24/01/1934 – 4/06/2024
Professor John Kerr was a pathologist elected to the Academy in 1998 for his contributions to understanding physiologic cell death, a process he named apoptosis in his landmark 1972 paper.
Professor Kerr was the first to describe the features of apoptosis, showing it to be quite distinct from necrosis. He drew attention for the first time to the role of cell death in normal adult mammals and in disease. He clearly enunciated the concept that cell death is a selectively regulated process which should be possible to control in disease states.
Professor Kerr was born in Sydney in 1934. He studied medicine at the University of Queensland and worked as an intern, then pathology registrar at the Royal Brisbane Hospital from 1958 to 1961. He obtained his PhD from University College Hospital Medical School in London.
He then returned to the University of Queensland in 1965 as Senior Lecturer in Pathology becoming Professor of Pathology in 1974, whilst also working as a pathologist at the Royal Brisbane Hospital.
From 1988 to 1995 Professor Kerr was Adjunct Senior Principal Research Fellow at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. He retired in 1995 and was Professor Emeritus at the University of Queensland from 1996.
Professor Kerr was a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (1967) and the Royal College of Physicians (1974).
He was awarded the Australian Medical Association of Queensland’s Bancroft Medal and Oration (1993), the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Fred W Stewart Award (1995), Germany’s Paul Ehrlich & Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (jointly with H Robert Horvitz, 2000) and the Charles University and City of Prague Charles IV Prize (2002).
He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Queensland (1998) and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (1996).
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