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Professor Gordon Ada was interviewed in 1993 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Ada's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers how he became interested in the development of vaccines and his assessment in 1988 of the possibility of an HIV vaccine. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Gordon Ada was born in 1922 in Sydney. From the University of Sydney he received a BSc in 1943, an MSc in 1946 and a DSc in 1959. His first research position was at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) from 1944 to 1946, where he worked on ridding blood serum of precipitates. The realisation that he needed to get further experience and learn new techniques led to him moving to London to work at the National Institute for Medical Research. Working there from 1946 to 1948, he mastered moving boundary electrophoresis and ultracentrifugation, which were then new biophysical techniques used for the study of proteins.
While in London he was invited to join the staff of Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research (WEHI), by the then Director Frank Macfarlane Burnet, to help establish the Biochemistry and Biophysics Research Unit with Henry Holden. He accepted the invitation and stayed at WEHI from 1948 until 1968. During this time he became first a virologist and then an immunologist. As a virologist he studied the influenza virus and the Murray Valley encephalitis virus. In 1962 Ada changed to immunology and began his study of the nature and location of cells that bind antigen. Over the next six years they studied the role of antibody in antigen localisation and demonstrated the absence of antigen in antibody-forming cells.
Ada left WEHI in 1968 to become Head of the Department of Microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, a position he held until his retirement in 1988. Under his leadership the department combined virological and immunological approaches, becoming an international centre for the study of cellular immune response. In his department during this time were Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel, conducting the research that led to their being awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
In 1971, shortly after arriving in Canberra, Ada became interested in international health through his association with the World Health Organization. This involvement lasted more than 20 years and covered eight different programs, most being concerned with the development and use of vaccines.
During 1988-1991 Ada was at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, USA. as director of the School's Center for AIDS Research. In 1988 he delivered the plenary lecture on The prospects for HIV vaccines to the Fourth International AIDS Congress in Stockholm. In 1991 he returned to Canberra as a Visiting Fellow in the Division of Immunology and Cell Biology at the John Curtin School.
Ada was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1964 and has served the Academy in a number of roles. He has also served as President of the Australian Biochemical Society (1966-67) and the Australian Society for Immunology (1975-76). In 2001 he was honoured by induction into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.
A growing interest in vaccines
So that introduced you to a group of infectious diseases, the parasitic diseases, that you had had no contact with, and those fascinating diseases led to other things in the vaccine development?
Yes. Firstly, the senior advisory body to WHO was the Global Advisory Committee on Medical Research. Australia, as a member of the United Nations, could nominate a member for a four-year period every eight years. Burnet was the first member to represent Australia, Eccles the second and Nossal the third. I became the fourth. This was a very different sort of committee – a discussion committee, a talking committee, essentially. It came up with ideas rather than controlling any specific program. I was asked to chair a small ad hoc committee to discuss the ways that modern techniques in molecular biology and immunology can contribute to the work of WHO. We wrote a report on it, and this body was expanded to become a rather major subcommittee of the Global Advisory Committee over a period of eight years.
What led from that was the opportunity for Dr Asaad, who was then head of the Communicable Diseases Section, to form a new in-house committee on the Programme for Vaccine Development, and I was asked to be Chairman of the Committee which oversaw this Programme, the Scientific Advisory Group of Experts, SAGE. (It was first of all called the Scientific Advisory Group, but the acronym for that was SAG and it wasn't very wonderful, so we added the word 'Experts' at the end to make it SAGE.) I was chairman for six years. The program tried to bring together different vaccine components in WHO and provide a focus for vaccine development. I got involved with the human reproduction program in the same way, because they had a program to develop a vaccine to control human fertility. So I got a very broad exposure, coming into contact with almost every part of WHO. My interest in vaccines grew enormously because of that.
I think the thing that stood out most for me was that, although the efficacy of a vaccine depends on the immune response it generates, immunologists were not involved in vaccine development at all. There were microbiologists, molecular biologists and so forth, but no immunologists. So, as I was getting closer and closer to retiring age, I saw this as something I could get into: to start to talk about the immune responses that were made to vaccines and how you could generate these immune responses. In my last half dozen years or so at the John Curtin School I devoted my experimental work to using a model system which I picked – the influenza virus in the mouse. It was very good because it only infected one organ, the lung, and you could follow everything that had happened within the lung. And so all my last years were spent on working out what did happen when the virus infected the mouse lung: what immune responses were generated, what determined those immune responses, how long they lasted, why they lasted as long as that and so forth.
And you were able, with the newer techniques, to dissect this in terms of each protein molecule?
Absolutely, yes. You could quantitate things, you see: the action of antibody-secreting cells, the number of B and T memory cells, what determined how long they lasted and what happened. You could dissect the influenza virus – which proteins were recognised best by cytotoxic T-cells, for example. And they turned out to be the internal rather than the external proteins. It was really great.
Becoming a trans-Pacific commuter
Your retirement years, I think, brought an even deeper involvement in that subject, first with the human reproduction program and then at Johns Hopkins.
Yes. You're responsible for what happened in that, as in so many parts of my life. D A Henderson was in charge of the WHO program for smallpox eradication, but afterwards he became dean of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. I had met him when we were both members of STAC but I never got to know him well. Then, about two years before I was due to retire, I was present in Geneva at the same time as you and D A – you were very close friends, having known one another for a long time. We went out together to dinner, during which you said, 'D A, do you realise Gordon is retiring in a couple of years' time?' D A looked up and said, 'Is he? That's interesting.' Nothing else happened. But about two months later I got a letter from Noel Rose, the head of one of his divisions in the school, asking me to spend my retirement at Johns Hopkins.
I suppose the thing that really made a difference was that just before I retired I was invited to give the plenary lecture on the prospects of an AIDS vaccine, at the forthcoming International Congress on AIDS, in Stockholm in 1988. This came out of the blue, but I decided to accept it because I was interested in that subject. It so happened that the common feeling at that time – promoted by a very eminent US researcher two years earlier – was that within a few years there would be a vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. But I had discussed with you all the associated difficulties and the more I looked into it, the more I realised it was extremely unlikely because we had to find out so much more about the virus, and the amount of antigen variation was turning out to be a very great factor. So I got up in front of these 8,000 people in Stockholm in the middle of 1988 and said, 'There will not be a vaccine against HIV for some time.'
An edited transcript of the full interview can be found at http://www.science.org.au/node/325952.
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
Related publication: The Science of Immunisation: Questions and Answers
antibody
HIV
immunology
immune response
vaccine
virus
World Health Organization
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