Burnet, (Frank) Macfarlane (1899–1985)

Australian physician, an authority on immunology and viral diseases such as influenza, poliomyelitis, and cholera, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1960, together with the immunologist Peter Medawar, for their work on acquired immunological tolerance of transplanted tissues (such as in skin grafting). He was knighted in 1969.

Burnet was born in eastern Victoria and studied at Melbourne and London universities. From 1927 he was associated with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, becoming its director in 1944.

Burnet was the first to investigate the multiplication mechanism of bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria) and devised a method for identifying bacteria by the bacteriophages that attack them. In 1932 he developed a technique for growing and isolating viruses in chick embryos; this was to be used as a standard laboratory procedure for more than 20 years.

In 1949 Burnet predicted that an individual's ability to produce a particular antibody to a particular antigen was not innate, but developed during the individual's life. In 1951 Medawar carried out the experiments that confirmed this theory.

Burnet's second major contribution to immunology was made in 1957 – his ‘clonal selection’ theory of antibody formation, which explains why a particular antigen stimulates the production of its own specific antibody.