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(This book has two central themes: infectious disease as p...)
This book has two central themes: infectious disease as part of the general picture of how life has evolved, and the influence of infectious disease of man on his past, present and future.
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Burnet was born on September 3, 1899 in Traralgon, Victoria; 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.
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. , in 1922, and M. D. , in 1923.
He holds an honorary doctorate of the University of Cambridge.
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 from 1923-1924 Resident Pathologist at the Melbourne Hospital.
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 Hall Institute in Melbourne.
In 1946, in collaboration with W. I. B. Beveridge, Burnet devised a technique for cultivating viruses on the chorioallantoic membrane of chicken embryos and a method for determining the relative concentration of the material inoculated into these membranes by counting and statistically analysing the number of lesions that then appear on the membranes.
In 1947 he discovered, in collaboration with Stone, the receptor-destroying enzyme present in Vibrio cholerae, a discovery which led to the synthesis of neuraminic acid and to the demonstration, by Gottschalk and Cornforth, that purified influenza virus will quantitatively split the acetylgalactosamine neuraminic acid compound. Later it was shown that this enzyme derived from Vibrio cholerae can prevent infection by the influenza to a significant degree.
Burnet did much other important work on certain aspects of the prevention of virus infections and on important biological aspects of virus growth inside the cells in which they can live. He found that the filamentous forms of some viruses (e. g. those of myxoviruses such as those which cause influenza, mumps, fowl plague, and Newcastle disease) can be ruptured by suspending them in water, and suggested that their infectivity is limited to their tips, so that these filamentous forms can, as later work showed, be regarded as having an infective «warhead» composed of nucleic acid and a long tail composed of non-infective viral haemagglutinin.
Other aspects of Burnet's work are his work on the surface properties of these filamentous forms, which are, he found, similar to those of cell surfaces, and his work with the haemagglutinin found in extracts of tissue infected with vaccinia, which can, he found, be precipitated by a saturated solution of ammonium sulphate and by cobra venom. He has also added much to our knowledge of the haemagglutination of red blood cells by various animal viruses, and has made contributions of fundamental importance to our knowledge of the genetic complexity of virus particles, and to the genetic interactions between related viruses which simultaneously infect the same cell and their relations to the transfer of neuropathogenicity. In addition, he has increased our knowledge of the inhibition of viruses by various substances, and of the complex details of immunological methods of studying viruses and of the immunology of viral infections.
Burnet has embodied his experience and experimental results, not only in numerous scientific papers, but in several books which show that he is a master, not only of a clear and attractive literary style, but also of lucid exposition of complex ideas and scientific facts.
Burnet's major achievements in microbiology included discovering the causative agents of Q-fever and psittacosis; developing assays for the isolation, culture and detection of influenza virus; describing the recombination of influenza strains; demonstrating that the myxomatosis virus does not cause disease in humans. Modern methods for producing influenza vaccines are still based on Burnet's work improving virus growing processes in hen's eggs.
(This book has two central themes: infectious disease as p...)
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 a fellow or honorary member of 30 international Academies of Sciences.
Burnet married Edith Linda Druce in 1928. They have one son, Ian, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Deborah.
