Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 (with Peter Brian Medawar) "for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance" Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was born in Traralgon, Victoria, Australia, on 3rd September, 1899. He was educated at the Victoria State Schools and at Geelong College, completing his medical course at the University of Melbourne, where he graduated M.B.B.S. (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) in 1922, and M.D. (Doctor of Medicine) in 1923. In 1923, Burnet went to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of the University of Melbourne to do research work on the agglutinin reactions in typhoid fever. He was also Resident Pathologist at the Melbourne Hospital from 1923-1924. In 1926 he was awarded a Beit Fellowship for Medical Research and worked for a year at the Lister Institute, London. In 1932 he spent a year at the National Institute for Medical Research, Hampstead, London. Otherwise, apart from many visits to various countries to give lectures or for other purposes, he has worked continuously at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. In 1944 he became Director of this Institute and Professor of Experimental Medicine in the University of Melbourne. Burnet's scientific expertise lay in the areas of virology and immunology. He perfected techniques for growing animal viruses in the laboratory, and used these to study poliomyelitis, influenza, herpes simplex, psittacosis, Q fever and other diseases. The quality of Burnet's work on viruses was so outstanding that he was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for this work. Subsequently Burnet became interested in the body's response to infection - the immune response. He studied the way in which the body can differentiate between infection or foreign objects and its own tissues. From these studies, Burnet developed a theory for the cellular basis of immunology; this theory proved to be the key paradigm for immunology, and Burnet received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1960. Burnet received many honours and distinctions, among which the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London (1942), where he was awarded the Royal Medal in 1947 and the Copley Medal in 1959, and where he delivered the Croonian Lecture in 1950. He holds an honorary doctorate of the University of Cambridge, and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1953. He was knighted in 1951, and in 1958 he received the Order of Merit. | 
