The Burnet Era
Sir 
Frank Macfarlane Burnet was arguably one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Remarkably, at a time when the brightest and best from the antipodes fled abroad and stayed there, Burnet carried out most of his research in Australia, at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Building on the strong foundation provided by his predecessor, Burnet took the institute on to the world stage.
The institute’s autonomy was regularised by its incorporation on April 9 1947 as a company limited by guarantee. In an agreement reached with the University of Melbourne, as director, Burnet was also appointed Research Professor of Experimental Medicine.
Just prior to his appointment as director, Burnet had been on his first trip to the US, to deliver the Dunham Lectures at Harvard University. This trip reinforced his determination to maintain a strong connection between basic science and clinical medicine and one of his first actions was to establish a Clinical Research Unit. He ensured that the unit had its own ward within the new hospital and appointed as its head the well-known gastroenterologist, Ian Wood.
Burnet made several other notable appointments, including biochemists Alfred Gottschalk (another refugee from Germany) and Gordon Ada; and virologists Frank Fenner, Gray Anderson, Eric French and Stephen Fazekas. The growing reputation of the institute drew an increasing number of visiting scientists from overseas, including Carleton Gajduseck, John Cairns, Alick Isaacs and Barrie Marmion. The younger scientists at the institute during Burnet's time included Donald Metcalf and Gustav Nossal.
Virology research remained paramount. The major preoccupation remained influenza virus but the many viruses studied at the institute over the years included herpes, psittacosis, ectromelia, Q fever, Newcastle disease virus, poliomyelitis and Murray Valley Encephalitis (MVE). In the early 1950s, during an outbreak of encephalitis in the Mildura region, French and Burnet showed it was due to MVE and not, as feared, the myxomatosis virus that had just been released to control rabbits. Famously, Burnet, Frank Fenner and Sir Ian Clunies-Ross allayed public fears by inoculating themselves with myxomatosis virus.
By 1957, Burnet felt the need for change and decided to switch from infectious diseases to the body's response to infection. Almost overnight, immunology became the major preoccupation of the institute and over the next 10 years or so it contributed almost 50 per cent of the world immunology literature. In 1959, Burnet published a seminal paper describing his clonal selection theory of antibody production - see WEHI.TV for a vivid explanation of this profoundly influential theory.
In 1960, Burnet was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Sir Peter Medawar for the discovery of immunological tolerance.