(Sir Macfarlane Burnet is on e of Australia's most disting...)
Sir Macfarlane Burnet is on e of Australia's most distinguished scientists. Now, after sixty years' association with the medical and biological sciences, he has set down the important features of his thoughts on the human situation in the form of a credo, a statement of his beliefs.
Sir Macfarlane embraces sociobiology, the Darwinian idea that our social ways are dictated by our genes rather than by our environment. Because of the slowness of evolution, our behaviour in many ways is more appropriate to members of a hunter-gatherer society than to citizens of an urbanized industrial world. This emphasis on the importance of heredity challenges the neo-Marxist line and raises questions about many basic issues: free will, social justice, the equality of man, and the causes of war.
This is not only the testament of an eminent man, but also a disturbing and thought-provoking book which will produce spirited debate.
Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, usually known as Macfarlane or Mac Burnet, was an Australian virologist.
Background
On September 3, 1899, F. Macfarlane Burnet was born in the country town of Traralgon. His father, Frank Burnet, a Scottish emigrant to Australia, was the manager of the Traralgon branch of the Colonial Bank. His mother Hadassah Burnet (née Mackay) was the daughter of a middle-class Scottish immigrant, and met his father when Frank was working in the town of Koroit. Frank was 36, and 14 years older than Hadassah when they married in 1893. The family was socially conservative Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Frank Macfarlane Burnet was the second of seven children and from childhood was known as "Mac". He had an older sister, two younger sisters and three younger brothers. The eldest daughter Doris had a mental disability that consumed most of Hadassah's time and the family saw Doris's condition as an unspoken stigma, discouraging the other children from inviting friends home, lest they come across the eldest daughter.
Mac was distant from his father—who liked to spend his free time fishing and playing golf—from a young age. He preferred bookish pursuits from a young age and was not enamoured of sport, and by the age of eight was old enough to analyse his father's character; Mac disapproved of Frank and saw him as a hypocrite who espoused moral principles and put on a facade of uprightedness, while associating with businessmen of dubious ethics. Hadassah was preoccupied with Doris, so Mac developed a rather solitary personality.
Education
From his early years in Traralgon, Mac enjoyed exploring the environment around him, particularly Traralgon Creek. He first attended a private school run by a single teacher before starting at the government primary school at the age of 7.
He was educated at Terang State School and attended Sunday school at the local church, where the priest encouraged him to pursue scholastic studies and awarded him a book on ants as a reward for his academic performance. He advised Frank to invest in Mac's education and he won a full scholarship to board and study at Geelong College, one of Victoria's most exclusive private schools. Starting there in 1913, Burnet was the only boarder with a full scholarship. He did not enjoy his time there among the scions of the ruling upper class; while most of his peers were brash and sports-oriented, Burnet was bookish and not athletically inclined, and found his fellow students to be arrogant and boorish. During this period he kept his beetle-collecting and disapproval of his peers a secret and mixed with his schoolmates out of necessity. Nevertheless, his academic prowess gained him privileges, and he graduated in 1916, placing first in his school overall, and in history, English, chemistry and physics. The typical university path for a person of his social background was to pursue studies in theology, law or medicine.
From 1918, Burnet attended the University of Melbourne, where he lived in Ormond College on a residential scholarship.
The length of time required to study medicine had been reduced to five years to train doctors faster following the outbreak of World War I, and Burnet graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery in 1922, ranking second in the final exams despite the death of his father a few weeks earlier.
Burnet received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Melbourne in 1924, and his PhD from the University of London in 1928.
He received 10 honorary D. Sc. degrees from universities including Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford, an honorary M. D. degree from Hahnemann Medical College (now part of Drexel University), an honorary Doctor of Medical Science from the Medical University of South Carolina and a LL. D. degree from the University of Melbourne.
Career
After graduating as a doctor of medicine from Melbourne University in 1922, he studied staphylococcal infections at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne. He worked at the institute for 41 years, becoming director in 1942.
