Every week, I see 80 to 100 cancer patients. Half are on experimental therapies. Some are taking drugs that have never been tested in humans before. They place their lives in my hands, and I carry that weight into what I call “the third space”, the gap between what we know and what we desperately need to know.

This is where courageous medicine happens. Not in the textbooks. Not in the established protocols. But in the uncomfortable, uncertain territory where evidence does not yet exist.

Professor Georgina Long with Professor Richard Scolyer after they were announced as the joint 2024 Australians of the Year. Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

Nearly a century ago, Charles Lambie and Harold Dew, an unlikely duo of thinker and doer, reshaped medical education at the University of Sydney. They believed medicine was not just about treating illness, but about training doctors to reason, question and build evidence.

Lambie, the reserved idealist, insisted education must cultivate independent thinkers, not rote technicians. Dew, the practical fly-fisher, hardwired research training into the curriculum and urged young graduates to pursue medical research as a career. Their partnership established something fundamental: the responsibility to create evidence, not merely consume........

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