Written by Frank Fenner.

Introduction

With the death of Frank Macfarlane Burnet on 31 August 1985, Australia lost its greatest biologist, a man who had spent virtually all of a long working life in Australia. His experimental work on bacteriophages and animal viruses, especially influenza virus, resulted in major discoveries concerning their nature and replication, and he was a pioneer in the application of ecological principles to viral diseases. He proposed two concepts in immunology – acquired immunological tolerance and the clonal selection theory of antibody production – which proved to be of critical importance in stimulating research and led to a more complete understanding of immune processes. In the later stages of his life he lectured and wrote extensively about problems of human biology and human affairs, ageing and cancer. He was a Foundation Fellow and, from 1965 to 1969, President of the Australian Academy of Science.

Early life

Burnet was born in Traralgon, in eastern Victoria, on 3 September 1899. His father, Frank Burnet, was born in 1856 in Langholm, Scotland, and emigrated to Australia as a young man; his paternal grandfather was an architect and factor to the Duke of Buccleuch in Dumfriesshire. His mother, née Hadassah Pollock Mackay, was born in Koroit, in Victoria, in 1872. She also came of Scottish middle-class stock, her father being a Glasgow schoolteacher who had emigrated to Australia in the late 1850s and settled in Koroit.

Macfarlane Burnet, who from childhood and throughout his life was known as 'Mac' to his close friends, was the second of seven children. At the time of his birth, his father was manager of the Traralgon branch of the Colonial Bank. In 1909, he was transferred and moved with the family to Terang, in western Victoria. In both places young Burnet went to the local primary school. As related in his autobiography, Burnet retained vivid memories of his life as a boy in Terang, where he returned for vacations until he was in his twenties. He was a shy boy, but revelled in the opportunities to wander in the nearby countryside, especially near Lake Terang, where he was greatly interested in the variety of wild life to be seen. He became a member of the Boy Scouts in 1910, soon after the movement was founded in Victoria, and enjoyed the associated camping and outdoor activities.

The first evidence of a serious interest in biology began in Terang, where young Burnet became an enthusiastic collector of beetles – an interest which he retained all his life. There were no books on biology in his home, and no ready access to them in Terang, but he read all the biological sections of an old Chambers Encyclopaedia (published in the 1860s), which introduced him to Charles Darwin. His parents bought him Harmsworth's Natural History, which appeared as a fortnightly periodical. He wrote to Melbourne for a book about beetles, and was sent an English translation of Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologique. Later he acquired Froggatt's (1907) Australian Insects, his copy of which shows his intense interest in the Coleoptera – these pages are covered with entries concerning his collecting and his own very creditable drawings of some of the beetles he had found. This interest in beetles led the local Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Samuel Fraser, to note that he was a bright boy and to suggest to his parents that he should have a university education. Always a person to have a realistic view of his own qualities and deficiencies, Burnet notes in his autobiography that his attributes in childhood and adolescence fitted well with the picture drawn by Roe (1965) for a group of eminent research scientists working in America: 'Most...were rather shy, socially late-maturing boys with strong hobbies and noticeable persistence in them. [They] were voracious if unselective readers throughout their childhood. Most regarded their fathers with great respect but felt somewhat distant from them'.

University education

Having completed his primary school education in Terang, Burnet was sent to Geelong College for four years – an experience that he did not greatly enjoy. In his final year he gained scholarships enabling him to proceed to the university, the most important being a residential scholarship at Ormond College, in the University of Melbourne. Choice of a course was not so much because of a desire to be a doctor as a choice of the only kind of professional life that had much of an appeal of the three suggested – Medicine, Law or the Church. His early years at the University were accompanied by the usual wide reading and broadening of horizons, and a sorting out of his ideas on religion, during which he moved from the traditional social pattern in which he had grown up – Sunday school and later church every Sunday – to become consciously agnostic. Charles Darwin was his hero, whose writings exerted a profound influence on his scientific work, and H.G. Wells was an important influence on his views about science and society.

At the end of a medical course that was shortened to five years because of the First World War and the perceived need when the course began to produce medical graduates quickly, Burnet graduated MB,BS in April 1922, coming second in a class that contained four other persons who later achieved fame in science and medicine as Sir Roy Cameron, Professor R.A. Willis, Dame Jean Macnamara and Dame Kate Campbell. After graduation, Burnet proceeded immediately to prepare for the degree of MD by examination, which he gained late in 1924. It was then usual to spend one year as a resident medical officer, so as to gain experience in casualty and medical and surgical wards before going into practice. In the surgical wards he came to know two eminent surgeons, each of whom later served as a chairman of the Board of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute when he was director: Sir Alan Newton and Sir Victor Hurley. However, his greatest satisfaction at this time was to serve as house physician to Melbourne's leading physician at the time, Dr R.R. (later Sir Richard) Stawell, a neurologist. This experience firmly convinced Burnet that his future career lay in clinical neurology, and he applied for the post of medical registrar as a stepping stone for such a career. However, the medical superintendent of the Melbourne Hospital, who was responsible for making such appointments, judged (correctly) that Burnet's character and personality were more compatible with a career associated with the laboratory than with clinical work, and instead he was appointed pathology registrar, and a few months later, senior resident pathologist.

Scientific career

The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, 1924

At that time the pathology laboratories of the Melbourne Hospital were operated as part (then the larger part) of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, which had been established in 1915. As a medical resident, Burnet had been interested in the attempts of Dr N.H. Fairley (later Sir Neil Hamilton Fairley), then a member of the Institute staff, to treat cases of typhoid fever by intravenous injections of typhoid vaccine – an interest that led to Burnet's first scientific papers and subsequently to his interest in bacteriophages.

In 1924 the Institute was transformed with the arrival from University College, London, of Dr Charles Kellaway (later to become Sir Charles Kellaway (1)) to become the second director of the Institute. Kellaway was not content with a predominantly service role for the Institute and proceeded to establish research activities in physiology, biochemistry and bacteriology.

The Lister Institute, London, 1925-1927

Kellaway saw Burnet as the potential leader of the small bacteriology section, but decided that he should first have overseas training, and Burnet left for England as a ship's surgeon in June 1925. He took a position at the Lister Institute because there was a paid position available there as an assistant to the curator of the National Collection of Type Cultures, which allowed him about two-thirds of his time for research. A few months later he obtained a Beit Fellowship Award and was able to devote himself full-time to research on bacteriophages. Under the supervision of Professor J.G. Ledingham, he gained a PhD degree of the University of London (1928). A measure of the respect his work had already gained is provided by the fact that he was invited to write the chaper on bateriophages for the Medical Research Council's System of Bacteriology. A copy of d'Hérelle's (2) expanded work, Le Bacteriophage, purchased by Burnet in Paris in July 1927, reveals how carefully he read the book and picked up aspects which prompted additional experimental work. While working in London he became engaged to a fellow Australian then resident there, Edith Linda Marston Druce, whom he married on 10 July 1928, after his return to Australia.

Bacteriologist at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute 1928-1931

Shortly after his return to Australia in 1928, an event called the 'Bundaberg disaster' occurred, in which several children died after receiving inoculations of diphtheria toxin-antitoxin. Kellaway headed the Royal Commission appointed to investigate the tragedy (3) and Burnet carried out the bacteriological investigations, leading to important studies on staphylococcal toxins. At the same time he continued studies on bacteriophages, producing some papers later regarded as classics.

National Institute of Medical Research, London, 1932-l933

In November 1931 Burnet received an offer that changed the course of his scientific life. Sir Henry Dale, Director of the National Institute of Medical Research at Hampstead, had received a generous offer from the Rockefeller Foundation to expand the excellent work on animal virology then in progress at Hampstead, and after consultation with Kellaway, he invited Burnet to participate in this work. This was a period of great activity, for with people like Sir Patrick Laidlaw, Wilson Smith, C.H. Andrewes, W.I. Elford and J.E. Barnard, the Hampstead laboratories were world leaders in research on animal viruses. The excitement caused by Laidlaw's comment 'The ferrets are sneezing' remained with Burnet all his life; it may even have influenced his later decision to concentrate on influenza virus. During this period Burnet developed his work on the use of the chick embryo for the isolation and assay of animal viruses. He also acquired a powerful friend in Sir Henry Dale, who offered him a permanent position at the National Institute. However, Burnet decided to return to Melbourne, where he became Assistant Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, in charge of the virus section.

Assistant Director, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, 1934-1943

Back in Melbourne, Burnet rounded off his work on bacteriophages and continued actively to study the behaviour of a variety of viruses in the developing chick embryo. Seizing opportunities as they arose, he worked on psittacosis, an experience that influenced his thinking in his first book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, recognized a rickettsia to be the cause of Q fever, and carried out studies on poliovirus. However, his major interest after 1939 was influenza virus, prompted by the discovery of methods of growing the virus in the amniotic and allantoic cavities of the chick embryo. With the onset of the Second World War, his attention was focused on methods of immunizing against influenza, in case there should be another epidemic like that of 1918-19. In 1942 he was elected FRS, and in 1944 made his first trip to America, where he delivered the Dunham Lectures at Harvard University and received an attractive offer for a chair at Harvard. This tempted him greatly, and was refused only after much soul-searching, principally out of a feeling of loyalty to Australian science and especially to the Hall Institute.

Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, 1944-1965

In 1943 Kellaway was appointed Director of the Wellcome Foundation in London; Burnet was appointed Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 1944. He had been greatly impressed with what he saw of medical research in the United States in 1944, especially at Harvard University, and set out to achieve something of this pattern in Melbourne. He decided that the future activities of the Institute should be concentrated on animal virology, especially influenza virus, and of those already in the Institute (apart from the Clinical Research Unit), only Gottschalk, a biochemist, continued to work on any other topic. When the enzymic nature of influenza virus action on red blood cells became apparent, Gottschalk also joined the team and unravelled the nature of the viral enzyme (neuraminidase).

Although he personally evinced no desire to become involved in experiments using biochemical and biophysical techniques, Burnet recognized that such an approach was essential if the Institute were to contribute to a comprehensive study of animal viruses. In 1946 he sought and obtained from the Commonwealth Government a special grant of £20,000 (then a very considerable sum) to establish a group equipped to carry out biophysical research on viruses, including electrophoresis, ultracentrifugation, and later electron microscopic studies. For the next decade, the Institute was a Mecca for overseas scientists who came to work on influenza virus under Burnet's guidance.

From 1951 to 1956, Burnet himself concentrated on studies of the genetics of influenza virus. His demonstration of high frequency recombination was received with great scepticism by scientists overseas, since it did not accord with what was found with bacteriophages and therefore with conventional wisdom. The soundness of Burnet's experimental work in this field became apparent when it was demonstrated several years later that influenza virus had a segmented genome (4).

Although he was an expert and assiduous experimentalist, Burnet also found time to write books summarizing his views on animal virology and with W.M. Stanley acted as co-editor of a major compendium on virology.

In parallel with his work on virology, Burnet had always been interested in the immune response, and in 1941 he had produced a monograph analysing the nature of antibody production. In 1948 he re-examined this topic and propounded a new hypothesis on antibody production based on analogies with adaptive enzymes. More important, however, was his enunciation in this book of the hypothesis of acquired immunological tolerance.

Honours, both scientific and civil, began to come his way. In 1947 he received a Royal Medal and in 1959 the Copley Medal of The Royal Society; he was knighted in 1951. In 1958 he was awarded the Order of Merit and in 1960 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Although never a keen committee man, as Director of the Institute Burnet accepted an increasing number of national and international obligations. Apart from Board meetings and membership of committees of the National Health and Medical Research Council that were an obligation of his position, he served as a member of the Defence Research and Development Policy Committee (1947-52), as Chairman of the Radiation Advisory Committee (1955-59), and as Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship Committee (1963-69). As Chairman of the Papua New Guinea Medical Research Committee (1962-69) he played a major part in the establishment of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Human Biology – a name that he preferred to 'Medical Research' in that it emphasized the importance of demography and population growth in the future of that country.

Internationally, Burnet had the unusual distinction of serving as President of both the International Association of Microbiological Societies (1953-57), and the Third International Congress of Immunology (1977). He served on several committees of the World Health Organization, including the WHO (Global) Medical Research Advisory Committee (1959-63) and on retirement undertook the task of acting as foundation chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation in London (1966-69).

In 1957, at an age when most scientists are thinking of contracting their bench work, Burnet made a revolutionary change in the direction of his own work and that of the Institute. He decided that henceforth he (and all staff in the Institute) would abandon virology and concentrate instead on immunology. The reasons for this decision were complex. He saw that virology would in future demand the use of tissue culture rather than the developing chick embryo, and that it would become more and more 'molecular', and he was loth to undertake either transition. Further, as Lederberg noted (personal communication, 1986), Burnet was at the time 'remarkably uninformed with respect to modern views on the mechanism of protein synthesis, DNA coding, etc.' Also, his long time interest in the theory of antibody production had been stimulated by a paper by Jerne (5) that proposed a 'selective' model for the process, rather than the currently fashionable instructive theory. A few years later, this decision was vindicated by the award of the Nobel Prize not for virology (for which the award would certainly have been merited), but for an immunological discovery, acquired immunological tolerance. By then, Burnet had gone beyond immunological tolerance to formulate what he himself regarded to be his major contribution to science, the clonal selection theory of antibody production.

Burnet's increased prestige and international fame led to a change in his work pattern, so that he had less and less time to spend at the bench. Nevertheless he continued to produce papers on experimental immunology – on graft-versus-host reactions, as described by Simonsen (he was deighted to find that he could use the chorioallantoic membrane to study immunological phenomena), and on autoimmune diseases, using NZB mice as a model.

Burnet had always kept the staff of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute small, partly, no doubt, so as to maximise his opportunities for research at the bench. But by 1962 he saw that his successor, whoever he was to be, would require more space, and he devoted considerable effort to obtaining money for two more floors, which were completed in 1966 and named the 'Nuffield-Burnet Laboratories' by his successor. In 1965 he retired from directorship of the Institute, and Dr G.J.V. Nossal (now Sir Gustav Nossal) was appointed as Director. To mark the occasion, the Ciba Foundation organized a symposium on 'The Thymus' (6) in Melbourne, and the Governor-General of Australia, Lord Casey, attended his Farewell in the University of Melbourne.

University of Melbourne, 1966-1977

For Burnet, as for most scientists, retirement from an official position did not mean the end of active work. Professor S.D. Rubbo, who had just moved into the newly built School of Microbiology in The University of Melbourne, across the road from the Hall Institute, offered Burnet rooms and organized the provision of a secretary, and Burnet began a new career as a writer and elder statesman of science in Australia. At this time (1965) he accepted the presidency of the Australian Academy of Science, which he had declined eight years earlier because of his wish to devote himself primarily to his work as Director of the Hall Institute. During the twelve years that he was at The University of Melbourne, Burnet produced thirteen books, initially on immunology and subsequently on human biology, ageing and cancer, as well as a fourth edition of his first book.

He continued to receive honours, both scientific and civil. In 1969 and again in 1974 international symposia were organized by Nossal to celebrate his 70th and 75th birthdays. He received a KBE in 1969 and Australia's highest award, Knight of Australia (AK), in 1978. However, in 1973 he suffered a grievous loss when his wife Linda died of lymphoid leukaemia. For a time he went to live again in Ormond College, University of Melbourne, where he had lived as a medical student, and renewed his friendship with the Master, Dr Davis McCaughey, who was later to be appointed Governor of Victoria. In 1976 he married again, to Hazel Jenkin, a widow who had endowed the library in the School of Microbiology to commemorate her only daughter, who had died while still a graduate student.

Retirement, 1978-1985

In 1978 Burnet decided, at the age of 78, that the time had come to slow down somewhat. He left the School of Microbiology and moved to his home, where he produced two more books, and continued to maintain an extensive correspondence and to write articles on general problems such as the future of Australia. In November 1984 he was operated on for cancer on the rectum and appeared to have made a good recovery, but secondary lesions were discovered early in August 1985 and he died on August 31 at his son's home at Port Fairy, near where he had spent his boyhood. He was given a State funeral by the Government of Australia, and was buried at Tower Hill cemetery, near Port Fairy. He was survived by his second wife Hazel, his son Ian, his daughters Elizabeth and Deborah, and eight grandchildren.

