Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (3 September 1899 – 31 August 1985), usually known as Macfarlane or Mac Burnet, was an Australian virologist known for his contributions to immunology. He won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for predicting acquired immune tolerance. He also developed the theory of clonal selection.
Burnet received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Melbourne in 1924, and his PhD from the University of London in 1928. He went on to conduct pioneering research in microbiology and immunology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, and served as director of the Institute from 1944 to 1965. From 1965 until his retirement in 1978, Burnet worked at the University of Melbourne. Throughout his career he played an active role in the development of public policy for the medical sciences in Australia and was a founding member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS), and served as its president from 1965 to 1969.
Burnet's major achievements in microbiology included discovering the causative agents of Q-fever and psittacosis; developing assays for the isolation, culture and detection of influenza virus; describing the recombination of influenza strains; demonstrating that the myxomatosis virus does not cause disease in humans. Modern methods for producing influenza vaccines are still based on Burnet's work improving virus growing processes in hen's eggs.
For his contributions to Australian science, Burnet was made the first Australian of the Year in 1960, and in 1978 a Knight of the Order of Australia. He was recognised internationally for his achievements: in addition to the Nobel, he received the Lasker Award and the Royal and Copley Medal from the Royal Society, honorary doctorates, and distinguished service honours from the Commonwealth of Nations and Japan.
Early life Burnet was born in Traralgon, Victoria; his father, Frank Burnet, a Scottish emigrant to Australia, was the manager of the Traralgon branch of the Colonial Bank. His mother Hadassah Burnet (née Mackay) was the daughter of a middle-class Scottish immigrant, and met his father when Frank was working in the town of Koroit. Frank was 36, and 14 years older than Hadassah.Biographical Memoirs, p. 101. The family was socially conservative Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Frank Macfarlane Burnet was the second of seven children and from childhood was known as "Mac". He had an older sister, two younger sisters and three younger brothers. The eldest daughter Doris had a mental disability that consumed most of Hadassah's time and the family saw Doris's condition as an unspoken stigma, discouraging the other children from inviting friends home, lest they come across the eldest daughter. From his early years in Traralgon, Mac enjoyed exploring the environment around him, particularly Traralgon Creek. He first attended a private school run by a single teacher before starting at the government primary school at the age of 7. Mac was distant from his father—who liked to spend his free time fishing and playing golf—from a young age. He preferred bookish pursuits from a young age and was not enamoured of sport, and by the age of eight was old enough to analyse his father's character; Mac disapproved of Frank and saw him as a hypocrite who espoused moral principles and put on a facade of uprightedness, while associating with businessmen of dubious ethics. Hadassah was preoccupied with Doris, so Mac developed a rather solitary personality.
The Burnets moved to Terang in 1909, when Frank was posted to be the bank manager there, having declined a post in London. Burnet was interested in the wildlife around the nearby Lake Terang; he joined the Scouts in 1910 and enjoyed all outdoor activities. While living in Terang, he began to collect beetles and study biology. He became acquainted with Charles Darwin's work by reading biology articles in the Chambers Encyclopaedia.Biographical Memoirs, p. 102. During his early teens, the family took annual holidays to Port Fairy, where Burnet spent his time observing and recording the behaviour of the wildlife. He was educated at Terang State School and attended Sunday school at the local church, where the priest encouraged him to pursue scholastic studies and awarded him a book on ants as a reward for his academic performance. He advised Frank to invest in Mac's education and he won a full scholarship to board and study at Geelong College, one of Victoria's most exclusive private schools. Starting there in 1913, Burnet was the only boarder with a full scholarship. He did not enjoy his time there among the scions of the ruling upper class; while most of his peers were brash and sports-oriented, Burnet was bookish and not athletically inclined, and found his fellow students to be arrogant and boorish. During this period he kept his beetle-collecting and disapproval of his peers a secret and mixed with his schoolmates out of necessity. Nevertheless, his academic prowess gained him privileges, and he graduated in 1916, placing first in his school overall, and in history, English, chemistry and physics. The typical university path for a person of his social background was to pursue studies in theology, law or medicine. By this time, he was becoming disillusioned with religion and chose medicine. Due to World War I, military service was a possibility and he felt that a medical background would increase his chances of being given a non-combat post.
