I had no need to worry. Frank attended every session and delivered a very memorable talk. At the final celebration dinner I asked him to let me know when he was ready to go back to his hotel.
At around I went over to him and asked if he was ready to go. We hurriedly found a microphone and Frank rose to speak. He showed his dry sense of humour and extraordinary memory by telling numerous funny stories about Burnet and their times together. Burnet was days away from heading off to England on sabbatical and asked Frank whether he would mind looking after his house while he was away.
From his obvious enjoyment of this story it was clear that even Frank, the most generous of men, realised this was going above and beyond the call of duty.
It is fair to conclude that going above and beyond any ordinary sense of duty has earned Frank Fenner his place as one of the greatest servants of Australian science. Members Public. Remembering Frank Fenner Phil Hodgkin ASI Newsletter, March Before the start of the scientific program at the ASI meeting I was asked to deliver a short tribute to our long time colleague and great friend Frank Fenner who passed away the week before the meeting at the age of To quote Gus Nossal: "What a life, what a career, what generosity of spirit - We shall not see his like again!
When we started, in , everything was rosy: I had approval for 15 academic staff, quite apart from research assistants, computer programmers and all the rest. But I got only seven or eight, and university funding became tight.
Then the Vice-Chancellors changed, and the new Vice-Chancellor saw that one way of saving funds for other things was to kill the half-grown chicken. That meant struggling rather hard. He agreed to provide me with three research fellowships as the funding for three additional positions. Then the Director of the John Curtin School transferred Boyden, with his funding and a couple of support staff, to me. That gave me four positions which just made it viable, and there are no more positions in CRES now.
The present Director, Henry Nix, is now in his second term and doing a splendid job. He has been very interested in the effects of climatic change on the Australian environment from back in the s. That is centre stage now. He has got very strong modelling and computer understanding and the centre is making a major contribution.
You had the satisfaction of addressing a number of really pressing environmental issues. Yes, and they are not going to go away. I could bring a broad overview but I never felt that I was an expert. But you took it seriously and did a lot of research, approaching it with the viewpoint of a sensitive realist. My writing experience was useful. That was fascinating. It writes reports: there is now a range of about 50, some of which have been very influential. One was the first comprehensive report on environmental impact statements.
I was on the committee that drew that up, meeting in some ice-bound place in Canada for two weeks to do the final editing. It seems that your smallpox work throughout the s — leading to the great moment when, as chairman of a world committee on smallpox, you announced that eradication had been achieved — was the culmination of your career in virology.
I justified this on the grounds that you could call it an environmental disease. Eventually I got involved with the hard problem of demonstrating to the world that the eradication of smallpox had been achieved. Probably I was acceptable for this because I was an Australian and therefore not from a country that was a big power; I was native-born English-speaking the World Health Organization conducts its affairs and writes its reports in English ; I had been on WHO committees; and I knew a good deal about poxviruses.
The high point came in May , when I delivered a report at the meeting of the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, that smallpox was eradicated. That indicates to me that your virology work never went away, no matter how many other things you were involved in.
Tell me about the work you had done earlier on the taxonomy of viruses. That meant writing the quinquennial report of the committee, which was an interesting job because the nomenclature of viruses came very late to biological nomenclature.
In the committee had devised a number of rules, some of which were very good, such as that doing away with priorities.
They said — for some good reasons — that it would tie virology into a system which was inappropriate for viruses. The threatening thing at the time I took over was that they were so upset that they threatened to get out of the system.
Bacterial and animal viruses would be handled by one committee and plant viruses by another, under two systems of nomenclature. Since certain families of viruses have representatives in both plants and animals, that would be ridiculous. So I saw my major job as keeping them in the fold but not destroying the good things that had been achieved.
I did that by concentrating on the big groups — the families and the genera — and not worrying at all about Latinised names for the species. That was successful, and the last thing I did was to ensure that a plant virologist — Dick Matthews, from New Zealand — became the next President.
It sounds as though a lot of diplomacy was involved in that, resulting now in a very tight virological taxonomy. I think it was a move in the right direction.
The plant virologists have now come on board and have done away with their objections to using these more sensible names. That is now a very good committee. The taxonomy works very well, bringing order to the whole business. For that one, yes.
But there are others coming out, including a very good one from the present chairman, Fred Murphy, who is one of the collaborators in the book Veterinary Virology. Before we leave taxonomy: what links the poxviruses together? What have they got in common that makes this a family? The poxviruses are a tight bunch, a really closely related lot of viruses.
They are similar in many ways: they have a few common antigens, a similar structure, a similar kind of genome, a similar cytoplasmic replication. But the poxviruses of vertebrates fall into eight clearly distinguishable families, one of which includes eight or nine different viruses — of which smallpox, cowpox and vaccinia are the important ones for humans.
Myxoma virus is another group, with representatives primarily in South and North America. There is one that causes Molluscum contagiosum in humans, and so on. There are a number of different genera Orthopoxvirus , etc. You have mentioned your writing experience. Could we talk now about some of your books and reports — many of them quite significant. Well, I have written a number of books.