Pattern of work

Daily and weekly routine

Before embarking upon an analysis of Burnet's scientific work it may be useful to outline the pattern of his activities during the period 1945-55. After this, his increasing fame led to many other calls on his time and increased absences overseas, which disrupted this pattern somewhat, but when at the Institute Burnet always devoted a substantial part of each day to work in the laboratory. Throughout his life at the bench, he worked alone, except for one or sometimes two graduate assistants and one or two technicians. In consequence, many of his papers on experimental research show Burnet as the sole author and few list a co-author other than his current graduate assistant. He was careful in the selection of his graduate assistants, and had a succession of highly competent and devoted women help him in this capacity: Margo McKie (1928-34), Mavis Freeman (1928-40), Dora Lush (1934-39), Diana Bull (1941-43), Joyce Stone (1940-50), Patricia Lind (1944-65), Margaret Edney (1948-56), Margaret Gilpin (1948-49; 1949-52), Margaret Holmes (1958-65), Deborah Burnet (1960-62; 1963-64), and Susi Ernyei (1962-64).

Burnet's abiding passion was his scientific work. As Director of the Institute, he decided policy, usually after consultation with the Deputy Director, Dr I.J. (later Sir Ian) Wood, and often after discussions with Dr E.V. Keogh, the éminence grise of medical research in Victoria in the 1950s. However, he always took absolute responsibility for all appointments of research staff, graduate students and overseas visitors, in accordance with his policy of ensuring that the Institute should be an elite institution of world standard, small enough to be effectively controlled by one man, himself. He delegated the implementation of policy to the Manager of the Institute, Mr Arthur Hughes, and the Personnel Manager, initially Miss Fanny Williams and after her retirement, Dr Margaret Holmes.

Burnet was very proud of being an Australian, and was determined to show that science of first class quality could be carried out in Australia by Australians. The majority of his research papers were published in Australian journals, notably the Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Science, and for papers with a medical flavour, The Medical Journal of Australia. It was very fitting, and a source of considerable pride, that he was selected as 'Australian of the Year' in 1961.

Intellectual processes

This account of his daily work shows that Burnet was a dedicated and hard-working scientist. Hundreds of other scientists share these traits – what made Burnet so outstanding? Nossal (7) and Cohn (8) have analysed this question, and some of the answers will emerge from the description of Burnet's scientific work which follows. But it may be useful to attempt a summary here.

Although perhaps better known as a theoretical biologist, Burnet was a first-class experimental scientist, who until well into his sixties spent the greater part of each day working at the laboratory bench. His name never appeared on an experimental paper unless he had participated substantially in the benchwork himself. This involvement in benchwork meant that he was able to notice the unexpected result that might otherwise be dismissed as a technical mistake, and follow it up. His own experiments never made use of apparatus more complex than a microscope, for like many medically trained laboratory workers of that era, he overestimated the difficulties inherent in the use of biochemical and biophysical equipment. He rarely used statistical analysis for the evaluation of his experimental results; they had to be capable of unequivocal interpretation without it. And he found that benchwork was excellent 'occupational therapy', that allowed his mind to wander and wonder while his hands were occupied with pipettes and eggs.

In his experimental work, Burnet was a reductionist; he designed experiments to demonstrate or disprove the 'minute particulars' of his current hypothesis. However, in discussions of his own work, and even more that of his associates, he was quick to relate any new finding to biology as a whole in a most perceptive way. As he says of himself, Burnet was an ecologist, and his capacity to integrate discoveries made in diverse fields of science, which is the hallmark of the ecologist, was one of his great strengths.

A remarkable feature of Burnet's career was that although he worked as a virologist until the age of 57, some 90% of his experimental papers being on virology, the two contributions to science for which he became most renowned were in the field of immunology, on aspects in which he had done little or no experimental work. Such breadth and depth of understanding, and such self-assurance as to allow him to challenge established dogma in a field not his own, is rare in the present era of scientific specialization.

In spite of the fact that he never gave a regular course of lectures to undergraduate or graduate students, Burnet was a great teacher. He had an unforgettable impact on the thinking of the stream of scientists who came to the Hall Institute from Australia and overseas, especially between 1944 and 1965 (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Annual Review 1978-79). Even at this stage of his life, he was shy and withdrawn, and reacted most effectively with his colleagues when he discussed a paper that they wished to submit for publication. But all who worked in the Institute had no doubt that they were privileged to be working with a man of genius. He influenced an even wider audience though his books, the majority of which were not technical monographs, but were written in 'Scientific American' style, for the physician or biologist who was not a specialist in virology, or immunology, or gerontology.

Burnet had knowledge and intelligence in abundance. He was uncommonly broad in his interests and reading and had an excellent memory. But the great and rare qualities to which his knowledge and intelligence were harnessed were originality and creativity. Burnet had a remarkable intuitive grasp of certain fundamental biological concepts, especially Darwinian evolution. He had courage, optimism and the self-assurance and confidence in his own judgement that allowed him to address questions of fundamental importance in spite of his relative isolation in Australia. Indeed he thought that his isolation was an advantage, since it protected scientists from being too much influenced by fashions in scientific thinking. And he was a lateral thinker with an unparalleled capacity to link apparently unconnected observations. This led him to devote as much mental energy into interpreting the world literature as most people put to interpreting their own work. However, he did not have much interest in other people's theories, except in so far as they helped him to remould his own.

Of course, he had weaknesses. He was very reluctant to accept the 'ultimate reductionism' of DNA, and in both articles and books castigated molecular biology as being potentially dangerous, and unlikely to make a contribution to human health commensurate with the funds and talent that were devoted to it. Even this much-criticized shortcoming had its logic. His comment referred to medical science, not biology in general, and he argued that little could ever be done to prevent afflictions due to genetic errors (germline or somatic), and that little research in molecular biology was needed to control or prevent the diseases due to environmental influences. The major problem, he thought, was to ensure the proper distribution of known methods of preventive and curative medicine, which applied almost exclusively to extrinsic diseases, to all of the world's people.

If one had to nominate 'keywords' to describe Burnet's greatness as a biological scientist, they might include – originality, creativity, biological intuition, high intelligence, discipline, persistence, excellent memory, capacity for lateral thinking, ability to write rapidly and clearly, and self-confidence.

Scientific work

Burnet's first scientific paper was published in 1924 and his last in 1983; his first monograph appeared in 1936 and his thirty-first and last book in 1979. For over two-thirds of the long period during which he was writing, he spent well over half of each working day, on average, at the bench. His work covered a wider range of subjects in biomedical research than that of most scientists, hence it is convenient to arrange it by major topics, in roughly chronological order. There are, of course, some overlaps, as Burnet responded to urgent biomedical problems that occurred when he was involved in other studies, e.g., the Bundaberg disaster in 1928 and the poliomyelitis epidemic in 1937; and, as Director of the Hall Institute, the outbreak of Murray Valley encephalitis in 1951.

Bacteriophages

Although as the pathology registrar at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 1924-25 he was responsible for clinical bacteriology for the Melbourne Hospital, Burnet immediately began to carry out research. In 1924, shortly after beginning work at the Institute, he had acquired a copy of an English translation of Felix d'Hérelle's first book on bacteriophage (9). His fascination with this subject was heightened by the observation, soon afterwards, of bacteriophage plaques in a culture of Escherichia coli grown from the urine of a patient with pyelitis. The study of bacteriophages was to dominate Burnet's research for the next decade, and his 32 papers on the subject, published between 1924 and 1937, include two authoritative reviews on bacteriophages themselves, one review on their immunological reactions, and several papers of seminal importance for what came to be the sciences of molecular biology and microbial genetics.

In contrast to d'Hérelle, who held that the phenomenon of transmissible bacterial lysis was caused by self-reproducing virus particles, many other scientists of the period, including such notable figures as Jules Bordet and André Gratia, maintained that the phenomenon was caused by bacterial enzymes. Burnet was convinced by the logic of d'Hérelle's view of the particulate nature of bacteriophage, but his experience with isolations from human faeces soon led him to believe that d'Hérelle was wrong in insisting that there was only a single, highly variable, species of virus – the bacteriophage. He thought that there were many different species of bacteriophage, and showed that different strains differed greatly in physical and physiological characteristics. In order to establish this point unequivocally, he adopted an approach that was to characterise his later work in animal virology and reflects his childhood interest in collecting and classifying beetles. Taking advantage of the opportunity provided by his brother's dairy farm, he collected specimens from fresh excreta of pigs, cows, horses and chickens, from which he isolated many bacteriophages. Up to this time the principal method of classification was that introduced by Bail (10), viz., study of the resistance patterns of 'smooth' and 'rough' salmonellas to various bacteriophage strains. Burnet decided to employ serology (virus neutralization) for the classification of his collection, and found that using this method, 50 cloned bacteriophage strains could be classified into 12 natural groups. All members of each serological group also produced plaques with the same general structure and showed similar patterns when studied by Bail's method. His observations of physical differences between different strains of bacteriophage was greatly strengthened by the demonstration by Elford & Andrewes (11) that different bacteriophages, mainly from Burnet's collection, differered greatly in size, as judged by filtration through graded collodion membranes.

Although d'Hérelle had made many fundamental observations on bacteriophage and had introduced the basic techniques for its study, viz., the limiting dilution method and the plaque assay, he was principally concerned with its possible use for the therapy of human diseases. As a medical bacteriologist, Burnet had a similar concern and produced three papers exploring such possibilities. However, his major interest was with the nature of bacteriophages and their interactions with bacteria. Several of his contributions were to be of lasting historical importance, notably a paper on techniques for studying bacteriophage multiplication, papers on the nature of lysogeny, and experiments on the inheritance of bacterial resistance to bacteriophages.

Bacteriophage multiplication.

In 1926 d'Hérelle had demonstrated that with a highly virulent strain of bacteriophage and highly susceptible bacteria, bacteriophage multiplication caused step-wise increases in titre. However, proponents of the bacterial enzyme hypothesis of bacteriophage action regarded this as a special case. By modifying d'Hérelle's methods, Burnet was able to show that the step-wise increase in titre was a general phenomenon, applicable to all bacteriophages. These experiments provided the basis of the classical experiment of Ellis & Delbrück (12) on the one-step growth experiment, a technical manipulation that was to prove of crucial importance in the use of bacteriophages for the development of molecular biology. Shortly after I had joined the staff of the Hall Institute in 1946, Burnet gave me reprints of the Ellis-Delbrück and subsequent Delbrück papers to read, with the remark that they were scientifically fascinating, but of no practical importance. Parenthetically, Delbrück also had a blind spot; he did not believe in lysogeny but thought that persistence of bacteriophages in some cultures was due to cryptic infections.

Burnet also carried out important experiments on the initial stage in virus multiplication, viz., the attachment of virus particles to the susceptible bacterial cell. He proposed that the initial contact between infecting virus and bacterial cell was a stereo-specific process between complementary structures on virus and cell, analogous to an antigen-antibody reaction, and showed that bacterial extracts could specifically inactivate bacteriophage particles to which the intact cell was sensitive, but that similar extracts of bacteriophage-resistant bacteria could not.

The significance of lysogeny.

The phenomenon of lysogeny has played a central role in the formulation of ideas about bacteriophages. Excluding contamination of a partially susceptible bacterial strain with a bacteriophage ('carrier' cultures), certain bacterial strains exhibit lysogeny, i.e., during their multiplication the bacteriophage genetic material is replicated as part of the bacterial genome (prophage), but occasionally certain bacterial cells release viral particles, which can be detected by their effects on susceptible bacteria.

Lysogeny provided Bordet and other critics of d'Hérelle with their most serious objection to the notion that serially transmissible bacterial lysis was caused by a particulate virus, since lysogenic bacteria reproduced the lytic principle during their growth without the viability of the cell being affected – a contradiction to beliefs of d'Hérelle and his contemporaries about the essential nature of viral reproduction. The problem was conclusively solved by the elegant experiments of Lwoff & Gutmann (13), involving the cultivation of individual lysogenic bacteria in microdrops, which led to the notion of 'probacteriophage' (later called 'prophage' and ultimately generalized to 'provirus'). As these authors noted, however, Burnet & McKie (14) had already come close to this view, when they said that permanence of the lysogenic character made it necessary to assume the presence of the bacteriophage or its anlage in every cell of the culture, and drew the conclusion that it was a part of the hereditary constitution of the bacterial strain. In other experiments, Burnet also recognized the difference between resistance of bacteria at the level of absorption of bacteriophage particles and what came later to be called the 'immunity' of lysogenic bacteria to infection by a bacteriophage homologous to that it already carried.

Microbial genetics.

Since so many bacteria are lysogenic, the development of bacterial genetics has been inseparable from studies on bacteriophages. To this extent Burnet's contributions to the understanding of lysogeny, just discussed, are an important part of the early history of microbial genetics. Two other papers report pioneering experiments in what came to be the science of bacterial genetics. Many years before Luria and Delbrück (15) published their classical paper on the 'fluctuation test', showing that the occurrence of bacteriophage-resistant bacteria in a culture exposed to bacteriophages was due to the selection of bacterial mutants, Burnet (16) had reached the same conclusions, by selecting resistant mutants by their colonial morphology, without the use of phage as a selective agent. Subsequently, Burnet & Lush (17) wrote the first paper on bacteriophage genetics, when they discovered a bacteriophage whose capacity for being carried in the lysogenic state had been lost permanently, by mutation.

Staphylococcal toxin

Burnet arrived back in Australia from his first sojourn in England in December 1927, filled with enthusiasm to carry on his work with bacteriophages. On 27 January 1928, however, within twelve hours after twenty-one children in Bundaberg, in Queensland, had received injections of a diphtheria toxin-antitoxin mixture (then the accepted method of immunization against diphtheria), eighteen of them had become ill, and twelve died within twenty-five hours. Dr Charles Kellaway, the then Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, was immediately appointed Chairman of a Royal Commission to investigate the fatalities (18) and Burnet was deputed to carry out the laboratory part of the investigations. He soon showed that Staphylococcus aureus could be recovered from both the fluid in the toxin-antitoxin bottle and the pus in the abscesses of survivors. This led him into a completely new field, and over the period 1928-31 the behaviour of staphylococci and their toxins was the central theme of his research, with bacteriophages taking second place.

Over the next four years Burnet published nine papers on the staphylococcal alpha toxin, which was regarded as the cause of death in these children, and some years later, a paper on staphylococcal bacteriophages. The Bundaberg disaster was important in the history of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, because the effective work of its Director, Charles Kellaway, and his staff on a matter of great public interest impressed the name of the Institute and the significance of medical research on the Australian public. Burnet's work on the staphylococcal exotoxin extended a field that had barely been studied before, but the most important aspect of this work for Burnet's future development was an incidental observation on the antibody response of rabbits after intravenous or subcutaneous injection of the toxoid. Despite a very small and slow response to the first injection, a second injection a few weeks later led to an immediate and rapid rise in the antitoxin level, which rose logarithmically over a period of 40-120 hours after the second injection. Burnet' s interpretation of this phenomenon was that something was duplicating itself every twelve hours or so to produce the antibody. His paper on these results and their implications was rejected by the British journal to which it had been sent, but this only stimulated him to collect further information on the topic and to publish it in an Institute monograph, The Production of Antibodies, which was eventually published in 1941 (19). These data also figure prominently in the second edition of the monograph (20), for Burnet saw in this difference between the primary and secondary response, overwhelming evidence that the Haurowitz-Mudd-Pauling 'instructive' hypothesis of antibody production could not be correct.

Animal virology

Although Burnet had already carried out some work with poliomyelitis virus (21), his introduction into animal virology really came with his second, two-year-long visit to England in 1932-33. Before Kellaway came back to Australia in 1923, he had worked with Sir Henry Dale, the Director of the National Institute of Medical Research in Hampstead, England. Since its opening in 1919, the microbiology department of the National Institute had concentrated on virus diseases, and by 1931 Dale had gathered together an active group of workers who had made some well-publicized discoveries and were at that time recognized as world leaders in this field. The Rockefeller Foundation offered Dale substantial support to develop work on animal viruses further, and through Kellaway, Dale asked Burnet to come to the Institute on a two-year appointment, to study animal viruses. After assuring himself that there would be a post at the Hall Institute when he returned, Burnet accepted the offer and started work at Hampstead early in 1932.

At that time animal virology was in its infancy. Apart from smallpox and vaccine virus, which had been studied for many decades, the only viruses of medical importance that had been isolated were those that caused herpes simplex, poliomyelitis, rabies and yellow fever, and very little detailed study had been made of any of these. However, since all these viruses were already being studied by staff members at Hampstead, another virus had to be found for Burnet. The chance came when Kikuth, the German worker who had just discovered the first effective synthetic antimalarial drug, atebrin, asked Dale to help with study of a virus that had caused problems in their testing of antimalarials. With the collaboration of J.E. Barnard and W.J. Elford, Burnet (22) showed that the virus was a large one and correctly identified it as canary-pox virus, related to but different from fowlpox virus. The fact that it was a virus of birds suggested to Burnet that it might be a good candidate for growth on the chorioallantoic membrane – a technique described for fowlpox virus a year before by Woodruff & Goodpasture (23) at Vanderbilt University, USA. Many years later, Burnet was to pay gracious tribute to Goodpasture (24). The initial experiments were successful, and Burnet was introduced to the developing chick embryo – an experimental animal that was to dominate his work in virology, and even in immunology, for the rest of his life at the bench.