Academic foundations From 1918, Burnet attended the University of Melbourne, where he lived in Ormond College on a residential scholarship. There, he read more of Darwin's work and was influenced by the ideas of science and society in the writings of H. G. Wells.Biographical Memoirs, p. 103. He enjoyed his time at university and spent much of his free time reading biology books in the library to feed his passion for scientific knowledge. He also had fleeting sporting success, holding down a position in Ormond's First VIII rowing squad for a brief period. He continued to pursue his study of beetles in private, although his classmates found out and there was no loss in this as they viewed his hobby positively. Despite an ongoing shyness, Burnet got on well with staff and students at university. Burnet was self-motivated and often skipped lectures to study at his own faster pace and pursue further knowledge in the library, and he came equal first in physics and chemistry in first year. The following year, 1918, he became increasingly immersed in laboratory work, but he was also dogged by peer pressure to enlist in the military, which he saw as a distasteful prospect. However, this was averted by the end of the war. In 1919, he was one of 12 high-performing students selected for extra tuition, and he came equal first in third year physiology. He began clinical work in the same year, but found it somewhat unpleasant as he was interested in diagnosing the patient and had little interest in showing empathy towards them.
While at university, he became an agnostic and later an aggressive atheist; he was sceptical of religious faith, which he regarded as "an effort to believe what common sense tells you isn't true." He was also disgusted by what he regarded as hypocritical conduct by religious adherents. Towards the later years of his undergraduate years, his unhappiness with religion began to dog him to a greater extent. He tried to become involved with communism for a brief period but then resolved to devote himself to scientific research. The length of time required to study medicine had been reduced to five years to train doctors faster following the outbreak of World War I, and Burnet graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery in 1922, ranking second in the final exams despite the death of his father a few weeks earlier. His fellow graduates included Ian Wark, Kate Campbell, Jean Macnamara, Rupert Willis and Roy Cameron, who became distinguished scientists in their own right.
He then did a ten-month residency at Melbourne Hospital to gain experience before going into practice. The new graduates spent four months in the medicine ward, another four in surgery, and the remaining two in casualty. In the surgery ward he worked under John Gordon and Alan Newton, both well known surgeons. He enjoyed this period immensely and was disappointed when he had to do his medicine residency. However, he was soon engrossed in his work, having been inspired by the neurologist Richard Stawell, whom Burnet came to idolise. As a result of this he became intent on a career in clinical neurology, and he wrote a theoretical paper about testing sensory losses following peripheral nerve lesions, but his submission to the Clinical Report of the Melbourne Hospital was rejected. Burnet applied to be medical registrar as part of his clinical career path, but the medical superintendent of Melbourne Hospital, who was in charge of such appointments, deemed Burnet's character and personality more suited to a laboratory research career, and asked Burnet to withdraw his application in return for the post of senior resident pathologist, which would become vacant in the following months. Burnet complied.
During the transition period he worked as a pathology registrar at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and also prepared for his Doctor of Medicine examinations, late in 1923. In 1923 he took up the post of senior resident pathologist at the Melbourne Hospital; the laboratories were a part of the Institute. He conducted research into the agglutinin reactions in typhoid fever, leading to his first scientific publications.Fenner, F. 1987. Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Historical Records of Australian Science 7:39–77. This article also contains a full list of Burnet's publications. It was reprinted in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 22:100–162. A shortened version is available online from the Australian Academy of Science He decided to work full-time on the antibody response in typhoid, even though he was technically supposed to pursuing pathology as part of his obligations to the hospital. Burnet came first in the Doctor of Medicine exams by a long distance, and his score was excluded from the scaling process so that the other students would not fail for being so far behind.
At the time, the Hall Institute was in the early stages of rapid expansion. The new director of the Institute, Charles Kellaway, wanted to increase the activities of the organisation to not only support hospital operations but have separate research groups in physiology, microbiology and biochemistry that would also do independent studies. He also hoped to raise the standards to make the Institute comparable to the world-class operations in Europe and America. Kellaway took a liking to Burnet and saw him as the best young talent in the Institute with the ability to help raise it to world leading standards. However, he thought that Burnet would need experience working in a laboratory in England before he could lead his own research group on bacteriology in Australia.Biographical Memoirs, p. 104. Burnet left Australia for England in 1925 and served as ship's surgeon during his journey in exchange for a free fare. On arrival, he took a paid position assisting the curator of the National Collection of Type Cultures at the Lister Institute in London. Burnet prepared or maintained bacteria cultures for other researchers in the morning and was free to do his own experiments in the afternoon. During the latter half of 1926, he experimented to find out the effects of bacteriophage on Salmonella typhimurium.