In 1930 Burnet discovered the existence of multiple strains of the poliomyelitis virus, essential knowledge for the production of vaccine. While visiting Sir Henry Dale in London in 1931, he observed the discovery of the influenza virus and mastered the developing-chick-embryo technique for virus culture. Returning to Australia in 1932, Burnet and his colleagues were the first to make influenza virus vaccine by the egg technique. In 1936 they discovered that Q fever, an infection in slaughter house workers, which had a worldwide distribution in humans, cattle, and sheep, was caused by a rickettsial organism. They also discovered, in 1952, the virus that causes the brain disease Murray Valley encephalitis, finding that it was carried by migrating birds from New Guinea and transmitted by mosquitoes to man.
Burnet possessed an insatiable desire to explore the unknown. He often thought of the inadequately explored field of immunology and theorized that at birth a person learned to tolerate his or her own tissues ("self") and to reject foreign tissues ("not-self"). A failure by a person to tolerate his or her own tissues might be produced by a freak mutation in the antibody-producing system, and a person would then attack his or her own organs to produce autoimmune disease. To prove these beliefs, in 1957 Burnet turned his researches to immunology with immediate success. His findings stimulated worldwide research in autoimmune disease. In 1960 he received the Nobel Prize for work on immunological tolerance.
In 1964 Burnet retired to write and lecture. Burnet's published works during this period included the books Immunology, Aging, and Cancer (1976) and Endurance of Life (1978). His own productive life came to an end on August 31, 1985, when he died of cancer in Melbourne.
He was becoming disillusioned with religion and chose medicine.
While at university, he became an agnostic and later an aggressive atheist; he was sceptical of religious faith, which he regarded as "an effort to believe what common sense tells you isn't true. " He was also disgusted by what he regarded as hypocritical conduct by religious adherents. Towards the later years of his undergraduate years, his unhappiness with religion began to dog him to a greater extent.
Politics
Throughout his career he played an active role in the development of public policy for the medical sciences in Australia.
Views
Quotations:
"I can see no hope at present of such a vaccine being produced. .. I have adopted a frankly defeatist attitude towards the problem of poliomyelitis and I hope that future developments will prove me wrong. .. No means of controlling poliomyelitis is at present visible. "
"I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs. .. DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible. "
"I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally the new immunology was born. This is a science which to me has far greater potentialities both for practical use in medicine and for the better understanding of living process than the classical immunochemistry which it is incorporating and superseding. "
"The idea of man as the dominant mammal of the earth whose whole behaviour tends to be dominated by his own desire for dominance gripped me. It seemed to explain almost everything, and I applied it to everything. "
Membership
From 1965 to 1969 he served as the president of the Australian Academy of Science.
He was a fellow or honorary member of 30 international Academies of Sciences.
He was a Australian Fellow of the Royal Society and an Australian Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Burnet biographer Christopher Sexton suggests that Burnet's legacy is fourfold: (1) the scope and quality of his research; (2) his nationalistic attitude which led him to stay in Australia, leading to the development of science in Australia and inspiring future generations of Australian scientists; (3) his success establishing the reputation of Australian medical research worldwide; and (4) his books, essays and other writings. In spite of his sometimes controversial ideas on science and humanity, Peter C. Doherty has noted that "Burnet's reputation is secure in his achievements as an experimentalist, a theoretician and a leader of the Australian scientific community. "
Connections
While in London, Burnet became engaged to fellow Australian Edith Linda Marston Druce. She was a secondary school teacher and daughter of a barrister's clerk and the pair had met in 1923 and had a few dates but did not keep in touch. Druce sought out Burnet while on a holiday in London and they quickly agreed to marriage although she had to return to Australia. They married in 1928 after he had completed his Ph. D. and returned to Australia, and had a son and two daughters.
His first wife, Edith Linda Druce, died from lymphoid leukaemia in 1973, after a four-year struggle. During her final years, Burnet refused all offers of lectures overseas to spend more time nursing his ailing wife. For a period after this he became very lethargic and reclusive, numbed by his wife's death. He then moved into Ormond College for company, and resumed beetle collecting, but for a year after her death, Burnet tried to alleviate his grief by writing mock letters to her once a week. Gradually he regained his enthusiasm and began writing again. In 1975, he travelled to California to deliver a series of lectures. In 1976 he married Hazel G. Jenkins, a widowed former singer from a business family in her 70s who was working in the microbiology department as a librarian, and moved out of Ormond College.