At the National Institute of Medical Research, Burnet found a lively group of colleagues of about his own age, including C.H. (later Sir Christopher) Andrewes, with whom he continued to conduct a correspondence ('FMB' to 'CHA', and vice versa) for many years afterwards. Although working with animal viruses, Andrewes and Elford were also interested in bacteriophages, studying their size, as determined by gradocol filtration (25) and the mechanism of neutralization by antibody (26). With this example and stimulus, Burnet himself divided his time between studies of animal viruses (mainly their growth on the chorioallantoic membrane), and further work with bacteriophages, on which he published, from the National Institute of Medical Research, seven experimental papers and a major review (27).

Growth of viruses in the developing chick embryo.

Although Goodpasture and his colleagues had shown that fowlpox and vaccinia viruses could be grown on the chorioallantoic membrane, they had always used large inocula and obtained confluent growth. In the work described in his paper on canary-pox virus (28) Burnet also used concentrated inocula. Some time later, however, he noticed that with dilute suspensions, opaque spots of proliferating cells a few millimetres in diameter were produced. Here was a system comparable to plaque assay with bacteriophages, that might be employed for the titration of animal viruses and antisera to them. However, it was not until 1936, after he had returned to Melbourne, that he was to utilize the pock-counting technique for studying the relationship between canary-pox virus and fowlpox virus (29).

Growth on the chorioallantoic membrane. Having found that canary-pox virus grew on the chorioallantoic membrane, Burnet again followed his collecting habits. He studied all the viruses he could obtain, whether from human or animal sources, to study their growth on the chorioallantoic membrane and their effects on the developing chick embryo. In rapid succession, papers appeared on the growth on the chorioallantoic membrane of infectious laryngotracheitis virus (30), fowl plague and Newcastle disease viruses (31), vesicular stomatitis virus (32), influenza virus (33), psittacosis 'virus' (34), louping ill virus (35) and ectromelia virus (36). Initially, he merely tested for growth, by subinoculation into susceptible animals, and studied the macroscopic and histological changes in the membrane and elsewhere in the chick embryo.

In 1936 he published his first paper on the use of the pock-counting technique, with avian laryngotracheitis virus (37), and illustrated the potential of this method for assaying antibodies to the virus. He immediately applied the method to other viruses, and by the time he came to write his monograph on the use of the developing egg in virus research (38), he or workers in his laboratory had shown that a variety of viruses could be assayed in this way – avian poxviruses, vaccinia, ectromelia, herpes simplex, infectious laryngotracheitis and louping ill viruses, and after adaption by serial passage, influenza A virus.

Over the next four years (1936-40) he worked on a variety of viruses and with the chlamydia of psittacosis and the rickettsia of Q fever. A series of eight papers utilized pock-counting of egg-adapted influenza virus for the study of various aspects of influenza; other papers illustrated the use of the pock-counting method for the analysis of the natural history of herpes simplex and the pathogenesis of louping ill (39). A few years later he produced a paper (40) describing in detail the methodology of the pock-counting technique, including ways of minimizing the occurrence of non-specific lesions.

Amniotic inoculation. Following a report that inoculation of meningococci into the amniotic cavity produced infection of the lung and meninges of chick embryos, Burnet demonstrated that unadapted (ferret) as well as egg-adapted strains of influenza virus could be propagated in the chick embryo by amniotic inoculation (41), and that this route of inoculation could be used for titration of influenza virus and antibodies to it (42). It also provided a new, simpler and more sensitive method than ferret inoculation for the recovery of influenza virus directly from human patients (43). Until about 1968, when it was found that the Hong Kong strain would grow directly in the allantoic cavity, amniotic inoculation continued to be the method of choice for the recovery of influenza virus from human and animal sources.

Allantoic inoculation. Although he had previously observed that the allantoic fluid contained large amounts of virus after the amniotic inoculation of influenza virus, Burnet had regarded this as having been derived from the infected lung, and did not test whether influenza virus would grow after direct inoculation into the allantoic cavity. However, after reading that Nigg et al. (44) had found that a high yield of influenza virus could be obtained from membranes of chick embryos inoculated through the chorioallantoic membrane, Burnet tested direct allantoic inoculation, and showed that 2-3 days later all strains tested could be recovered to high titre in the allantoic fluid. He commented that this method might be useful for the production of large amounts of virus for use as vaccine (it is still the preferred method of preparation of influenza vaccine). He also noted that with some strains of influenza virus that multiplied to high titre, the embryo was unaffected and hatched normally, however no antibody to influenza virus was produced. It was not until 1950 that he used the chick embryo to test for acquired immunological tolerance (45).

With the discovery of haemagglutination by influenza virus by Hirst (46), the possibility arose of using allantoic inoculation as a cheap, simple and reliable method of titrating influenza viruses and their antibodies (47). Later he was to concentrate the full resources of the virus group in the Hall Institute on the elucidation of the haemagglutination-elution phenomenon. In 1942 Burnet published his first paper on the genetics of influenza virus, based on differences between viruses that were maintained by amniotic passage (O) or passed in the allantoic sac (D) (48). This was a topic that was to become his major interest in the 1950s.

This phase of Burnet's research was rounded off with the publication in 1946, with his colleague W.I.B. Beveridge, of the second edition of their Medical Research Council monograph (49). In contrast to the first edition, which was concerned only with the results of inoculation on the chorioallantoic membrane, all routes of inoculation – chorioallantoic, amniotic, allantoic, intravenous, intracerebral and yolk sac – were discussed.

Psittacosis and the ecological approach to infectious diseases.

Burnet did not carry out much research on psittacosis, since he published only six papers, over a period of eight years, on the topic. Two of these were routine papers for a laboratory-based microbiologist – one the demonstration that the chlamydiae of psittacosis, like many viruses, multiplied on the chorioallantoic membrane, with the production of pocks when dilute suspensions were used, with characteristic Levinthal-Coles-Lillie (LCL) bodies (50); and the other with the production of focal pulmonary lesions after the intranasal inoculation of mice with dilute suspensions and the use of the method for titrating the agent (51). However, his work with psittacosis had some interesting side effects:

1. it brought him into contact with Karl Meyer, a powerful figure in contemporary public health activities in California, leading to a lifelong friendship;
2. his recent use of Castaneda's strain for LCL bodies led to his early recognition of rickettsiae in Q fever material; and
3. his studies of latent psittacosis and an outbreak of lethal disease in Australian wild parrots directly influenced his thinking about the ecology of infectious diseases.

It may be useful to elaborate somewhat on the last of these matters here. In his autobiography (52), Burnet notes that he was '...by temperament an ecologist, a naturalist...'. Until 1934, his naturalist's instincts had been largely directed to beetle collecting, bird watching, and curiosity about the ecology of the bacteriophages of intestinal bacteria. In 1934, in response to a request from the Commonwealth Director-General of Health, he demonstrated that psittacosis was present in apparently healthy parrots obtained from bird dealers in Adelaide and Melbourne (53). Following up this study, he demonstrated that asymptomatic psittacosis was enzootic among Australian parrots in the wild, but could cause disease when parrots were stressed under conditions of confinement by bird dealers (54). Some years later, he was able to investigate outbreaks of fatal psittacosis that occasionally occurred among wild parrots in nature (55).

Lysogeny was, of course, a perfect example of latent, inapparent infection, and experimental work during 1935-36 had impressed Burnet with the frequency with which inapparent infections occurred in laboratory animals deliberately infected with different viruses (56). Psittacosis exemplified a similar situation, and he interpreted data on the epidemiology of poliomyelitis and yellow fever in man as indicating that most infected humans suffered inapparent infections with these viruses (57). Over the next year or so Burnet put these ideas about the ecology of infectious diseases and immunity together as a book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease, written 'from the point of view of a biologist as much interested in how the parasite species survives as in how the host resists it'. Written before he had read the only other comparable book at that time – Theobald Smith's Parasitism and Disease, it presented a rather similar point of view. He later acknowledged his debt to Smith, whose ideas, he said, 'filtered through the writings of others long before I read his famous exposition of the ecological approach in medicine'. This first semipopular book of Burnet went through four editions (1940, 1953, 1962, 1972), and was translated into German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. From my own contacts with scientists in the United States, I know that it and his 1944 Dunham Lectures, Virus as Organism, had a considerable impact on many biochemists and microbiologists, by showing the value of thinking of infectious diseases from the point of view of the survival in nature of the parasite, rather than just as diseases of the vertebrate host.

Burnet was to come back time and again to this ecological point of view (58) hence his great interest in myxomatosis and Murray Valley encephalitis in Australia, two diseases on which he did not carry out any investigations himself, although the work on Murray Valley encephalitis was carried out under his direction.

Q fever.

In 1935 physicians in Brisbane became concerned with the sporadic occurrence of a typhoid-like disease among abattoir workers, from which no bacteria could be recovered. Guinea pigs were susceptible, but again no organisms could be recovered (59). It was reasonable to assume that the disease was due to a virus, hence organs from an infected guinea pig were sent for investigation to Burnet, late in 1936. Burnet subjected the material to the usual series of tests in experimental animals, making inoculations in guinea pigs, monkeys, mice, rats and on the chorioallantoic membrane, but soon concentrated on studies in mice, using normal and immune guinea pigs to determine the specificity of the findings (60). In all his studies of the growth of viruses in experimental animals, Burnet used to examine infected organs histologically. Sections of the enlarged mouse spleens showed no inclusion bodies but under high power magnification Burnet noticed a 'vague herringbone pattern', which recalled what he had seen in psittacosis and had read about for rickettsiae. Using Castaneda's stain, he decided that there was no doubt but that the agent was a rickettsia. In an addendum to his first paper on Q fever, Burnet reported that he had been able to recover the organism from the blood of a patient, and that acute and convalescent sera of another patient showed a substantial rise in agglutinating titre against a rickettsial suspension, thus establishing that it was the cause of Q fever.

The next step was the development of a serological test. Mouse spleens contained very high concentrations of the rickettsiae, which could be substantially purified by differential centrifugation and provided a satisfactory agglutinogen (61). Having confirmed by serological tests that the rickettsia that they had isolated was without question the cause of the human disease, further work with the agglutination test devolved on Derrick, who used the method with good effect to unravel the epidemiology of Q fever in Queensland (62).

Burnet's subsequent investigations on Q fever were concerned mainly with determining the relationship of the Q fever organism to other microorganisms. In a rare excursion into tissue culture, he showed that it behaved like the typhus rickettsiae and unlike viruses or chlamydiae in its capacity to continue to multiply in damaged cells (63).

Subsequent studies involved direct comparisons with other known rickettsiae, the upshot of which was to show that there was no serological relationship between the Q fever rickettsia and other known pathogenic rickettsiae (64). However, early experiments (65) suggested and later investigations (66) conclusively demonstrated that it was identical with a rickettsia isolated from ticks in Montana, USA, by Cox (67), except that the American strain was much more virulent for guinea pigs.

Apart from being the first of many laboratory workers to be infected with Q fever (68), the other feature of note in Burnet's association with Q fever is that the causative organism was named after him – first, by Derrick, as Rickettsia burneti and subsequently, when taxonomists split the genus, as Coxiella burnetii. As noted in a recent review (69), 'The papers of Derrick and of Burnet and Freeman remain models of careful investigations, critical analyses, and conclusions'.

Poliomyelitis.

During the 1920s and 1930s epidemics of poliomyelitis were common in Melbourne, and as a medical virologist Burnet inevitably became involved in the experimental study of polioviruses. An early study (70) provided the first inkling that there was more than one serotype of poliovirus; monkeys that had recovered from intracerebral inoculation with either the Rockefeller Institute 'MV' strain (now known to be poliovirus type 2) or the local strain (probably type 1) were immune to reinfection with the homologous strain but susceptible to the heterologous strain. A severe epidemic of poliomyelitis occurred in Victoria in 1937-38, with over 1900 paralytic cases, and Burnet was appointed by the State Government to the local Advisory Council on the outbreak, and had his first experience of public affairs when he acted as its spokesman.

He was also asked to undertake experimental investigations into the disease, and over the period 1938-40 he and his colleagues produced seven research papers on poliomyelitis in monkeys. After isolation of the virus causing the epidemic in rhesus monkeys, Burnet and his colleagues (71) developed intraocular inoculation as a preferable alternative to intracerebral inoculation in tests for neutralizing antibodies. Then the supply of rhesus monkeys ran out, because of a six-months-long closed season in India. As an alternative, cynomolgus monkeys were obtained from Singapore. Although some earlier workers had reported that cynomolgus monkeys, unlike rhesus, could be infected by the oral route, Flexner (72), in extensive experiments with the 'MV' strain, had been unable to confirm this result. Burnet and his colleagues (73) found that cynomolgus monkeys were readily infected by all routes of inoculation, including feeding, swabbing the pharynx, and after laparotomy, inoculation directly into the stomach or small intestine. The orthodox view at the time was that, apart from cases after recent tonsillectomy, the only 'natural' route of human infection was via the olfactory bulbs (74). However, the results obtained with cynomolgus monkeys suggested to Burnet that infection of humans with poliovirus might normally occur by oral or pharyngeal routes. Extending this study (75), he found that poliovirus could be recovered from pharyngeal tissue, certain local nerves (vagus, coeliac plexus), and mesenteric lymph nodes of cynomolgus monkeys infected by the oral or intestinal routes, and then went on to carry out the second and last experiment of his career employing tissue culture. Lung, intestine and buccal tissues of a 12-weeks-old human foetus were used to set up 'Rivers-type' tissue cultures and each culture was inoculated with poliovirus. After incubation for three days, the centrifuged supernatant fluids were inoculated intracerebrally into monkeys; those from the intestinal and buccal tissues, but not from the lung tissues, yielded virus. Confirmation of this experiment, the first demonstration of the cultivation of poliovirus in non-nervous tissues, was not possible because 'we have been unable to obtain any other suitable human embryos...so that its implications must be accepted with great reserve'. That paper reported the last of Burnet's experimental work with poliovirus. In a review article (76) published, ironically, in 1949, Burnet 'adopted a wholely defeatist attitude towards the problem of poliomyelitis and...[hoped] that further developments [would] prove [him] wrong'. Yet his last unconfirmed experiments ten years before had left him poised on the edge of the discovery reported in the classical paper of Enders et al. (77), which was to make possible the effective control of the disease.

Herpes simplex.

Burnet and his co-workers wrote only six papers on herpes simplex, all of which were published in 1939. They provided him with confirmatory evidence of the value of the ecological approach in virus research. The studies began with the demonstration that herpes simplex virus of man, B virus of monkeys and pseudorabies virus of swine, which Sabin (78) had shown shared many characteristics, grew well on the chorioallantoic membrane (79), which provided an accurate and sensitive method for the titration of antibodies to them (80). Burnet confirmed Sabin's opinion that these three viruses were members of a natural group (now designated as the subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae).

Burnet's principal contribution lay in describing, for the first time, what is now the accepted view of the epidemiology of this ubiquitous human disease (81). After confirming that aphthous stomatitis in infants was usually due to herpes simplex virus, he and his colleagues showed by serial antibody assays that these were primary infections. They suggested that non-specific resistance to primary infection developed in later childhood, except when there was intimate exposure. In adults, there was a sharp distinction between persons with high titre antibody and those without any antibody – intermediate levels of antibody were not found. Further, the presence of antibody was correlated with socio-economic status, being lowest among university graduates and highest among public hospital patients. It was clear from the occurrence of recurrent herpes that virus persisted somewhere in the body, but like others, Bumet failed in efforts to demonstrate it directly, by cultivation of fragments of skin or of Gasserian ganglion. Recurrent herpes simplex occurred in the presence of high levels of antibody and was due to reactivation of the latent virus, by mechanisms then unknown. The epidemiology of pseudorabies in swine and B virus in monkeys, Burnet concluded, was very similar to that of herpes simplex in man, viz., asymptomatic infection, usually in very young animals, with lifelong persistence of both virus and antibody. In animals other than their natural hosts, all three viruses could produce severe disease.

Poxviruses.

