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Sir Macfarlane Burnet: A Pillar of Modern Immunology
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15048 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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9 / 1988 |
3,216 Words |
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Vivianne de Vahl Davis
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It is given to some to achieve greatness in one field of scientific endeavor; it is given to very few to attain greatness in a number of such fields. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was one of those few. During his career spanning four decades, he made seminal contributions to bacteriology, virology, and immunology, and produced fundamental advances in several areas of clinical medicine. In retirement he wrote about problems of aging and cancer, and expounded on his philosophy of life. He became a commentator on such issues of public concern as smoking and the export of uranium from Australia.
There are many who think that his earliest work on baceriophages, done in the 1920s, was his finest, but it was his highly successful virus work during the 1930s and '40s that established his reputation and brought him election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1942. Burnet later earned the Royal Medal of that society in 1947 and a British knighthood in 1951.
In the third major stage of his scientific activities, he switched to immunology, a step only a very bold and confident scientist makes. It was in this field, as a theoretical scientist, that Burnet won even more of the accolades toward which he had been unashamedly aiming throughout his career: in 1958, the Order of Merit (an award that is limited in number and the direct gift of the queen); in 1959, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society; and in 1960 the greatest of all his honors: the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.
The Early Years
Macfarlane Burnet was born of Scottish stock in a small country town in Victoria, Australia, on September 3, 1899. He excelled at school and greatly enjoyed outdoor activities. Like Charles Darwin, he showed an early interest in biology by collecting beetles. He won scholarships, which allowed him to study medicine at Melbourne University, and he ranked second in his class in his final year.
Although Burnet was anxious to become a clinician after finishing his residency (internship), the hospital superintendent showed great perspicacity by urging him to concentrate on laboratory work. He thus became the resident hospital pathologist at what is now the Royal Melbourne Hospital and was given complete freedom to do his own research.
Attached to the hospital was the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research in Pathology and Medicine (now called the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) whose new director, Charles Kellaway, also noted Burnet's research potential. This further recognition of Burnet's talent at the very beginning of his career was also remarkably perceptive, since Burnet in 1923 was extraordinarily shy and worked on his own at the hospital in research areas quite different from Kellaway's.
Thus it was that, although employed by the hospital, Burnet became de facto a member of the Hall Institute staff. He remained there, with two brief absences, until his retirement in 1965.
Australia was a long way from the center of medical research in the 1920s. In 1926, therefore, Burnet went to the Lister Institute in London for two years to gain experience in a research center of greater renown and with far greater opportunities for access to
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