Overview

The annual Ann Moyal Lecture is given by a distinguished speaker on a contemporary question that draws on such fields of knowledge as science, environment, ecology, history, anthropology, art, and technological change.

In 2026, the lecture will be delivered by Professor Georgiana Long AO and address the question 'When groundbreaking cancer treatments save 50 per cent of patients, what happens to the other half?'

Professor Georgina Long, Joint Australian of the Year 2024 and one of the world's leading melanoma researchers and medical oncologists, takes us into medicine's "Third Space" – the territory where conventional solutions fail, and new evidence must be created. Drawing on her experience developing experimental drug therapies, Long explores why breakthrough science requires not just brilliant minds, but extraordinary courage.

From the women scientists not credited for their discoveries, to Finland's fight against misinformation, to the question of who decides what counts as evidence in an age of artificial intelligence and social media – this is a story about the patients who drive her work, the researchers who refuse to give up, and why the most important breakthroughs happen in the places no one else dares to go.

A lecture about cancer research that's really about something much bigger: how to create truth, who to trust, and why unsolved problems are where the next generation of discoveries begins.