Burnet's first paper on animal virology was the demonstration that the causative agent of a disease of canaries was a poxvirus (82), a study that led to his lifelong devotion to the use of the developing egg as a laboratory animal. His early studies with infectious ectromelia virus, which had been discovered at the National Institute of Medical Research a few years earlier (83), established that pock-counting was a feasible method for assaying this poxvirus (84), a technique that I was to use extensively a decade later. It was in studies with ectromelia virus in the developing chick embryo that Burnet introduced into virology the concept that the temperature of incubation influenced viral multiplication, later to be extensively developed in poxvirus research by Bedson & Dumbell (85) under the designation of 'ceiling temperature'.

Following the chance observation by Burnet that a suspension of vaccinia virus agglutinated fowl red blood cells, Nagler (86), working at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, demonstrated that vaccinia virus agglutinated the red cells of certain fowls only, and that this haemagglutination could be inhibited by anti-vaccinial antibodies. Recalling his experiments with ectromelia virus a decade earlier, Burnet then showed that ectromelia virus would agglutinate cells agglutinable by vaccinia virus and that ectromelia haemagglutination was inhibited by vaccinia-immune serum (87). When he had been working in Hampstead in 1932-33, Burnet had been interested in Topley's studies in experimental epidemiology, especially in those involving ectromelia virus (88). Now that he had shown that ectromelia virus was an Orthopoxvirus (as the genus was later designated), he decided to develop further work in the experimental epidemiology of viral diseases in the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, based on studies with ectromelia, and in 1946 he appointed me to do this. Burnet himself continued with laboratory studies of vaccinia haemagglutinin, and showed that unlike haemagglutination by influenza virus and the arboviruses, the haemagglutinin of vaccinia and ectromelia virus, as found in extracts of infected egg membranes or rabbit skin, was separable from the virions, and that nonspecific tissue lipids also agglutinated only those red blood cells susceptible to agglutinination by the orthopoxvirus haemagglutinins.

Virus classification.

In contrast to his friend C.H. Andrewes and the famous French virologist André Lwoff, Burnet was not deeply interested in the classification and nomenclature of viruses. However, because of his eminence as a virologist and his position as President-elect and then President of the International Association of Microbiological Societies, he unavoidably became involved in discussions about viral taxonomy. His first contribution came at an international conference of which he was chairman, 'Virus and Rickettsial Classification and Nomenclature', held at the New York Academy of Sciences in 1952. In his introductory address (89), he outlined his ideas on criteria for allocation to a genus ('...approximately the same size and appearance in electron micrographs and, at least, one common functional characteristic'), and concluded by suggesting that '...we should go all out to make a start on virus classification...'. This initiative was followed up at the International Congress of Microbiology in Rome in 1953, where Burnet played an important role in developing a compromise between those who wished to introduce a Linnaean binomial nomenclature forthwith, and those who opposed this. He also suggested that for animal viruses the group names should carry the suffix '-virus', an idea that eventually developed into the present system for viral families ('-viridae'), subfamilies ('-virinae'), and genera ('-virus').

Subsequently he was a member of the subcommittees that prepared reports on two virus groups: the 'myxoviruses' (90) – later to be divided into two families, Orthomyxoviridae and Paramyxoviridae – and the poxviruses (91).

Influenza.

Between 1934 and 1939, after his return from Hampstead, Burnet's investigations ranged over a wide variety of different animal viruses, and included also the non-viral causative agents of psittacosis and Q fever. Influenza virus was among the viruses for which he was able, with a suitably adapted strain, to develop a pock-counting method of assay. However, this technique was never used by other investigators, and his major contributions to the study of influenza virus began in 1940, with the demonstration that amniotic inoculation of the developing chick embryo provided a method for isolating virus directly from human patients, a method which quickly supplanted intranasal inoculation of ferrets. Continuing his exploration of routes of inoculation of the developing egg, he showed that the allantoic route, while not suitable for isolation of virus from human subjects, could be used for large-scale production of virus that had initially been isolated in the amniotic sac.

By that time the Second World War had begun, the then Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Kellaway, was heavily involved as Director of Pathology for the Australian Army, and Burnet had to serve as Acting Director. With memories of the devastation caused by the influenza pandemic that followed the First World War revived by a review of the literature of that disaster (92), Burnet decided that his war effort should be the development of a method of immunization against influenza. In fact, the study of influenza virus became the major focus of his work, and that of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, of which he became Director in 1944, until 1957, when he made an historic shift to immunology. It took some two years after that change before papers on virology ceased to appear, and over the period 1942-59 Burnet's name was attached to some 114 papers on influenza virus. Since almost every other independent worker in the Hall Institute at that time, apart from the Clinical Research Unit, was working on influenza virus, the volume of investigations on this topic in which he was involved as an adviser was perhaps three times greater than this. It is not possible to describe here work on influenza virus carried out at this time by his colleagues and students in the Hall Institute – a description of this can be found in the Annual Reports of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute over the relevant period, or more conveniently in Burnet's history of the Institute (93). However, it should be remembered that all of this work was strongly influenced by Burnet's ideas and perceptions, and often by his advice.

Although his own work covered almost every aspect of the biology of influenza and influenza virus, his major contributions fall into four fields:

1. methods of isolation of influenza virus from human subjects;
2. immunization against influenza;
3. the phenomena of haemagglutination and elution; and
4. influenza virus genetics.

His discovery and development of the amniotic and allantoic routes of inoculation have already been discussed; the next few pages outline in turn Burnet's work on immunization against influenza, haemagglutination and influenza virus genetics.

Immunization. As early as 1937 Burnet had found that egg-passaged influenza virus (after 65 passages on the chorioallantoic membrane) was non-pathogenic for ferrets and mice, but produced an immune response and conferred protection against challenge with virulent virus (94). Taking the view that only a live virus vaccine administered by the natural route was likely to be of any use if there was an influenza epidemic during or after the Second World War that was anything like that experienced in 1918-19, Burnet concentrated his efforts on trying to produce an effective attenuated live virus vaccine. In 1940 he reported the results of spraying various strains of influenza A virus, some attenuated by passage on the chorioallantoic membrane and others fully virulent, into the nose and throat of human volunteers (95). The attenuated strains had no protective effect, whereas the virulent strains caused typical influenza in most subjects who were previously sero-negative, but had no effect or produced subclinical infection (as evidenced by antibody rises) in those who had high antibody levels at the time of challenge.

Saving recovered influenza virus B by amniotic inoculation from human subjects in an epidemic in Melbourne (96), Burnet proceeded to test the efficacy as a vaccine of influenza B virus attenuated by amniotic passage, inoculated in human volunteers by the intra-nasal route (97). Antibody responses were observed only in those with low initial titres, and second inoculations produced a much lower proportion of antibody responses and virus reisolations than the first series of inoculations, suggesting that the vaccine might be protective.

However, any pandemic was likely to be caused by influenza A, and in February 1942 Burnet received permission to test in Australian Army volunteers influenza A virus that had been grown in the allantoic cavity of the chick embryo. Initial experiments were satisfactory, but by the time vaccination got under way on a large scale (20,000 men by June 1942), a natural epidemic of influenza A had already occurred (98); the immunization programme had been launched just too late to test its efficacy adequately. By 1943 experiments in USA with inactivated vaccine (produced by Burnet's method, in the allantoic cavity) had shown good enough results to convince the Australian Army that further experiments with live virus vaccine were not justified. Almost half a century later the position remains unchanged; inactivated influenza vaccines are not very effective, but a satisfactory live virus vaccine has still to be produced.

Haemagglutination. The agglutination of chicken red blood cells by influenza virus was reported independently by Hirst (99) and McClelland & Hare (100). It was a discovery that Burnet conceded that he should have made, for he had been working with influenza virus in developing eggs for much longer, and much more intensively, that anyone else – but he didn't follow up his observation that such clumping occurred. However, immediately after reading Hirst's paper, he saw the value of the method for assaying influenza viruses, and realized that the phenomena of haemagglutination and elution had the makings of a first class scientific problem. As the Institute staff built up after the end of the Second World War he deployed almost all of them on the study of haemagglutination. This work reached its peak in the period that I worked at the Hall Institute (1946-48); I was the only virologist there at that time who was not working on influenza virus and in one way or another on the phenomenon of haemagglutination-elution. Burnet believed that intensive team work was essential if the Institute was to be competitive with what were assumed to be the large teams working on the problem in the USA. In fact, McClelland & Hare did not follow up the discovery, and Hirst, who did, preferred to work alone, and was very conscious of the size and power of the group of scientists that Burnet had assembled.

A practical result of the availability of the haemagglutination test was to make all other methods of assay of influenza virus and antibodies to it obsolete (101), especially as it was directly applicable to untreated allantoic and amniotic fluids. Following his usual practice of testing new discoveries with all available viruses, Burnet soon showed that Newcastle disease virus also exhibited haemagglutination and elution (102). He seized on the demonstration by Levens & Enders (103) that mumps virus also agglutinated fowl red cells to point out its similarity to Newcastle disease virus (104), and demonstrated that vaccinia and ectromelia viruses produced a different kind of haemagglutination.

However, the major focus of interest was the phenomenon of elution. It was shown that cells from which a particular 'myxovirus' (influenza, Newcastle disease virus or mumps virus) had eluted were inagglutinable by that virus but agglutinable by others further down a 'receptor gradient'. Then came one of those feats of biological intuition which were the hallmark of Burnet's genius. Having observed that fowl or human erythrocytes from which 'myxoviruses' had eluted became susceptible to agglutination by normal sera that were without action on normal cells, Burnet recalled the phenomenon of 'panagglutinability' of human red cells described by Thomsen (105) and Friedenrich (106). This was ascribed by them to the action of bacterial enzymes, and Burnet (107) showed that enzymes of Vibrio cholerae, one of the bacterial species that produced panagglutinability, would remove viral receptors from red cells in almost the order of the receptor gradient. Further studies showed that V. cholerae filtrates contained other enzymes of interest – a mucinase and a 'tissue disintegrating enzyme' (108); however his main interest was in what was described as the 'receptor-destroying-enzyme' (109). At the same time Burnet seized on the discovery of Francis (110) that mucins would inhibit influenza virus haemagglutination to show that mucins were a substrate for both bacterial and viral receptor-destroying-enzymes. These two discoveries opened the way for Gottschalk, a skilled carbohydrate biochemist who until then had been outside the virus group, to join it (111), an event which changed Gottschalk's subsequent career and led to his pioneering work on sialic acid and the glycoproteins (112). The immediate result was the definition of receptor-destroying-enzyme as a neuraminidase (113); since then the influenza virus neuraminidase has been crystallized and its sequence and three-dimensional structure determined (114).

Leaving the biochemical work to others, Burnet's interest in haemagglutination and elution was principally in relation to what light it might shed on the initiation of infection by influenza virus, a topic that he reviewed and chose for his Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society (115).

Influenza virus genetics. Like other virologists, Burnet had always been interested in the changes in virus virulence, for particular hosts, that occur after serial passage of a virus in another host – the classical method of 'adaptation' for laboratory use and attenuation for use as a vaccine. With influenza virus, he had observed such changes after passage on the chorioallantoic membrane and after amniotic passage. However, his first explicit discussion of genetic changes in influenza virus came with observations of changes in the haemagglutination behaviour of strains of influenza virus newly isolated in the amniotic sac, and after serial passage (116). Newly isolated virus (O; original) differed from passaged virus (D; derived) in a number of characteristics, notably O virus showed a much higher haemagglutination titre with guinea pig cells than with fowl cells and would not multiply in the allantoic cavity; with D virus the haemagglutination titre was much the same with guinea pig and fowl cells and the virus multiplied readily in the allantoic cavity. Further, since passage in the amniotic cavity at high dilutions maintained the O characteristics whereas passage at low dilutions produced D virus, Burnet concluded that the change from O to D was a 'discontinuous mutation'.

He returned to this problem in 1945 (117), and showed that virus could be maintained in the O form if the inoculum was obtained from embryo lung emulsion purified by absorption with fowl cells, to which such O form virus does not attach. Further observations of sporadic and epidemic cases of influenza (118) supported the concept that in human infections influenza virus always occurred in the O form, and clarified anomalies apparent in earlier work (119). The molecular explanation of the difference between O and D forms emerged 40 years later. They differ in a specific amino acid residue in the cell-binding site at the distal tip of the haemagglutinin molecule, which alters the binding preferences of the virus for glycoprotein receptors with one type of sialic acid linkage to those with another. The mutation also produced an antigenic change that may explain the ineffectiveness of inactivated influenza virus vaccines, all of which are produced from allantoic fluid (120).

At the time, however, others had not been able to confirm Burnet's ideas about the mutational nature of the O-D change, partly, he believed, because of the difficulty inherent in the system. He therefore used a simpler system to establish the same principle, namely the maintenance of the neurotropic character of NWS influenza virus by serial passage in the allantoic sac at limit dilution, and the loss of the neurotropic character when passage was made at low dilutions (121).

Having established to his satisfaction that mutations occurred in influenza virus similar to those observed in bacteriophages, bacteria and higher organisms, Burnet set out to determine whether recombination would occur with mixed infections. He first defined two derivatives of the original WS strain of influenza A virus, WSM and NMW, by a number of very simple 'marker' characteristics – virulence for mouse lung and neurotropism (122). Taking advantage of the phenomenon of viral interference, he found that when a mixture of varying larger amounts of non-neurotropic WSM were mixed with a constant small amount of neutrotropic NWS and inoculated intracerebrally in mice, recombinants occurred at the level at which interference with NWS by WSM was just being overcome (123). Subsequently he extended the system by demonstrating recombination between two strains with different serological characteristics (124).

However, mouse brain inoculation, followed by limiting dilution analysis of the progeny of mixed infections, was a laborious process, and it was natural for Burnet to try to demonstrate recombination after inoculation of viral mixtures into developing eggs. In the first of three papers describing recombination between strains of influenza A virus in the developing egg (125), Burnet observed and described a novel kind of interference. He mentioned the possibility that the observed interference was due to some product of the virus-cell interaction which might modify the susceptibility of the target cells (vascular endothelium) – what would now be interpreted as interferon – but preferred the 'negative' interpretation, viz., that the ongoing viral multiplication in the allantoic membrane led to a deficiency in some plasma component which was needed if the virus was to multiply in and damage the vascular endothelium. Like his failure to discover haemagglutination, this was another 'near miss' – Isaacs, who was later to describe interferon and open a new field in cell biology (126), was working on interference between heat-inactivated and active influenza viruses in Burnet's laboratory at this time.

Subsequent papers (127) demonstrated that reciprocal recombination occurred between two different strains of influenza A virus in first-cycle viral multiplication in the allantoic cavity; back-cross experiments were also positive (128), and provided suggestive evidence for the production of 'heterozygotes' – a matter which was subsequently elaborated. He also showed that recombination would occur between two different strains of influenza B but not between strains of influenza A and influenza B virus (129), and obtained recombinants with a wide range of virulence for the mouse lung, a result which led him to postulate the possibility that the genome of influenza virus 'may fracture and the fragments themselves replicate independently' .

In his earlier writings on influenza virus genetics, Burnet noted with regret that single-cell experiments of the type used in bacteriophage genetics were not then feasible with animal viruses – a deficiency made good a few years later by Lwoff et al (130). However, he tried to simplify the system as much as possible, and turned to the use of de-embryonated eggs. Some of the progeny obtained in such experiments were doubly neutralizable, partly as a result of phenotypic mixing, partly, he thought, because some of them were heterozygous (131).

Over the next three years Burnet explored a number of unusual features of influenza virus multiplication by means of this approach, including the production of 'incomplete' virus (132), which he showed could contribute genetic information in recombination experiments (133), and the reactivation of inactivated influenza virus (134), which he interpreted, correctly, as being due to genetic recombination. He also reinvestigated the significance of heterozygosis (135) and probed further into the genetic control of viral virulence. By this time, however, Burnet realized that he had exploited the purely biological approach to influenza virus genetics as far as it would go. Ada, working in the Hall Institute, had shown that the genome of influenza virus was RNA (136) and that 'incomplete' virus contained less RNA than infectious virus (137). However, it was not until the demonstration by Pons & Hirst (138) that the genome of influenza virus was segmented that Burnet's results, and those of Hirst, fell into place. Until then, many virologists had regarded the 'high frequency recombination' demonstrated by these two workers with great suspicion, since it was so unlike the results obtained with bacteriophages.

Later, long after Burnet had abandoned the field, genetic reassortment, as the process has come to be called, was taken up as a method of producing vaccine strains (139), although in the process the occurrence of the O-D change rendered the vaccine less than ideal. It is now widely accepted, also, that new pandemic strains of influenza A virus arose, and may arise again, by reassortment between animal and human strains of influenza virus (140).

Mumps and Newcastle disease viruses.

