Philippa Stevenson: Budding scientist meets his heroes

You'd excuse Peter Mace for being a tad overawed.

The boy from Tokoroa is not long back from mingling with dozens of Nobel Prize winners, chatting with them about their discoveries, even sharing a quiet meal with one. Heady stuff, you'd think.

But the 24-year-old is pretty down to earth about his experience in Lindau, Germany, where he was one of the first three budding New Zealand scientists to attend the annual gathering of Nobel laureates held there for the past 55 years.

The Otago University biochemistry PhD student was humbled by the chance to attend the four-day conference, but it seems lads from Toke keep their feet firmly on the ground in the most rarefied atmospheres.

"They are just people," he said of the 44 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine who lectured to and mixed with more than 700 young students/researchers from 54 countries late last month.

While some of the young scientists treated the laureates as research rock stars - lining up for autographs and photographs - Mace was more circumspect.

"It was enough just to be there," said the one-time Tokoroa High School student who, with fellow NZ representatives Kaa-Sandra Chee from Auckland University and Shelley Scott from Canterbury University, dined with Kiwi Nobel laureate Alan MacDiarmid, who was also attending his first Lindau meeting. The encounter was the highlight of the conference, Mace said.

The laureates were an impressive group who had made the major discoveries of our time and influenced the way we live, he said. But despite relishing the experience, he believed it didn't pay to be daunted by their success.

Science - even Nobel Prize-winning science - is about asking the right questions, he told me. "There's a certain degree of being in the right place at the right time."

Mace, too, has suddenly found himself in the right place. Back in Dunedin on Sunday after three months flitting from university courses to research laboratories in America, Finland and Britain, as well as the Lindau conference, the laidback Toke lad, who has a bachelor of science with first-class honours, admits to being a bit dazed by his globetrotting.

"I can't believe where I've been," said the son of Richard and Barbara Mace, respectively a Kinleith engineer and a Tokoroa High teacher. His parents, he says, were "pretty ecstatic".

Mace is also the first recipient of a new Otago University award, the Elman Poole Travelling Scholarship, and was already overseas when he learned he was one of the three chosen by the Royal Society to go to Lindau.

"My Tokoroa High sweatshirt has seen some interesting parts of the world!" he told me by email before the conference.

Back home, I learn that the sweatshirt is not the original school version stretched to meet the occasion and the grown man; it's by popular clothes brand Huffer, whose head designer is Dan Buckley, another former Tokoroa High student.

Mace has worn it proudly across the world. "I feel better for growing up in Tokoroa. Where you grow up makes you the person you are but it doesn't define what you can do."

What Mace is doing now is studying the structure of proteins in relation to fertility and ovulation. The research by Otago's biochemistry department is based on findings in the Inverdale sheep breed but applicable to humans. It was the subject of the research in some of the labs Mace visited overseas and he's come back with new ideas for his own work and some invaluable contacts.

The Lindau conference proved fruitful, too, whether the talk was on specific science such as global warming or nanotechnology or on approaches and attitudes to research.

"There were similar threads between countries," Mace said.

One debate, which resonates here, canvassed the different emphasis placed on basic and applied science. A widely held concern was that starving basic science of funds in favour of applied science and its more likely immediate benefits risked cutting off the stream of ideas that enabled the applied science to occur in the first place.

And scientists' pay was a universal worry. "Everywhere it is not enough. A lot of people accept you don't get rich doing science - unless you win a Nobel Prize, of course."

But, it seems, anything is possible. Even, or maybe especially, if you come from Toke.