Newsmakers with Dr Karl

The iconic Aussie on the complex relationship between science and the media...

September 09, 2024

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is - for many - an iconic Aussie personality.

I mentioned last week that when the request came through to us, the Squiz team got very excited about the prospect of Dr Karl on the show.

Why? Well, many of them are in their late 20s, and they grew up listening to his science show on Triple J. So he’s famous. But heaps of people are famous and don’t evoke this kind of enthusiasm. So I probed, really, why?

Three things:

  1. He gives the sense that no question is a stupid question

  2. “He’s the scientist of our generation” - that’s a direct quote

  3. There’s a real fascination with how much he knows about stuff, science stuff… 

So there’s that. And then there are those who know him from other ABC work, his many books, his many, many TV appearances, and his brief political stint as a senate candidate in 2007.  My 4yo knows him from Playschool and his ‘funny shirts’.

His latest book, A Periodic Tale, is his personal memoir.  It covers his family background - he’s the son of migrant parents who were both Holocaust survivors. He became a physicist, a taxi driving hippie, and a children's doctor and eventually landed in TV and became a star. He’s a father and, at 76, still has a weekly show on Triple J’s Science with Dr Karl, which is also available as a podcast. 

Scroll down for the edited transcript of our chat. You can also listen to the episode here or click the image below to watch on YouTube.

My advice is to take a deep breath - this man can achieve a lot in a small space of time, and this interview demonstrates exactly why. 

Your friend in news

Kate Watson

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki on Elle Macpherson and not trusting the headlines…

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: In the case of Elle Macpherson, from my reading, she had a certain type of breast cancer that 95% of the time would not spread. And if you go in there and you remove that cancer, it's not done by a friendly naturopath, it's done by people with lots of training over many years. So, you remove this lump, and 95% of the time, you fix it. But just to cover that other 5%, you say, I don't know what the treatment is, is it chemo, is it radio, is it drugs ending in AB, I don't know, but then they give the option to cover that other 5%, So, Elle Macpherson took the surgery, conventional Western medicine, and had it done by trained people and removed the lump. Then she voluntarily went to the lottery, where she had a 95% chance of winning. You think they're pretty good. Dr. Kate, in a month, would you have 20 cups of coffee?

Kate Watson: Probably. 

KK: But then imagine that it was guaranteed one of them has a poison that will kill you. Would you continue to go through 20 cups of coffee a month? 

KW: No…

KK: Right. But she did. And she was lucky. And I'm really glad that she did not suffer a bad outcome. But she went into the lottery and she won. And the odds are 20 to one in her favour, they're good odds. But when it comes to somebody dying, you'll say… “Oh Michael, we did think that the odds were mostly in your favour, so we didn't decide to go all away. We're sorry you're dying”… You can't do that with people dying. And so the way it's reported that she ignored Western medicine and she's cured of cancer…Not quite. No.

KW: Interesting. It's the lottery of life… I guess just coming back to the point, then who do you trust, and what do you listen to?

KK: ABC media is good. BBC media is still good. NPR is good in America. Canadian government radio is good… But things do change. There is a falsehood put out in the press that scientists are these people who know everything. When they meet a scientist, they say, “What are you researching? And what do you know?”… But it’s what you don't know, and it’s infinite. Two things about science. Number one, it's not a bunch of facts - that's an encyclopedia. Secondly, it's a way to not get fooled. It's not the best way, but we haven't got a better one. With COVID, there was a 1% death rate, and the odds were that 80 million would die. In fact, only about 25 million died because we had the vaccine so quickly. So that was 65, 55 million people who didn't die because of the vaccines that we got on to so quickly. So I think that's a good thing. 

KW: What would you say is the most overlooked news story at the moment? Something we should be talking about more that we're not.

KK: It's not so much a news story, but it's four messages of good hope. One, we can stop and reverse both rising CO2 and climate change with today's technologies, using only half of the money that we give to fossil fuel companies. Number 2, we are living in the most peaceful time ever in the history of the human race… We think that the Second World War was the most bloodthirsty war on a percentage basis, killing more people percentage-wise than any other war in history. But if you go back to 755 AD, a general in China had a revolution against the emperor and killed one in every three people in China. China was half the world's population. He killed one in every six humans alive in the year 755. It is a peaceful time, even though it doesn't appear that way. The third message of hope is that the kids are smarter than their parents by 9 IQ points every generation, so they can fix the future. And the last one is that we're coming up with vaccines that can fix all future versions of COVID.

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