It was eventually published by Cambridge University Press in I guess I had a guilt feeling early in my career about being a professor who had never in my life given a course of lectures — I went from the Hall Institute to the Rockefeller Institute to the John Curtin School.
So I wrote a large technical book, in two volumes, on the biology of animal viruses. Then David White — an ex-student who was a very good teacher and Professor of Microbiology in the University of Melbourne — and I wrote Medical Virology , which Academic Press in America published in with some misgiving. It sold very well, 25, copies, and we are currently in the fourth edition of it. So Veterinary Virology was deliberately designed as a companion volume to Medical Virology. David White came in with me again, writing some of the chapters of Part 1, the general principles.
I got four veterinarians — one from Germany, two from the United States one of those, Paul Gibbs, was actually a British scientist , and an Australian man in Melbourne, Mark Studdert — to write the clinical chapters for Part 2. That first edition appeared in The publishers were a bit sceptical about its sales but for a veterinary textbook it sold very well, nearly copies.
It got very good reviews and we have just done a second edition. They were excellent, very good companions. Peter Bachmann, the German, died very tragically during the writing of the book so we dedicated that volume to him.
To replace him, keeping the international flavour of the editorial group, we got another distinguished German veterinary virologist, Rudolf Rott. My function there was largely organisation and editing — everything went through my word processor. I was very proud that I kept the length of the second edition, in spite of the new material, to within five pages of the length of the first edition.
Three and an eighth kilograms — people would not be able to read it in bed. It is called Smallpox and its Eradication. It covers the virology, the pathology, the pathogenesis, the history of smallpox itself, the history of vaccination, then the history of eradication country by country and continent by continent , and of certification, and finally the lessons for the future. I had been Chairman of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication up till , when it made its final decision.
When I retired, aged 65, the Global Commission resolved — not at my instigation — that there should be a proper record of the eradication program. I was unoccupied, so I took it on, thinking I was going to do it on my own, and in a year.
It ended up an interesting book, beautifully produced with a series of coloured photographs of smallpox cases — it would be impossible for any ordinary publisher to afford to publish this in colour, but the WHO spared no expense. Some parts of the book are thrillers, especially the page account of the eradication in India, which was really the hard nub of the problem, as that is the ancient home of smallpox. If you start reading that chapter you have to finish it before you put it down.
Well, it was a kind of history of virology. Adrian Gibbs, whom I mentioned earlier, came out from England for three years of working with me in animal viruses. He suggested that we get some of the people who were studying the classical viruses — tobacco mosaic virus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, and so on — to write up the history of each one as they saw it. That volume contains a lot of very interesting accounts, portraits as much of the 15 virologists who wrote the histories as of the viruses.
A classical example is the account of tobacco mosaic virus by Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, who first demonstrated that the nucleic acid of TMV was infectious. Burnet wrote the one on influenza virus, Brooksby wrote the one on foot-and-mouth disease virus, and so on — all historical. That was published as the History of Microbiology in Australia. The idea of it was proposed by my colleague David White, who was President of the Australian Society of Microbiology at the time, when I had just finished the book on the eradication of smallpox.
Again I thought it would take a year, but it took three years. There were collaborators, of whom provided material. I left a blank page because when I was already indexing the book I was still waiting for his contribution. Writing the book was an interesting experience, because microbiology is a broad subject. As well as general aspects like international activities and microbiology in the two world wars, we included protozoology, soil bacteriology, water microbiology, viruses — of course — and institutions where microbiology is done and so on.
We must say something about a key figure in your life — Bobbie Roberts, whom you married in , during the war. You have mentioned her transfusion work in the malaria unit at Cairns. Having trained as a nurse in Western Australia, she went away in the first contingent of nurses to the Middle East. She was at the hospital at Kantara, in the desert, where Sir Ian Wood was a senior physician in charge of blood transfusion.
He got her to move into that and she became a very expert transfusionist. Bill Keogh, the pathologist there, did all the sterility testing and she came through with flying colours. She was very good and Keogh was impressed. She in fact got recognition as an Associate of the Royal Red Cross, which is very rare for a person who is not an administrator. Nearly always such recognition goes to matrons, not hands-on, working people. And then, because of her expertise in transfusion work, she went into direct transfusion in the research unit and also dissection of mosquitoes with Josephine Mackerras, the parasitologist there.
Firstly she worked with me in the lab, and then we had some children and so she looked after them. But also, especially when I was Director of the John Curtin School, she maintained open house for the staff and so on. My wife has very vivid memories of that trip. We came across Canada on the Canadian Pacific, stopped at Lake Louise for a little while, and then got on the train. But I was under the impression that one got meals aboard.
And I had no money at all. I think I lived on a few oranges, but she almost starved to death before we got down to New York. So that coloured her memory of that trip. Not all your travels have been together, but during your time with the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication you made some substantial journeys.
