Professor Georgina Long Lambie-Dew Oration: Cancer expert implores students and young doctors to step up, into the ‘third space’

National

Medicine

Opinion

Georgina Long Oncologist, 2024 Australian of the Year October 23, 2025 — 7.30pm

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.

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 tr