During his wide ranging examination of other viruses for evidence of haemagglutination, Burnet noticed that Newcastle disease virus behaved very like influenza virus, producing haemagglutination and then eluting from the red cells, although there was no serological relationship between the two viruses. He suggested that influenza, Newcastle disease, and mumps viruses belonged to the same group, and used all three species in experiments with the 'receptor gradient'. However, unlike influenza viruses, mumps and Newcastle disease viruses also lysed red blood cells. His only other contribution with these viruses was that he was himself the subject of the first reported case of human conjunctivitis due to Newcastle disease virus (141).

In 1955 he was one of the three members of a subcommittee which proposed the name 'Myxovirus' group for the influenza, mumps and Newcastle disease viruses, a taxonomic view based on particle morphology and the property of haemagglutination and elution, which had to be discarded when the properties of the genomes of these viruses were discovered (142).

Immunology

Apart from the relatively small specialty of human blood group serology, immunology remained largely the province of the microbiologist until transplantation became a practical measure in the 1950s. Like other microbiologists, Burnet employed serological techniques from the time of his entry into the laboratory (143), and he was an early exponent of serology as a method of bacteriophage classification. His interest in the immune response per se was stimulated by observations on the antibody response to staphylococcus toxoid, which led to an abiding interest in the production of antibodies and the publication of his first monograph on this topic (144).

After starting work on influenza virus in 1935, Burnet had by 1956 'worked out' what could be done with influenza virus genetics without adopting a molecular biological approach (which still lay some years in the future). Tissue culture methods were essential for the study of all other viruses, and he was reluctant to use this technique. On the other hand, his latent interest in immunology had been restimulated by Jerne's (1955) paper describing a 'selective' hypothesis for antibody production. At about the same time Dr Carleton Gajdusek, working in the Hall Institute, had found very high levels of autoantibodies in a patient with an immunoproliferative disease (145), and Simonsen (146) had shown that graft-versus-host reactions could be demonstrated on the chorioallantoic membrane, producing pocks due to cellular proliferation that could be regarded as clonal.

This combination of circumstances led, in 1957, to a decision by Burnet to reorient work at the Hall Institute from virology to immunology, although it took until about 1960 before publications on virology ceased to appear. From 1957 onwards, however, new students, staff and visitors to the Institute worked on immunological problems, Burnet himself being involved in bench work relating to autoimmune diseases and the graft-versus-host reaction, and increasingly in theoretical studies of immunology, immunological surveillance and cancer.

The production of antibodies.

During the 1930s Breinl & Haurowitz (147) and Mudd (148) proposed a hypothesis to account for antibody production which was clarified and reformulated by Pauling (149); namely that antibody protein was synthesized, or according to Pauling, folded, in specific ways in spatial contact with the antigenically significant (determinant) parts of the antigen, which acted as a template – an 'instructive' hypothesis. Burnet could not accept this 'chemical' picture of antibody production, for a number of biological aspects of antibody production were incompatible with it. In 1941 he summarized his views in a monograph, in which he reviewed the known facts and developed some ideas on antibody production. Because of the apparently almost infinite variety of antibodies, he accepted an instructive hypothesis, but suggested that the antigen impressed a complementary pattern not on the globulin molecule, but on some cellular component – for 'antibody-producing cells must be capable of giving rise to descendant cells with the same faculty'. The same point of view was developed more forcefully in the second edition of the monograph (150), together with a new hypothesis for the process of antibody production itself based on an analogy with adaptive enzymes.

The more important feature of the second edition, however, was the exposition of a hypothesis concerning the manner in which the body normally failed to make antibodies to its own components – the 'self-marker' concept. In the course of the discussion of this concept, Burnet noted reports in the literature to the effect that mice and calves exposed continuously to antigens during embryonic life (congenital lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus and red cell antigens in some twin births respectively) failed to produce antibodies if exposed to these antigens in adult life. He made the comment: 'If in embryonic life expendable cells from a genetically distinct race are implanted and established, no antibody response should develop against the foreign cell antigen when the animal takes on independent existence'. This prediction was to form the basis for the award of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Burnet, jointly with Sir Peter Medawar, who had developed an experimental system demonstrating the generality of this phenomenon (151), something that Burnet (152) had attempted to do without success. However, even in 1955 Burnet saw no alternative to an instructive theory to account for the great multiplicity of antibodies that all animals can produce, although on this occasion he invoked the concept of an RNA 'genocopy' to serve as the template.

The revolution in his thinking came in 1956, after reading a paper by Jerne (1955), which developed a 'selective' hypothesis, in which it was postulated that every animal had a large set of natural globulins that had become diversified in some unknown fashion. According to Jerne, the function of an antigen was to combine with those globulins with which it made a chance fit and to transport the selected globulins to antibody-producing cells, which would then make many identical copies of the globulin presented to them. Burnet turned this idea over in his mind for several months, and '...it gradually dawned on me that Jerne's selection theory would make real sense if cells produced a characteristic pattern of globulin for genetic reasons and were stimulated to proliferate by contact with the corresponding antigenic determinant. This would demand a receptor on the cell with the same pattern as antibody...'. (153) Under appropriate conditions, such cells would either liberate antibodies or give rise to descendant cells that would do so.

Just before writing a short paper setting out this hypothesis, he saw Talmage's (154) review, in which somewhat the same idea was suggested. Essentially, Burnet envisaged the problem in terms of the population genetics of mesenchymal cells, with the variety of surface receptors and antibody globulins arising as a result of somatic mutation or 'by some other obscure process occurring during differentiation and development'. He published a paper on the subject (155) in an Australian journal not readily accessible to overseas scientists, for reasons which reveal some aspects of his personality. One was his Australian nationalism; he knew that it was a good idea and he wanted it to see first light in Australia. On the other hand, he had received adverse criticism of theories he had elaborated in a recent book (156), and he thought that by publishing the paper in this way he would have established priority, if it was eventually going to be recognized as important, and if there was something very wrong with it, very few scientists in America or England would have seen it (157). In fact, this short paper, in which he acknowledged Talmage' s contribution, still provides an excellent summary of the theory. Within two years, he had elaborated the concept as a book entitled The Clonal Selection Theory of Acquired lmmunity. He regarded the elaboration of this hypothesis as his most important scientific achievement (158), a view with which many biomedical scientists concur. Two immunologists who were working at the Hall Institute during the 1950s have recently summarized the history of the clonal selection theory. Over the last thirty years, it has led to a vast amount of experimental work, which has provided 'a rich insight into the biologic basis of immunity, and the central, unifying framework underlying this understanding is the clonal selection theory of antibody production' (159).

In 1957 Nossal (Burnet's successor as Director, now Sir Gustav Nossal) was working as a PhD student in Burnet's laboratory and he set out to test the clonal selection theory, by determining whether one antibody-producing cell could make more than one kind of antibody. None of 456 single cells challenged with two antigens produced two antibodies, although 33 were active against one antigen and 29 against the other (160). Further experiments from the Hall Institute (161), together with other evidence, finally provided formal proof of the validity of the clonal selection theory.

As he was increasingly called upon to give honorific lectures or to participate in symposia, Burnet used the clonal selection theory as the central point of his contributions, and it formed the theoretical basis of the major books on cellular immunology that were produced after his retirement. As new discoveries in immunology were made, e.g., the immunological functions of the thymus and the bursa of Fabricius, they were incorporated within the framework of the theory. However, his experimental work, which went on until his retirement from the Institute in 1965, was principally concerned with two other aspects of immunology – graft-versus-host reactions and auto-immune disease.

Graft-versus-host reactions.

In 1957 Simonsen showed that when a chick embryo was inoculated intravenously with adult fowl blood, a graft-versus-host reaction occurred. Here was an immunological phenomenon demonstrable in the chick embryo, Burnet's favourite experimental animal. Further, it was amenable to quantitative study by the pock-counting technique. Over the three years 1960-62 the 'Simonsen phenomenon' was the major focus of Burnet's personal laboratory work. He studied the role of major histocompatability antigens (162) and the effects of corticosteroids on the reaction (163), and showed that chickens could be rendered tolerant by prenatal administration of embryonic spleen cells (164). He and his colleagues also continued to explore the roles of the thymus and bursa of Fabricius in the immune responses of the chicken. In a review of the history of the graft-versus-host reaction, Simonsen (165) commented that: '...the most significant use to which Burnet's group put their CAM assay was in their investigations of bursectomized chicks... That work marked the beginning of our understanding of the T and B cell dichotomy in lymphocytes'. By the end of 1962, however, Burnet felt that investigation of the graft-versus-host reaction on the chorioallantoic membrane had yielded as much as it was likely to in his hands, although a few years later it was to form the basis of experimental work that helped to reestablish the 'passenger leukocyte' concept in tissue transplantation (166).

Autoimmune disease.

Burnet became interested in autoimmune disease in about 1955, partly because staff of the Clinical Research Unit of the Hall Institute suspected that some aspects of chronic hepatitis appeared to have an autoimmune basis. At that time, the laboratory findings on which ideas about autoimmune disease rested were the Coombs anti-globulin test, the anti-nuclear antibody basis of the lupus erythematosus (LE) cell effect, and autoimmune thyroiditis. The demonstration of LE cells in a patient with active chronic hepatitis (167), and the subsequent observation that such patients, and patients with macroglobulinaemia, had very high levels of antibody to extracts of normal human liver, forced Burnet to face up to the problem of autoimmune disease in the formulation of the clonal selection theory of antibody production (168).

One important aspect of Burnet's elaboration of the clonal selection theory was the notion of 'forbidden clones', which he suggested would provide an explanation for the 'self' 'not-self' conundrum. Autoimmune diseases were seen as aberrations of this mechanism. At 63, Burnet was still a keen experimenter, and he therefore turned to an experimental model which promised to provide an opportunity for the study of autoimmune disease. The model he chose was a strain of mice, 'New Zealand Black' (NZB), of which he heard by chance (169). With Dr. Margaret Holmes, he devoted the last few years of his life at the bench exploring various aspects of the biology and immunopathology of these mice, which spontaneously develop a high incidence of haemolytic anaemia of an autoimmune type, at an early age, and other signs recalling human systemic lupus erythematosus (170). Having shown that the anaemia could be transferred to young isologous mice by transfer of spleen cells from older mice (171), Burnet and Holmes showed that the affected mice developed characteristic thymic lesions (172). Over the next few years they studied the inheritance of autoimmune disease and thymic lesions emphasising the importance of a genetic factor and dismissing the influence of a virus (as suggested by others). The clearcut effect of cyclophosphamide in enhancing survival and abrogating renal disease (173) influenced clinical thinking on the use of immunosuppressive drugs in human autoimmune diseases. However, when Burnet abandoned laboratory work at the end of 1965 he was unsatisfied with the results of these experimental studies: '...without [a] break, the whole field may be deserted within a year or two', he wrote in 1967. In fact, the discovery of other inbred strains of mice that also developed autoimmune disease showed that the phenomenon was not just an idiosyncrasy of the NZB mouse, and murine models of systemic lupus erythematosus continue to be extensively exploited (174). However, mouse models have not proved to be very useful for studying the basic mechanisms of autoimmune disease.

After his retirement from the Hall Institute, Burnet continued to lecture and write on autoimmune diseases, and in 1972 he followed up the earlier technical book on the subject (175), written mainly by Mackay, with a second more general book of which he was sole author (176), designed for the 'physician or biologist', rather than the immunologist. Later he became more and more interested in ageing and diseases associated with it, such as cancer, which he approached as he had approached the biological basis of immunity, i.e., as a biologist interested in the population genetics of the cells of the body. Looking at cancer as an immunologist, he developed the concept of 'immunological surveillance'.

Immunological surveillance.

In 1957 Burnet suggested that 'small accumulations of tumour cells may develop and because of their possession of new antigenic potentialities provoke an effective immunological reaction with regression of the tumour and no clinical hint of its existence' (177), a concept for which he later coined the term 'immunological surveillance'. However, he has said that he really developed this concept only after hearing of remarks by Lewis Thomas (178), suggesting that 'perhaps, in short, the phenomenon of homograft rejection will turn out to represent a primary mechanism for natural defense against neoplasia.' This happened after he had abandoned virology and was reorienting his interests, ranging widely over other kinds of human disease in which immune mechanisms might play a role, notably autoimmune diseases and cancer. He did not carry out any experimental work on surveillance, but discussed it in lectures (179) and reviews (180) over the succeeding years, ascribing a major responsibility to cellular immunity, mediated by T lymphocytes. In 1970 his views on the topic were elaborated in a book entitled Immunological Surveillance (181), and the same year saw the first international congress on the topic, which Burnet was unable to attend, but for which he provided a final comment (182). Over the next decade he further refined his views on surveillance in books and lectures, expounding the idea that a self-monitoring system was of major importance in cancers of the lymphoid cells, but accepting the widely held view that immune surveillance was probably much less effective in affecting the development of epithelial tumours (183). Inevitably, Burnet's views on surveillance now look dated, because since 1970 new immunological mechanisms that bear directly on the phenomenon have been discovered, such as suppressor cells, natural killer cells, and MHC restriction of the activity of T lymphocytes. However, it is still regarded by tumour immunologists as a useful concept (184).

Cancer

Burnet's experience on the Australian Radiation Advisory Committee (1955-59) had made him think about the relationship between ionizing radiation and cancers, especially leukaemia, and he spoke about this problem at some length to both Australian and overseas audiences (185). In 1957, in the process of looking at other fields of biomedical science as he moved out of virology, he undertook a survey of cancer as a biological problem, much as he had reviewed the 1918-19 pandemic of influenza in 1941 prior to embarking on attempts to produce an influenza vaccine. In these articles, and subsequently (186), he was highly critical of research in tumour virology, holding that the conditions under which experiments in this field were carried out were so highly selected and artificial that they had no relevance for the understanding of human cancer, its prevention or its cure. Burnet did not foresee how the 'oncogene' hypothesis, proposed in 1969 as a direct outcome of research in tumour virology (187), would change and develop so that by the late 1980s, in a radically different form, it promised to provide 'the final common pathway to tumorigenesis' (188).

His approach to cancer was profoundly influenced by the observation that in all mammals that have been adequately studied, the incidence of cancers increases with increasing age, reaching much the same levels towards the end of the life span, whether this was 2 years, as in the mouse, or 70 years, as in man. He looked for random processes in the renewable cells of the body, the likelihood of which would increase with the passage of time, as the key to the development of the malignant cell, and therefore espoused the somatic mutation hypothesis of cancer causation. As advances in molecular biology revealed the complexity of DNA replication and the role played by various enzymes in 'error repair', Burnet emphasized the importance of random somatic mutations in the genes for such enzymes in relation to both carcinogenesis and ageing. He found support for this concept in certain 'experiments of nature', such as high frequency of skin cancers in patients suffering xeroderma pigmentosum, in which there are congenital defects in these enzymes.

He thought that environmental causes of cancer – cigarette smoke, irradiation, etc. – might greatly enhance the likelihood that relevant sequential mutations might occur, but that even without such influences the error-proneness in the DNA replication process was subject to random mutation – a process that he called 'intrinsic mutagenesis'. In parallel with the increased likelihood with time of the emergence of a series of somatic mutations that might result in the production of a clone of turnout cells, Burnet envisaged that immunological surveillance (see above) diminished in efficiency with increasing age (189). As a corollary, turnouts would be likely to develop earlier in individuals with genetic or acquired immunodeficiencies. His concept of cancer was thus a logical extension of the application of Darwinian principles to the phenomena of disease and the interactions of cells within the body, just as was the clonal selection theory of antibody production.

Compared with the impact of the concepts of clonal selection and immunological tolerance on the field of immunology, Burnet's hypothesis of intrinsic mutagenesis has had little influence on cancer research. However, it illustrates Burnet's penchant for looking at specific problems from a broad biological and evolutionary point of view.

Public health

It was inevitable that as a medically qualified scientist interested in microbiology, Burnet should have been actively interested in public health and preventive medicine. Even in his early days of bacteriophage research, he explored the possibility that bacteriophages might have a role in the treatment of bacillary dysentery (190), and his major virological work, on influenza virus, was always done with one eye on the risks of another pandemic of influenza like that of 1918-19 and the need to develop a satisfactory method of protection against it. Later, when poliovirus vaccines became available, he was active both in Australia (191) and in the World Health Organization in advising on their use.

Perhaps his major contributions to public health, however, were in lucid addresses on the application of science to public health. Many of these were given to Australian audiences and most of them were published. Between 1939 and 1955, when he was still working on viruses at the bench, they dealt with infectious diseases in general, poliomyelitis, rickettsial diseases, influenza, allergic diseases, tuberculosis, staphylococcal infections, and Murray Valley encephalitis. In a more general analysis of infectious diseases (192), he took recent data on mortality statistics in childhood, and by using a log-log scale gave a good graphical illustration of the interactions of changes due to three factors: the inexperience and development of the immune system in early childhood, its over-reaction in early adult life and its decline in old age.