I travelled for two reasons: to go to the meetings of this committee; and to the Commission and then on international commissions. Somebody had to see whether the Chinese had eradicated smallpox. At that time they were not within WHO and were very reluctant to receive anybody. Finally they agreed that one person from the WHO committee and I could go on a two-man Commission visit.
We travelled fairly extensively in China for five weeks. With the travel and after checking the extensive Chinese documentation, we satisfied ourselves that there were no recent cases of smallpox there. And I went to Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and so on — very interesting.
You have written that during your career there was an enormous change in opportunities for science ambassadors to move about the world. When it had to be by ship, it would have been too slow to be possible. Well, in the immediate postwar period we went to America by ship and came back by ship.
The first time I went to America by plane — in , I think — we stopped at Guam and a few more places as well. But the university at that time was pretty flush and professors were pretty important people who travelled first class.
In first class at that time the airlines provided Pullman beds: they just put down white sheets on a bed, where I lay down and slept as the plane flew across the Pacific — very, very smart travel but not the way I travelled for most of the rest of my career. That was usually economy class. You have had a long association with the Australian Academy of Science. Can you tell me a bit about your increasing link with the Academy? I was elected in The 23 foundation Fellows were Fellows of the Royal Society resident in Australia, plus a few senior scientists.
One of the provisions of the charter, which was signed by the Queen in , was that they had to have 50 members by the end of that year. I was one of the 30 who were selected in In I was asked to become Biological Secretary, in a similar arrangement to that of the Royal Society.
That took me beyond medical research into the wide area of biological sciences. I enjoyed that job because it took me into new fields and led to involvement with committees that played an important part in setting up institutions in Australia.
So it was decided that the only way to get big money was to put up big projects. One proposal was for a survey of the Australian fauna and flora, which was finally set up as a biological survey of Australia and has produced a new flora of Australia.
The second was a recommendation to set up, within the Australian National University, a research school of biological sciences.
That too came to pass, resulting in a very successful research school. In , when I was Vice-Chairman and a very prominent meteorologist called Priestley was Chairman, the committee produced a report on climatic change — so we were looking at the climate change problems quite a long while ago, with a whole range of quite influential reports on national parks, ecological reserves and so on.
There is another angle to all this. Knowing that there was tax deductibility for donations to the Academy, for a number of years I put the royalties into an environment fund for the Academy to use. After I retired, my wife and I discussed our affairs and decided to set up a couple of endowment funds, this time specifically for conferences.
One fund is within the Academy of Science, where colleagues had done the same thing. I have provided money over a number of years for a fund — adequate to be maintained indefinitely — with which they hold conferences on the environment. The seed money is put in from this fund, and then other organisations put in 10 or 20 times as much to get the things running.
They have been extremely successful, with five or six very good publications and very influential meetings on such things as the preservation of the coastline and adjacent wetlands; the Murray-Darling Basin; the history and preservation of the high country, the Alps; biological diversity, as a forerunner for the conference in Rio; and, recently, trade investment and the environment, and the various aspects of GATT that impact on environmental matters and so on. The other one is in the John Curtin School, for small conferences on various aspects of medical research, which I think have also been quite successful.
So that is the last aspect of my environmental activities. As a person who I suppose is approaching elderly, I find it very satisfying to see how effective this small input of money can be as seed money for these conferences.
Frank, it would be nice to talk a little bit about your Japan Prize for Preventive Medicine, a remarkable but very fitting tribute. It would not compete directly with the Nobel Prize, which devotes itself to fundamental science; instead, the Japan Prize would pick applied problems. The first award was in and two awards are made on different topics each year, one in the biological sciences and one in the physical sciences. In the subject was preventive medicine. Since smallpox eradication had just been achieved, it was a natural to be put up for an award.
The real leader in that field was D A Henderson, an outstanding epidemiologist. If you picked one man you would have to pick him. But, fortunately for me, the names of two other people were added to his: Isao Arita, his Japanese successor as chief of the smallpox eradication unit at WHO, and mine, as having been Chairman of the Global Commission.
Even splitting it up leaves a pretty nice nest-egg. To have that sort of money come in has helped very much in setting up the endowment funds, of course. I carried on the smallpox work right through the time at CRES. And you can look on smallpox as an environmental disease. It is an infectious disease associated with close contact with infected people, and there is a means of controlling it. You were an observer while it was being slowly pressed into a corner, finally into a little bit of Somalia and then out.
It was a marvellous thing to be associated with. And D A Henderson, who is now in the White House as officer of science and technology policy in charge of biological sciences, was an inspirational person to work with, a real leader, a great man.
We respect and like each other very much. So that was a great experience. The most important lesson from this incident is that the original idea to eliminate rabbits with a lethal virus was flawed, because powerful selective forces that could not be controlled or anticipated were at work.
Fenner published a series of journal articles from which carefully documented the changes in the virus and the host that occurred during this incident.
For more information on Dr. Fenner, see his interview from June of in The Australian , and a summary of his career at the Australian National University. Fenner F Deliberate introduction of the European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, into Australia. From the introduction: During the last twenty years virology has developed into an independent science.
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