Frank Macfarlane Burnet

He got engaged to Edith Linda Marston Druce, while working in London, and married her in 1928, upon his return to Australia. The couple had one son and two daughters – Ian Burnet, Elizabeth and Deborah. In 1973, his wife Linda died of lymphoid leukemia, affecting the lymphocyte cells, on which he had been conducting his research.

In 1976, he married widowed singer, Hazel Gertrude Jenkin, who had been working as a voluntary librarian at Ormond College’s microbiology department.

He was operated for colorectal cancer in November 1984 and made a good recovery, but fell ill again with secondary lesions, affecting his thorax and legs, and died on August 31, 1985 at Port Fairy.

Frank Macfarlane Burnet was born on September 3, 1899 in Traralgon, eastern Victoria, as the second of seven kids, to Scottish emigrants Frank Burnet and Hadassah Burnet.

He went to state schools in Traralgon and Terang, before moving to boarder Geelong College on full scholarship in 1913.

He graduated in 1916 and completed his Bachelors in Medicine and Surgery from Ormond College, University of Melbourne, on a residential scholarship, in 1922.

In 1923, he started researching on the agglutinin reactions in typhoid fever at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. He was also working as a research pathologist at Royal Melbourne Hospital.

In 1924, he obtained his doctorate degree in medicine and continued his research in bacteriology at Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, London, during 1925-27, through the Beit Fellowship.

Upon his return to Melbourne in 1928, he was appointed as assistant director of Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, by director Dr. Charles Kellaway, and carried out researches in staphylococcal toxins, besides his ongoing bacteriophages study.

In 1932, he took a two-year leave and went to the world-leading National Institute for Medical Research, London, to conduct research on virus. He discovered the influenza virus and developed a chick-embryo technique for virus culture.

Despite being offered a permanent position at the Institute by its director, Sir Henry Dale, he returned to Melbourne in 1934, to resume his research on virology.

In 1940, he released his first book ‘Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease’, which influenced the biological world and was published in Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish.

In order to prevent the potential outbreak of influenza pandemic during World War II, he started working towards producing a vaccine for this deadly disease.

In 1934, he discovered the causal organisms of psittacosis and Q fever as Rickettsia burnetii, and performed studies on poliovirus, herpes simplex virus, and epidemiology.

In 1956, his increased interest in Niels Kaj Jerne’s natural selection hypothesis led to the development of clonal selection, thus forming one of the concepts of immunology, known as Burnet’s clonal selection theory.