After moving away from virology he lectured on cancer and leukaemia, always with the possibilities of prevention in mind, and in his Presidential Address to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, he made a strong and well-publicized attack on the danger of undue exposure to medical and dental ionizing radiation, and on the relation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Other lectures with public health importance covered such topics as autoimmune disease, diseases of old age, kuru, and the risks of radiation.

Human biology

'Human biology' receives special though brief mention in this memoir because of Burnet's view of himself primarily as a human biologist, who from about 1940 had repeatedly tried to apply an understanding of biology to human diseases, and subsequently to human affairs. Initially his interest was in the ecology of the infectious diseases of man. His laboratory experience with the population genetics of bacteriophages and later of influenza virus was then applied to the populations of lymphocytes that make up the immune system, leading to the enunciation of the clonal selection theory of acquired immunity. Later, he applied a similar approach to his interpretation of the nature of cancer.

However, it was his experiences just after the Second World War, when as the newly appointed Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute he was asked to serve on a number of official committees concerned with scientific research, that led him to take a serious interest in the major problems confronting the human species – notably war and overpopulation. A naive newcomer to official committees, he was shocked by their lack of interest in anything except short-term approaches to the problems with which they dealt. In an attempt to draw attention to the long-term problems of man as a mammal, in 1947 he wrote a book with the title Dominant Mammal. However, at that time it was rejected by both an English and an Australian publisher, and Burnet forgot about it until after his retirement from the Institute. He then went back to his original manuscript, reduced its formerly over-ambitious coverage, and rewrote the book in conformity with scientific knowledge in the late 1960s. It was published, with the title Dominant Mammal: the Biology of Human Destiny, in 1970 (193). This time, perhaps reflecting Burnet's status as an elder statesman of science, it was a success, being reprinted by Penguin Books and translated into Danish, Japanese and Spanish. Dominant Mammal expresses most clearly Burnet's philosophy of life. He returned to the same subject again in his last two books (194), in which, amongst other things, he examined human aggression as the expression of the genetic make-up of man, selected for during his long evolution as a hunter-gatherer, but totally inappropriate for civilized life.

Burnet's deep concern with human biology, encompassing particularly problems of population growth, was expressed again in his choice of these words, rather than 'medical research', for the title of the research institute established in Papua New Guinea in 1968, when he was chairman of the Papua New Guinea Medical Research Advisory Committee. It is ironic that in 1973, reflecting the greater popular and political interest in short-term medical research than in longer-term demographic problems, the name of the institute was changed to the 'Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research'.

Ageing

It was perhaps inevitable that a human biologist with as wide a spectrum of interests as Burnet, who continued actively to read and write well into his eighties, would become interested in the ageing process. It had been implicit in his earlier writings about immunological surveillance and the origin of cancers that both of these processes had a secular component – with increasing age both surveillance and error-correcting mechanisms became less efficient, whereas the likelihood of the occurrence of sequential mutations that might lead to cancer increased with age. In 1970 he specifically examined immunological surveillance in relation to problems of ageing, and a few years later wrote his first paper that dealt explicitly with the concept that the characteristic life span of man and other mammals was genetically determined, and that much of the process of ageing was due to somatic mutations in clonally proliferating cells in the body (195). He suggested that quite apart from the effects of extrinsic mutagens, somatic mutation depended on random errors in copying the DNA message, that mutations in the 'editing' enzymes might increase (or, rarely, decrease) the rate of 'intrinsic mutagenesis'. This was followed, in 1974, by his last referenced, 'technical' book, Intrinsic Mutagenesis: a Genetic Approach to Ageing (196), in which he discussed all aspects of senescence, including ageing of the post-mitotic cells of the brain and the social implications of the biological approach to ageing which he espoused. He accepted the biological necessity for death and was impatient with proposals designed to prolong the human life span. However, he saw '...wide scope for research on the best means of minimizing the depression and misery of pre-death...'. Happily, he and his relatives were spared a long period of dependent pre-death – he died, mentally acute until he lost consciousness, shortly after the onset of his last illness.

Books

This account of Burnet's scientific career mentions incidentally most of the books that he wrote, but this does not give adequate emphasis to his extraordinary productivity. He wrote no fewer than 31 books and monographs, a few of which went through second and subsequent editions, and many of which were translated into other languages. All are lucid, and his many semipopular books are very readable. His first book, as distinct from a long technical report, was written for the non-specialist, to provide a general account of the infectious diseases of man looked at from an ecological point of view. Entitled Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (197), it was written in 1937-38 but was not published until 1940. With the title The Natural History of Infectious Disease it went through three further editions (1953, 1962 and 1972) and was translated into Italian, Spanish, German and Japanese.

His output of books is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that many of them were produced while he was making major contributions as an experimental biologist. They were of two types: technical overviews of some facet of virology or immunology in which he had been working or was interested, and more or less 'popular' books, written for the physician and biologist who was not a specialist in the field concerned. Early in his life, while he was still working at the bench, his books fell equally into the two categories; of sixteen books published after retirement, all except three – Cellular immunology (1969), Immunological surveillance (1970) and Intrinsic mutagenesis: a genetic approach to ageing (1974) – fell into the second.

He began writing major reviews early in life, after being asked to prepare the chapter on bacteriophages for the Medical Research Council's System of Bacteriology (198) while still doing his PhD degree in the University of London. The habit of reviewing a field in which he was interested, or had recently carried out extensive experimental work, persisted throughout his life at the bench. As well as writing a classical review on bacteriophages in 1934 (199), he produced a monograph on the growth of viruses in the chick embryo in 1936 (200), which was rewritten and greatly expanded ten years later. (201)

Virtually all Burnet's experimental work before 1957 was concerned with microbiology, mainly virology, but his interest in theoretical aspects of immunology was evident from early in his career, and was first expounded in a major review of the immunological reactions of viruses (202). In 1941 he used the device of a monograph, The Production of Antibodies, to publish some data on the antibody response of rabbits to staphylococcal toxoid which had been rejected by a journal, as well as to review the subject in general. In 1949 he published a second edition of this monograph, in which he introduced to science the concept of immunological tolerance. Between the publication of these two editions of The Production of Antibodies, he wrote a monograph on influenza, as a prelude to his wartime work on influenza virus, and published the Dunham Lectures, Virus as Organism (203), and another popular book on human infectious diseases (204). The last-mentioned was updated and published as a Penguin paperback in 1953, with a second edition two years later.

Over the period 1955-60 he summarized his great experience in virology as a book, Principles of Animal Virology, which was published in 1955. A second edition, his last book on a virological subject, was published in 1960, and was translated into Polish and Japanese. By 1964, when he was asked to prepare a third edition of this book, he had moved over completely to immunology and suggested to the publishers that I should be asked to do it – a request that I declined as such, but responded to by writing The Biology of Animal Viruses (205). Burnet always preferred to be sole author of any book that he was involved with, and he had no taste at all for the task of planning and acting as editor of a multi-author book. Nevertheless, at the request of the publishers of the Principles, he agreed to act as an editor, with Wendell Stanley, of a multi-author three-volume book, The Viruses (206), which was published in 1959 and contained five chapters written by Burnet. He undertook editorship, under very different conditions, on only one other occasion, when he acted as editor, many years later (1976), of a number of Scientific American articles on immunology (207).

By 1958 he was moving out of virology, and after a rather unsuccessful book that attempted to integrate biochemistry, immunology and virology (Enzyme, antigen and virus: a study of macromolecular pattern in action) and the production of the second edition of Principles of Animal Virology, he embarked upon purely immunological books. The first of these was a classic, The Clonal Selection Theory of Acquired lmmunity (208). The material of this book was updated and enlarged in 1963 as The Integrity of the Body, which was translated into Italian, Japanese, Polish and Russian. His first book on autoimmune disease(Auto-immune diseases: pathogenesis, chemistry and therapy), to which Mackay made a major clinical contribution, was translated into Spanish and Japanese. In 1972, as sole author, he produced another more general book on this subject(Auto-immunity and auto-immune disease: a survey for physician or biologist), for 'physicians and biologists'.

After his retirement from the directorship of the Hall Institute in 1965, he worked full time as a writer and lecturer, and produced 16 books, a few of which have already been mentioned. They covered a wide range of subjects. Cellular Immunology, a technical, fully referenced book, was the largest book he ever wrote. Ever an innovator, he carried out the interesting experiment with this book of preparing simultaneously a shortened version, without references, as a popular book (209). The large book was translated into Russian; the smaller one into Italian, Japanese and German. A year earlier, in 1968, his Boyer Lectures were published (210), as well as an autobiography. In 1970 he produced a book, Dominant Mammal, that he had been thinking about for some twenty years. This was translated into Danish, Spanish and Japanese. The same year saw the publication of his first book on problems of ageing, cancer and the immune response, Immunological Surveillance. He was to return to this theme again, with more emphasis on ageing, in 1974 and 1976, but in the meantime he published a history of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and another book on human biology (211) which was also published by Penguin Books and translated into Italian and French. His last books were written as he approached his eightieth year and were appropriately philosophical in tone: Endurance of Life and Credo and Comment.

Because of these books Burnet is thought of by many scientists throughout the world as essentially a writer and theoretician. He was this, but he was as well a superb experimenter, as all who worked with him can testify, and as the survey of his personal experimental work illustrates.

Academy activities

As a Fellow of The Royal Society resident in Australia, Burnet was a Petitioner for the Charter and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Since he was acknowledged to be the leading biological scientist in Australia, it was natural that in 1958 he should be asked to succeed Sir Mark Oliphant who as the moving spirit in the formation of the Academy was its first President. At that time he declined, since he wished to devote his full energies to the activities of the Hall Institute. However, he later became a member of its Council and Vice-President (1961-63). In 1965, just before he retired from the Hall Institute, he accepted an invitation to become President. He thus became, over the period 1965-69, '...in one sense the official spokesman for science in Australia', and '...tried hard to develop a balanced approach to the part science, basic and applied,...should play in relation to medicine and other practical affairs of the community' (212). He was outstandingly successful in this role, and although he did not initiate the idea, he played a major role in the establishment of the Academy's 'Science and Industry Forum'. He also strongly supported the recommendations of the Academy's Fauna and Flora Committee, which were the culmination of prolonged efforts to organize the production of a new Flora Australiensis and to establish a Biological Survey of Australia. One of his last acts as President was to inform the then Minister of Education and Science (Mr J.M. Fraser) that he thought that these proposals were the most important projects to be proposed by the Academy, and to urge their prompt implementation (213). Both initiatives were eventually supported by the government.

His Australian nationalism emerged in a suggestion that The Royal Society should be asked to accept no further Australian nominations for election as Fellow – a move that he believed would in the long term enhance the prestige of the Academy. As might be expected, this proposal met with little support in either Australia or Britain.

As President of the Academy, Burnet was recognized by both governments and the public as the leading scientist in Australia. His advice was often sought and was freely given – he was always thoughtful, sometimes provocative, and courageous in his predictions about contemporary and future trends in science and medicine. It was inevitable that this sometimes led to criticism by those who thought that he tried to speak with authority about too wide a range of subjects. But, as Walsh (1979), who was Secretary, Biological Sciences, during his presidency, noted: '...he always retained the respect of his colleagues, and...conducted the business of the Academy with dignity and impartiality' .

After he had retired from the presidency, the Council established the Burnet Lecture and Medal to mark his contributions during this period. This Lecture is now the Academy's premier award in the biological sciences, being given alternately with the Matthew Flinders Lecture and Medal, which since 1972 has become the highest award in the physical sciences.

Public policy

Burnet was an innately shy person, and until 1937 he had never served on a committee that dealt with matters of public policy. In that year he was deputed to act as spokesman for the Advisory Council set up by the Victorian Government to advise it on measures to be taken in the face of a large outbreak of poliomyelitis. In the existing state of ignorance, there was little of value that could be done, but he got a sense of the difference between model infections in the laboratory and a worrying human situation. In 1944, when he was appointed Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute he was already a greatly respected authority on infectious diseases, and as Director of what was then the major medical research centre in Australia, he now became a public figure. In order to fulfil his obligations he schooled himself to overcome his shyness, and in time became a lucid public speaker, and even came to enjoy the limelight. As well as serving as a member or chairman of scientific committees, both in Australia and overseas, he recognized the importance of co-operation with the media if the general public was to understand science and scientists. While ensuring that his bench work was interrupted only for cogent reasons, from the time he became Director of the Institute he always responded to enquiries from the press. In later life he gave a number of radio addresses and occasionally appeared on television, but he was rarely comfortable with interviewers, either on radio or television, and he did not seek such confrontations.

Inevitably, he received many invitations to participate in activities that were not directly related to his scientific interests. Since all would make demands on his available time, he never accepted an invitation without careful thought. As Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, he gave priority to those that would benefit the Institute and his own research activities, but he also accepted some as a matter of duty and a few that he thought might be of particular personal interest.

The more important committees upon which Burnet served are listed below:

• 1947-52 Defence Research and Development Policy Committee (Commonwealth of Australia)
• 1947-53 National Health and Medical Research Council – Medical Research Advisory Committee (Commonwealth of Australia)
• 1955-59 Radiation Advisory Committee (Commonwealth of Australia), Chairman
• 1962-69 Papua New Guinea Medical Research Advisory Committee (Territory of Papua New Guinea), Chairman
• 1957-64 Nuffield Foundation, Australian Advisory Committee
• 1963-69 Queen Elizabeth II Fellowships Committee (Commonwealth of Australia), Chairman
• 1965-74 Britannica Australia Awards General Council. Britannica Australia Awards Medical Committee, Chairman
• 1952-69 World Health Organization, Expert Advisory Panels on Virus Diseases and on Immunology
• 1953-57 International Association of Microbiological Societies, President
• 1959-63 World Health Organization Medical Research Advisory Committee
• 1977 International Congress of Immunology, President
• 1966-69 The Commonwealth Foundation, Chairman
• 1966-70 La Trobe University Council
• 1982-83 Australian Advisory Council of Elders, Patron

No attempt will be made to describe his contributions to all of these committees, but a few comments on some of them will give a flavour of Burnet's contributions to public policy. The Medical Research Advisory Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, which advised the Council on grants for medical research in Australia, was the major source of support for medical research in Australia, and thus of the work of the Institute. He also served on several technical committees of the Council, and contributed especially to the work of the Epidemiology Committee.

As a member of the Defence Research and Development Policy Committee from 1948 to 1952 and its Chemical and Biological Warfare Subcommittees, Burnet became involved in investigation of the rumours circulated by the People's Republic of China about biological warfare in Korea – an activity which he felt disqualified him for a visit to China in 1964, something that he always regretted.

Burnet was the first Chairman of the National Radiation Advisory Committee; he accepted the invitation because of his concern that the Australian population was being exposed to unnecessary medical, dental, industrial and commercial irradiation. He made this matter, and the dangers of cigarette smoking, the central topics of his Presidential address to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in 1957 (214). Problems with fallout from nuclear weapons testing arose after he had left the committee, but he entered, at a late stage, into the nuclear energy debate in Australia. At first, in a widely publicized lecture, he opposed the use of nuclear energy on the grounds of the risk it posed for further escalation of nuclear weapons (215). In 1977, in a letter to The Age, he withdrew his objections to the mining of uranium in Australia, on the grounds that he was convinced of the necessity of the use of nuclear energy to cover a world 'energy gap' before fusion or renewable energy sources would become available.

He enjoyed his role in medical affairs in Papua New Guinea. Although until 1956 he had never been there, he had a vicarious interest in the Territory, since his only son, Ian, was a patrol officer there, and later became Secretary for Transport. In 1956-57 Dr Carleton Gajdusek was a guest worker at the Hall Institute, and while there this inveterate traveller had visited New Guinea and become aware of the existence of the disease locally called kuru (216). (In 1976 Gajdusek was to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on kuru.) Burnet was asked for advice about research on kuru by the Director of Public Health of New Guinea, Dr J.T. (later Sir John) Gunther, and this request led to a series of regular visits to the Territory from 1962 to 1969 as Chairman of its Medical Research Advisory Committee. Building on his own experience, Burnet persuaded the Australian government, which then administered the Territory, to establish a medical research institute in New Guinea, but because of his appreciation of the vital importance of population growth for the future of this tropical country, it was called, at his suggestion, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Human Biology. The Institute played a vital role in the combined Australia/United Kingdom contribution to the International Biological Programme (Human Adaptability), operated jointly by the Australian Academy of Science (during Burnet's Presidency) and The Royal Society. A visit to Madang by representatives of both bodies, including Sir Lindor Brown as Secretary, Biological Sciences, of The Royal Society, and Professor R.J. Walsh, Secretary, Biological Sciences, of the Australian Academy, coincided with Burnet's 70th birthday and was marked by a notable open air banquet at the 'Smugglers Inn' on the coral shores of Madang Harbour. Through his activities as chairman of the Papua New Guinea Medical Research Advisory Committee and the Council of the Institute of Human Biology, Burnet played an important role in the development of medicine and science in Papua New Guinea. From 1967 to 1972 he acted as medical editor of the Encyclopaedia of Papua New Guinea, and he retained a lifelong interest in kuru.

