Alan Finkel back on the tools

Decades before the Chief Scientist became a policy visionary he was an entrepreneur, he is again

Alan Finkel used to be an electrical engineer and then he got interested in biophysics, combing them in a company making precision instruments for research in neuroscience.

He’s back at it, meeting an immediate market need in the complicated space where medicine meets engineering. Not that he’s talking about it.

But Health Minister Greg Hunt is.

In his eleventy-first doorstop on COVID-19 yesterday Mr Hunt mentioned, “work is being done, led by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel in conjunction with others on Australian production which could add an additional 5000 invasive and non-invasive respiratory and ventilator units to the Australian capacity.”