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Veterinary surgeon and immunologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1996
Australia · b. 1940
Science and medicine
Immunologist who trained first as a veterinary surgeon in Queensland. Shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Rolf Zinkernagel for discovering how the immune system recognises virus-infected cells. He has worked at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, and the University of Melbourne.
4 answers
Recorded · On the billboard
I share Alfred Nobel's conviction that war is the greatest of all human disasters. Infectious disease runs a good second.
On returning to Brisbane, I realised fairly quickly that I am an experimentalist at heart. A career as a diagnostic virologist was not for me!
The two things that I miss most when living out of Australia are the bush and the Pacific coast, especially fishing in the surf at night! My father had a workshop and I learned to be a carpenter, a skill that has resulted in the manufacture of some very substantial coffee tables and a fair amount of time working on houses.
I tried for a Ph.D. scholarship to work with Cedric Mims, but was told to apply again later because he already had a "scholar" and would take only one student at a time. … The following week a job in the Department of Experimental Pathology at the Moredun was advertized in Nature. We sailed for Britain in early 1967, on a very slow and cheap ship.
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