In the wider international field two of his public activities stand out – those associated with the Commonwealth Foundation and the World Health Organization. He was the first chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation, which was set up in London in 1966 with the broad aim of 'increasing interchanges between Commonwealth organizations in professional fields throughout the Commonwealth'. The Foundation, now a well-established and active body, owes much to Burnet's leadership during its formative years. Burnet was for a long time a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Virus Diseases, his major contributions being in the fields of poliomyelitis and influenza. Later he became a member of the first Medical Research Advisory Committee of the World Health Organization, a body which included the cream of the world's medical research leaders.

Burnet's writings and lectures probably played an even more important part than his service on committees in the formulation of public attitudes and policy on a variety of biological topics. He expressed his opinions fearlessly, even when he knew that they would be unpopular. His scientific stature assured an audience and his clarity of expression ensured that his writings would be widely understood. He was particularly worried about possible developments in molecular biology, sensing its fascination for scientists but feeling that it might be the biologist's equivalent of nuclear fission in its potential for danger. He was offended by the arrogance of some molecular biologists, and saw little chance that their work would contribute much to the betterment of human health, although he did not dispute its scientific interest. He continued to sound warnings about the dangers of molecular biological studies of the virulence of viruses (217), but he could not resist the scientific attraction of the contributions that molecular biology was making to the understanding of the problem with which he had wrestled for most of his life, the diversity of antibodies, and to his ideas on intrinsic mutagenesis. At the time, young molecular biologists were greatly concerned by Burnet's comments, since they believed that these would undercut their funding, but as time passed it was clear that Burnet could not stop the tide. As Burnet himself said, 'no-one has ever heeded the words of a Cassandra'.

As well as publications in scientific journals and books, Burnet spoke freely with newspaper reporters. His pronouncements were often controversial, but were always made with sincerity and usually after considerable thought, not 'off the cuff'. His contributions to the media are covered in some detail in the first biography of Burnet, other than his autobiography (218).

Honours and awards

Burnet was by far the most highly decorated and honoured scientist to have worked in Australia – in this respect he and Florey stand out in a separate category from all other Australian-born scientists. Various categories of these honours and the years in which they were received are listed below.

Decorations

• Knight Bachelor 1951
• Elizabeth II Coronation Medal 1953
• Order of Merit 1958
• Second Class of the Order of the Rising Sun 1961
• Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire 1969
• Elizabeth II Jubilee Medal 1977
• Knight of the Order of Australia 1978

Membership of learned academies and professional bodies

• Professor of Experimental Medicine, University of Melbourne, 1944-1965
• Professor Emeritus of the University of Melbourne 1965
• President of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science 1957
• President, Pacific Science Congress 1971
• Fellow of The Royal Society 1942
• Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science 1954, President 1965-69
• Foreign Associate, US National Academy of Sciences 1954
• Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Science 1957
• Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1958
• Honorary Member, Royal Society of New Zealand 1960
• Foreign Member, American Philosophical Society 1960
• Foreign Correspondent, Academia de Ciencias Medicas, Argentina 1978
• Honorary Member, New York Academy of Sciences 1950
• Honorary Member, American Public Health Association 1950
• Honorary Member, American Society of Microbiology, 1966
• Honorary Member, American Association of Immunologists 1961
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Society of Medicine 1950
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh 1970
• Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians 1948
• Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London) 1953
• Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) 1953
• Honorary Member, College of Pathologists of Australia 1956
• Honorary Member, Association of American Physicians 1961
• Honorary Fellow, American College of Physicians 1963
• Fellow, International Society of Haematology 1962
• Fellow, Australian Postgraduate Federation of Medicine 1963
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Institute of Public Health & Hygiene 1966
• Honorary Fellow, College of Pathologists (London) 1967
• Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (England) 1968
• Honorary Member, International Epidemiological Association 1971
• Honorary Fellow, American Academy of Allergy 1974
• Honorary Member, Associacion Medica Argentina 1977
• Fellow, Queensland Institute of Medical Research 1981

Honorary degrees

• Doctor of Science, Cambridge (1946), Western Australia (1948), New Zealand (1957), London (1960), Harvard (1960), Sydney (1961), New South Wales (1967), Oxford (1968), Monash (1968), Newcastle (1974).
• Doctor of Medicine, Hahnemann Medicai College, Philadelphia (1958)
• Doctor of Medical Science, Medical University of South Carolina (1984)
• Doctor of Laws, Melbourne (1962)

Awards

• 1935 Stewart Prize, British Medical Association
• 1938 Walter Burfitt Prize, Royal Society of New South Wales
• 1939 Cilento Medal, Australian Institute of Anatomy
• 1947 Royal Medal, The Royal Society
• 1953 Lasker Award, American Public Health Association; Charles Mickle Fellowship, University of Toronto
• 1954 Von Behring Prize for 1952, University of Marburg; James Cook Medal, Royal Society of New South Wales
• 1958 Galen Medal, Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London
• 1959 Copley Medal, The Royal Society; Matthew Flinders Medal, Australian Academy of Science
• 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• 1962 Mueller Medal, Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science; New York University Medal
• 1963 James Spence Medal, British Paediatric Association
• 1967 Royal Institute of Public Health & Hygiene Medal; Silver Medal, I'Institut de Microbiologie et d'Hygiene de l'Université de Montréal
• 1971 First International Congress of Immunology Award, USA
• 1973 Distinguished Service Award, International Association of Allergy

International lectureships

• 1944 Dunham Lectures, Harvard University
• 1950 Croonian Lecture, The Royal Society; Herter Lectures, Johns Hopkins University; Moynihan Lecture, Royal College of Surgeons of England; Wright Lecture, St Mary's Hospital, London; Holme Lecture, University College Hospital, London
• 1952 Woodward Lecture, Yale University; Dyer Award Lecture, US National Institutes of Health
• 1954 Price Lecture, Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh); CIBA Foundation Lecture, London; Litchfield Lecture, Oxford University
• 1956 Wyckoff Lecture, New York University
• 1958 Abraham Flexner Lectures, Vanderbilt University; Cutter Lecture, Harvard University
• 1959 Croonian Lectures, Royal College of Physicians (London)
• 1960 Herstein Medical Lectures, Stanford University; Schorstein Lecture, London Hospital; Nobel Lecture, Royal Swedish Academy of Science
• 1962 Jephcott Lecture, Royal Society of Medicine; Chouke Lecture, College of Physicians of Philadelphia
• 1963 Eli Lilly Lecture, American College of Physicians; Aschoff Lecture, Freiburg, Germany
• 1964 Sommer Memorial Lectures, Portland, Oregon; Marcy Lecture, University of Pittsburgh
• 1966 Harben Lectures, Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene
• 1967 Noranda Lecture, Expo' 67, Montréal; Cameron Lecture, College of Pathologists, London
• 1973 Sir Douglas Robb Lectures, University of Auckland
• 1975 MacArthur Postgraduate Lecture, University of Edinburgh
• 1978 Aharon Katzir-Katachalsky Memorial Lectures, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
• 1980 William S. Paley Lecture, New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, New York

Honorific lectures in Australia

• 1941 Charles Mackay Lecture, Australian Institute of Anatomy, Canberra
• 1942 Bancroft Memorial Lecture, Queensland Branch, British Medical Association
• 1948 Edward Stirling Lectures, University of Adelaide
• 1952 Listerian Oration, South Australian Branch, British Medical Association; Charles Clubbe Memorial Oration, Sydney Postgraduate Medical Foundation
• 1953 Mathison Memorial Lectures, University of Melbourne
• 1959 Sir John Morris Memorial Lecture, Adult Education Board of Tasmania; Matthew Flinders Lecture, Australian Academy of Science
• 1961 Keith Inglis Memorial Lecture, Sydney Hospital
• 1963 Arthur E. Mills Oration, Royal Australasian College of Physicians
• 1966 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Commission
• 1967 Sir Richard Stawell Oration, Victorian Branch, Australian Medical Association
• 1970 Sydney Rubbo Memorial Lecture, Australian Society for Microbiology
• 1971 Oscar Mendelsohn Lecture, Monash University
• 1973 Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture, Flinders University Science Association
• 1976 Alfred Deakin Lecture; Brailsford Robertson Memorial Lecture, Medical Sciences Club of South Australia
• 1978 Leonard Ball Oration, Victorian Foundation on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence

Other marks of recognition

• 'Australian of the Year', 1961
• CIBA Foundation Study Group: The Immunologically Competent Cell, in honour of Sir Macfarlane Burnet, 1963
• CIBA Symposium: The Thymus, in honour of Sir Macfarlane Burnet, held in Melbourne in 1965.
• Australian Journal of Experimental Biology and Medical Sciences, Frank Macfarlane Burnet Commemoration Issue, July 1965
• Nuffield-Burnet Laboratories, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, named 1966
• Australasian Annals of Medicine, Burnet Symposium Issue, November 1969
• Burnet Lecture, Australian Academy of Science, established 1969
• Sir Macfarlane Burnet Address, Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, established 1977
• Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Annual Review 1978-79; A Tribute to Sir Macfarlane Burnet
• Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research, Fairfield Hospital, Melbourne, named 1986
• Burnet Memorial Oration, Australian Society of Immunology, established 1986
• Burnet Clinical Research Unit of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, named 1986

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.7, no.1, 1987. It was written by Frank Fenner, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University, and Visiting Fellow, John Curtin School of Medical Research.

Acknowledgements

Many colleagues of Sir Macfarlane Burnet have provided me with assistance in the preparation of this Memoir. In particular, I am grateful to his children, Mrs Elizabeth Dexter and Mr Ian Burnet, for information on his later publications. I am also indebted to various colleagues of Sir Macfarlane for their help, in particular Professor G.L. Ada, Mrs Joyce Fazekas de St Groth (née Stone), Dr Margaret Holmes, Mr A. Hughes, Emeritus Professor D.O. Lancaster, Professor J. Lederberg, Dr I.R. Mackay, Sir Peter Medawar, Dr D. Metcalf, Sir Gustav Nossal, Associate Professor Margaret Sabine (née Edney), Emeritus Professor E. Saint, Professor D.O. White, and the late Sir Ian Wood.

The photograph reproduced was taken when Burnet was President of the Australian Academy of Science and hangs in the Academy's Becker Building.

Sources of information

Burnet did not prepare biographical notes for either The Royal Society or the Australian Academy of Science, probably because of the large number of sources of information on his life and work that had been published during his lifetime. These include his autobiography, Changing Patterns (1968), the Annual Reports of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research during the period of his directorship, and the collected tributes prepared in honour of his seventieth and eightieth birthdays, published in Australasian Annals of Medicine, November 1969, and The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Annual Review 1978-79, respectively.

Burnet's large collection of diaries, notebooks and personal correspondence is being sorted and listed by the Australian Science Archives Project prior to being deposited in the University of Melbourne Archives. It will form a rich primary source for future biographers. The first biography of Sir Macfarlane Burnet, by Christopher Sexton, will be published in 1988.

