and to be honest — maniacal laughter aside — Rosco knew exactly how his charisma would turn heads at any dinner party. As in turn away.
Should he ever be invited.
He didn’t own a suit and I’d seen him struggle with spoons.
So it was me who sent the farmer a few published papers and given that the statistics made me go all faint — not with excitement — I hoped he was sated.
Behold the modern day citizen scientist, someone who takes an interest in and joins projects that real scientists operate when they need an army of volunteering collectors.
Who then read up about it afterwards with relative ease.
The CSIRO has a comprehensive citizen scientist program if you’re interested enough to get involved but don’t want to delve any further than finding ‘things’.
Which is what a few dozen people did in one project — a survey of the calicivirus (or lagovirus), raising the collection rate from 30 samples from dead rabbits at the hands of only the boffins in 2015, to more than 300 in 2023.
The data on this biological control agent has been invaluable and all of it was collated by volunteering citizen scientists to help CSIRO scientists understand how the virus may be evolving to help control rabbits.
If you dig having a spot of science in your life, then get into it.
I found Rosco on Facebook last year and sent him the usual friend request complete with a nice witty message about sharing our past adventures.
Four months later he replied: “Are you the same Andy Wilson who once worked at CSIRO in plant pathology back in ...”
“Yes, it’s me Ross. That’s kinda why I contacted you.”
“Oh, what a coincidence! We used to work together.”
“Bought a suit yet?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
To get involved so you too can become as cool and groovy as Rosco and me, visit: https://www.csiro.au/en/education/get-involved/citizen-science
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