Notes

• (1) Dale, H.H. 1953 Charles Hallilay Kellaway. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 81, 503.
• (2) d'Hérelle, F. 1926 Le bacteriophage et son comportement. Paris, Masson.
• (3) Kellaway, C.H., MacCallum, P. & Tebbutt, A.H. 1928 Report of the Royal Commission into the fatalities at Bundaberg. Canberra: Government Printer.
• (4) Pons, M. W. & Hirst, G. K. 1968 Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of influenza virus RNA. Virology 34, 386.
• (5) Jerne, N.K. 1955 The natural selection theory of antibody formation. Proc Nat. Acad. Sci. US, 41, 849.
• (6) Wolstenholme, G.E.W. and Porter, R. 1966 Ciba Foundation Symposium: The Thymus: experimental and clinical studies. London: Churchill.
• (7) Nossal, G.J.V. 1969 Burnet and science. Australas. Ann. Med. 4, 311.
• (8) Cohn, M. 1979 Burnet, lysogeny and creativity. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Annual Review 1978-79, pp.9-13, Melbourne.
• (9) d'Hérelle, F. 1922 The bacteriophage: its role in immunity. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
• (10) Bail, O. 1923 Versuche über die Vielheit von Bakteriophage. Zeit. Immunitatsforsch. 38, 57.
• (11) Elford, W.J. & Andrewes, C.H. 1932 The sizes of different bacteriophages. Br. J. exp. Path. 13, 446.
• (12) Ellis, E.L. & Delbrück, M. 1939 The growth of bacteriophage. J. gen. Physiol. 22, 365.
• (13) Lwoff, A. & Gutmann, A. 1950 Recherches sur un Bacillus megatherium lysogene. Ann. Inst. Pasteur 78, 711.
• (14) Burnet, F.M. & McKie, M. 1929 Observations on a permanently lysogenic strain of B. enteritidis Gaertner. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 6, 277-284.
• (15) Luria, S.E. & Delbrück, M. 1943 Mutations of bacteria from virus sensitivity to virus resistance. Genetics 28, 491.
• (16) Burnet, F.M. 1929 'Smooth-rough' variation in bacteria in its relation to bacteriophage. J. Path. Bact. 32, 15-42.
• (17) Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1936 Induced lysogenicity and mutation of bacteriophage within lysogenic bacteria. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 14, 27-38.
• (18) Kellaway, C.H., MacCallum, P. & Tebbutt, A.H. 1928 Report of the Royal Commission into the fatalities at Bundaberg. Canberra: Government Printer.
• (19) Burnet, F.M., Freeman, M., Jackson A.V. & Lush, D. 1941 The production of antibodies: a review and theoretical discussion. (Monograph from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research in Pathology and Medicine, No.1), Melbourne: Macmillan.
• (20) Burnet, F.M. & Fenner, F. 1949 The production of antibodies. (Monograph of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne), 2nd ed., Melbourne: Macmillan.
• (21) Burnet, F.M. & MacNamara, J. 1929: The activity of stored antipoliomyelitic serum in experimental poliomyelitis. Med. J. Aust. 2, 851-855 & 1931: Immunological differences between strains of poliomyelitic virus. Br. J. exp. Path. 12, 57-61.
• (22) Burnet, F.M. 1933 A virus disease of the canary of the fowl-pox group. J. Path. Bact. 37, 107-122.
• (23) Woodruff, A.M. & Goodpasture, E.W. 1931 The susceptibility of the chorioallantoic membrane of chick embryos to infection with the fowlpox virus. Am. J. Path. 7, 209.
• (24) Burnet, F.M. 1973 The influence of a great pathologist: a tribute to Ernest Goodpasture. Pespect. Biol Med. 16, 333-347.
• (25) Elford, W.J. & Andrewes, C.H. 1932 The sizes of different bacteriophages. Br. J. exp. Path. 13, 446.
• (26) Andrewes, C.H. & Elford, W.J. 1933 Observations on antiphage sera. I. 'The percentage law'. Br. J. exp. Path. 14, 367.
• (27) Burnet, F.M. 1934 The bacteriophages. Biol. Rev. 9, 332-350.
• (28) Burnet, F.M. 1933 A virus disease of the canary of the fowl-pox group. J. Path. Bact. 37, 107-122.
• (29) Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1936. The immunological relationship between Kikuth's canary virus and fowl-pox. Br. J. exp. Path. 17, 302-307.
• (30) Burnet, F.M. 1934 The propagation of the virus of infectious laryngotracheitis on the chorio-allantoic membrane of the developing egg. Br. J. exp. Path. 15, 52-55.
• (31) Burnet, F.M. & Ferry, J.D. 1934 The differentiation of the viruses of fowl plague and Newcastle disease: experiments using the technique of the chorio-allantoic membrane inoculation of the developing egg. Br. J. exp. Path. 15, 56-64.
• (32) Burnet, F.M. & Galloway, I.A. 1934 The propagation of the virus of vesicular stomatitis in the chorio-allantoic membrane of the developing hen's egg. Br. J. exp. Path, 15, 105-113.
• (33) Burnet, F.M. 1935 Propagation of the virus of epidemic influenza on the developing egg. Med. J. Aust. 2, 687-689.
• (34) Burnet, F.M. & Rountree, P.M. 1935 Psittacosis in the developing egg. J. Path. Bact. 40, 471-481.
• (35) Burnet, F.M. 1936 Observations of the effect of louping ill virus on the developing egg. Br. J. exp. Path. 17, 294-301.
• (36) Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1936 The propagation of the virus of infectious ectromelia of mice in the developing egg. J. Path. Bact. 43, 105-120.
• (37) Burnet, F.M. 1936 Immunological studies with the virus of infectious laryngotracheitis of fowls using the developing egg technique. J. Exp. Med 63, 685-701.
• (38) Burnet, F.M. 1936 The use of the developing egg in virus research. Special Report No. 220. London: Medical Research Council.
• (39) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1939 A comparative study of rickettsial strains from an infection of ticks in Montana (United States of America) and from 'Q' fever. Med. J. Aust. 2, 887-891.
• (40) Burnet, F.M. & Faris, D.D. 1942 The technique of quantitative chorioallantoic virus titration. J. Bact. 44, 241-248.
• (41) Burnet, F.M. 1940 Influenza virus infections of the chick embryo lung. Br. J. exp. Path. 21, 147-153, & Influenza virus infections of the chick embryo by the amniotic route 1. General character of the infections. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 18, 353-360.
• (42) Burnet, F.M. 1941 Influenza virus infections of the chick embryo by the amniotic route 2. Titrations and serum neutralization tests. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 19, 39-44.
• (43) Burnet, F.M. & Foley, M. 1941 Two methods for the detection of influenza virus in human throat washings without the use of ferrets. Med. J. Aust. 1, 68-72.
• (44) Nigg, C., Crowley, J.H. & Wilson, D.E. 1940 On use of chick embryo cultures of influenza virus in complement fixation tests. Science 91, 603.
• (45) Burnet, F.M., Stone, J.D. & Edney, M. 1950 The failure of antibody production in the chick embryo. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 28, 291-297.
• (46) Hirst, G.K. 1941 The agglutination of red cells by the allantoic fluid of chick embryos infected with influenza virus. Science 94, 22.
• (47) Burnet, F.M. 1943 Characteristics of the influenza virus-antibody reaction as tested by the method of allantoic inoculation. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 21, 231-238.
• (48) Burnet, F.M. & Bull, D.R. 1943 Changes in influenza virus associated with adaptation to passage in chick embryos. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 21, 55-69.
• (49) Burnet, F.M. & Beveridge, W.I.B. 1946 The cultivation of viruses and rickettsiae in the chick embryo. Special Report No. 256. London: Medical Research Council. French edition: 1950.
• (50) Burnet, F.M. & Rountree, P.M. 1935 Psittacosis in the developing egg. J. Path. Bact. 40, 471-481.
• (51) Burnet, F.M. & Rudd, G.V. 1941 Intranasal infection of mice with the virus of psittacocis. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 19, 33-38.
• (52) Burnet, F.M. 1968 Changing patterns; an atypical autobiography. Melbourne: Heinemann. New York: Elsevier, 1969, Melbourne: Sun Books. 1970. Japanese edition: Tokyo, 1978.
• (53) Burnet, F.M. 1934 Psittacosis in Australian parrots. Med. J. Aust. 2, 743-746.
• (54) Burnet, F.M. 1935 Enzootic psittacosis amongst wild Australian parrots. J. Hyg. (Camb.) 35, 412-420.
• (55) Burnet, F.M. 1939 A note of the occurrence of fatal psittacosis in parrots living in the wild state. Med. J. Aust. 1, 545-546.
• (56) Burnet, F.M. 1936 Inapparent (subclinical) infection of the rat with louping-ill virus. J. Path. Bact. 42, 213-225 & Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1936 Inapparent (Subclinical) infection of the rat with the virus of infectious ectromelia of mice. J. Path. Bact. 42, 469-476.
• (57) Burnet, F.M. 1936 Inapparent virus infections with special reference to Australian examples. Br. med. J. 1, 99-103.
• (58) Fenner, F. 1979. Burnet and infectious diseases. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Annual Review 1978-79, pp. 25-30, Melbourne.
• (59) Derrick, E.H. 1937 Q fever, a new fever entity: clinical features, diagnosis and laboratory investigations. Med. J. Aust. 2, 281.
• (60) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1937 Experimental studies on the virus of 'Q' fever. Med. J. Aust. 2, 299-305.
• (61) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1938 The rickettsia of 'Q' fever: further experimental studies. Med. J. Aust. 1, 296-298.
• (62) Derrick, E.H. 1944 The epidemiology of Q fever. J. Hyg. (Camb.) 43, 357.
• (63) Burnet, F.M. 1938 Tissue culture of the rickettsia of 'Q' fever. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 16, 219-224.
• (64) Burnet, F.M., Freeman, M., Derrick, E.H. & Smith, D.W.J. 1939 The search for immunological relationship between 'Q' fever and other rickettsioses. Med. J. Aust. 2, 51-54.
• (65) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1939 A comparative study of rickettsial strains from an infection of ticks in Montana (United States of America) and from 'Q' fever. Med. J. Aust. 2, 887-891.
• (66) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1941 Studies of the X strain (Dyer) of Rickettsia burneti I. Chorioallantoic membrane infections. J. Immun. 40, 405-419 & Studies of the X strain (Dyer) of Rickettsia burneti II. Guinea pig infections, with special reference to immunological phenomena. J. Immun. 40, 421-436.
• (67) Cox, H.R. 1938 A filter-passing infectious agent isolated from ticks: III. Description of organism and cultivation experiments. Publ. Hlth. Rep. 53, 2270.
• (68) Burnet, F.M. & Freeman, M. 1939 Note on a series of laboratory infections with the rickettsia of 'Q' fever. Med. J. Aust. 1, 11-12.
• (69) Baca, O.G. & Paretsky, D. 1983 Q fever and Coxiella burnetii: a model for host-parasite interactions. Microbiol. Rev. 47, 127.
• (70) Burnet, F.M. & MacNamara, J. 1931 Immunological differences between strains of poliomyelitic virus. Br. J. exp. Path. 12, 57-61.
• (71) Burnet, F.M., Jackson, A.V. & Robertson, E.G. 1939 Poliomyelitis 1. Intra-ocular inoculation as a standard method for the demonstration of neutralizing antibodies. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 17, 253-260.
• (72) Flexner, S. 1936 Respiratory versus gastro-intestinal infection in poliomyelitis. J. exp. Med. 63, 209.
• (73) Burnet, F.M., Jackson, A.V. & Robertson, E.G. 1939 Poliomyelitis 3. The use of Macacus cynomolgus as an experimental animal. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 17, 375-391.
• (74) Flexner, S. 1936 Respiratory versus gastro-intestinal infection in poliomyelitis. J. exp. Med. 63, 209.
• (75) Burnet, F.M. & Jackson, A.V. 1940 Poliomyelitis 4. The spread of poliomyelitis virus in cynomolgus monkeys with particular reference to infection by the pharyngeal-intestinal route. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 18, 361-366.
• (76) Burnet, F.M. 1949 Some aspects of the epidemiology of poliomyelitis. Proc. R. Australas. Coll. Phys. 4, 95-100.
• (77) Enders, J.F., Weller, T.H. & Robbins, F.C. 1949 Cultivation of Lansing strain of poliomyelitis virus in cultures of various human embryo tissues. Science 109, 85.
• (78) Sabin, A.V. 1934 Studies on the B virus. I. The immunological identity of a virus isolated from a human case of ascending myelitis associated with visceral necrosis. Br. J. exp. Path. 15, 248.
• (79) Burnet, F.M., Lush, D. & Jackson, A.V. 1939 The propagation of herpes, B. and pseudorabies viruses on the chorioallantois. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci., 17, 35-40.
• (80) Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1939 The inactivation of herpes virus by immune sera: experiments using the chorio-allantoic membrane technique. J. Path. Bact. 48, 275-286.
• (81) Burnet, F.M. & Williams, S.W. 1939 Herpes simplex: a new point of view. Med. J. Aust. 1., 637-642.
• (82) Burnet, F.M. 1933 A virus disease of the canary of the fowl-pox group. J. Path. Bact. 37, 107-122.
• (83) Marchal, J. 1930 Infectious ectromelia. A hitherto undescribed virus disease of mice. J. Path. Bact. 33, 713.
• (84) Burnet, F.M. & Lush, D. 1936 The propagation of the virus of infectious ectromelia of mice in the developing egg. J. Path. Bact. 43, 105-120.
• (85) Bedson, H.S. & Dumbell, K.R. 1961 The effect of temperature on the growth of poxviruses in the chick embryo. J. Hyg. (Camb.) 59, 457.
• (86) Nagler, F.P.O. 1942 Application of Hirst's phenomenon to the titration of vaccinia virus and vaccinia immune serum. Med. J. Aust. 1, 281.
• (87) Burnet, F.M. 1945 An unsuspected relationship between the viruses of vaccinia and infectious ectromelia of mice. Nature, Lond. 155, 543 & with Boake, W.C. 1946 The relationship between the virus of infectious ectromelia of mice and vaccinia virus. J. Immun. 53, 1-13.
• (88) Greenwood, M., Hill, A.B., Topley, W.N.C. & Wilson, J. 1936 Experimental epidemiology. Medical Research Council Special Report Series No. 209.
• (89) Burnet, F.M. 1953 Virus classification and nomenclature. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 56, 383-390.
• (90) Burnet, F.M., Andrewes, C.H. & Bang, F.B. 1955 A short description of the Myxovirus group (influenza and related viruses.) Virology 1, 176-184.
• (91) Burnet, F.M. & Fenner, F. 1957 A short description of the poxvirus group (vaccinia and related viruses). Virology 4, 305-314.
• (92) Burnet, F.M. & Clark, E. 1942 Influenza: a survey of the last 50 years in the light of modern work on the virus of epidemic influenza. (Monographs from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research in Pathology and Medicine, No.4) Melbourne: Macmillan.
• (93) Burnet, F.M. 1971 Walter and Eliza Hall Institute 1915-1965. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
• (94) Burnet, F.M. 1937 Influenza virus on the developing egg: IV. The pathogenicity and immunizing power of egg virus for ferrets and mice. Br. J. exp. Path. 18, 37-43.
• (95) Burnet, F.M. & Foley, M. 1941 The results of intranasal inoculation of modified and unmodified influenza virus strains in human volunteers. Med. J. Aust. 2, 655-659.
• (96) Burnet, F.M. 1942 Influenza virus B: I. Observations on growth in chick embryos and on the occurrence of antibodies in Australian serum. Med. J. Aust. 1, 671-673.
• (97) Burnet, F.M. 1942 Influenza virus B: II. Immunization of human volunteers with living attenuated virus. Med. J. Aust. 1, 673-674 & 1943 with Bull, D.R. Experimental immunization of volunteers against influenza virus B. Med. J. Aust. 1, 389-394.
• (98) Burnet, F.M., Beveridge, W.I.B., Bull, D.R. & Clark, E. 1942 Investigations of an influenza epidemic in military camps in Victoria, May 1942. Med. J. Aust. 2, 371-376.
• (99) Hirst, G.K. 1941 The agglutination of red cells by the allantoic fluid of chick embryos infected with influenza virus. Science 94, 22.
• (100) McClelland, L. & Hare, R. 1941 Adsorption of influenza virus by red cells and a new in vitro method of measuring antibodies for influenza virus. Can. J. publ. Hlth 32, 530.
• (101) Burnet, F.M. 1942 Red cell agglutination by viruses: the Hirst phenomenon. Aust. J. Sci. 5, 5-7 & with Beveridge, W.IB. 1943 Titration of antibody against influenza viruses by allantoic inoculation of the developing chick embryo. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 21, 71-78.
• (102) Burnet, F.M. 1942 The affinity of Newcastle disease virus to the influenza virus group. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 20, 81-88.
• (103) Levens, J.H. & Enders, J.F. 1945 Hemoagglutinative properties of amniotic fluid from embryonated eggs infected with mumps virus. Science 102, 117.
• (104) Burnet, F.M. 1945 Haemagglutination by mumps virus: relationship to Newcastle disease and influenza viruses. Aust. J. Sci. 8, 81-83.
• (105) Thomsen, O. 1926 Ein vermehrungsfahiges Agens als Veranderer des isoagglutinatorischen Verhaltens der roten Blutkorperchen, eine bisher unbekannte Quelle der Fehlbestimmung. Z. ImmunForsch. exp. Ther. 52, 85.
• (106) Freidenreich, V. 1928 Recherches sur le phenomene de l'hemoagglutination de Thomsen. Nature de la substance transformante. C.r. Seanc. Soc. Bio. 98, 1267.
• (107) Burnet, F.M., McCrea, J.F. & Stone, J.D. 1946 Modification of human red cells by virus action I. The receptor gradient for virus action in human red cells. Br. J. exp. Path. 27, 228-236.
• (108) Burnet, F.M., with Stone, J.D. 1947 Desquamation of intestinal epithelium in vitro by V. cholerae filtrates: characterization of mucinase and tissue disintegrating enzymes. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 25, 219-225 & 1948 The mucinase of V. cholerae. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 26, 71-80.
• (109) Burnet, F.M. & Stone, J.D. 1947 The receptor-destroying enzyme of V.cholerae. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 25, 227-233.
• (110) Francis, T. 1947 Dissociation of hemagglutinating and antibody-measuring capacities of influenza virus. J. Exp. Med. 81, 1.
• (111) Trikojus, V.M. 1975 Alfred Gottschalk. Rec. Aust. Acad. Sci. 3 (1), 53.
• (112) Gottschalk, A. 1957 The chemistry and biology of sialic acids and related substances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press & 1966 (ed.) Glycoproteins: their composition, structure and function. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
• (113) Gottschalk, A. 1957 Neuraminidase: the specific enzyme of influenza virus and Vibrio cholerae. Biochim. biophys. Acta 23, 645.
• (114) Varghese, J.N., Laver, W.G. & Colman, P.M. 1983 Structure of the influenza virus glycoprotein antigen neuraminidase at 2.9 Å resolution. Nature, Lond. 303, 35.
• (115) Burnet, F.M. 1949 Some aspects of the epidemiology of poliomyelitis. Proc. R. Australas. Coll. Phys. 4, 95-100.
• (116) Burnet, F.M. 1942 Discontinuous variation in influenza virus. Aust. J. Sci. 5, 81-83 & with Bull, R.D. 1943 Changes in influenza virus associated with adaptation to passage in chick embryos. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 21, 55-69.
• (117) Burnet, F.M. & Stone, J.D. 1945 The significance of primary isolation of influenza virus by inoculation of mice or of the allantoic cavity of chick embryos. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 23, 147-150 & Further studies on the O-D change in influenza virus A. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 23, 151-160.
• (118) Burnet, F.M. & Anderson, S.G. 1947 Sporadic and minor epidemic and incidence of influenza A in Victoria, 1945-46. 1. Phase behaviour of influenza A strains in relation to epidemic charcteristics. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 25, 235-242.
• (119) Burnet, F.M., Stone, J.D., Isaacs, A. & Edney, M. 1949 The genetic character of O-D change in influenza A. Br. J. exp. Path. 30, 419-425.
• (120) Robertson, J.S., Naeve, C.W., Webster, R.G., Bootman, J.S., Newman, R. & Schild, G.C. 1985 Alterations in the hemagglutinin associated with adaptation of influenza B virus to growth in eggs. Virology 143, 166.
• (121) Burnet, F.M. 1951 A genetic approach to variation in influenza viruses 2. Variation in the strain NWS on allantoic passage. J. Gen. Microbiol. 5, 54-58.
• (122) Burnet, F.M. 1951 A genetic approach to variation in influenza viruses. 1. The characters of three substrains of influenza virus A (WS). J. Gen. Microbiol. 5, 46-53.
• (123) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1951 A genetic approach to variation in influenza viruses 3. Recombination of characters in influenza virus strains used in mixed infections. J. gen. Microbiol. 5, 59-66.
• (124) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1951. A genetic approach to variation in influenza viruses 4. Recombination of characters between the influenza virus A strain NWS and strains of different serological subtypes. J. gen. Microbiol. 5, 67-82.
• (125) Burnet, F.M. & Fraser, K.B. 1952 Studies on recombination with influenza viruses in the chick embryo I. Invasion of the chick embryo by influenza viruses. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 30, 447-458.
• (126) Isaacs, A. & Lindenmann, J. 1957 Virus interference. I. The interferon. Proc. R. Soc. B147, 258.
• (127) Burnet, F.M. & Fraser, K.B. 1952 Studies on recombination with influenza viruses in the chick embryo. II. Genetic interaction between influenza virus strains in the chick embryo. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 30, 459-468 & with Lind, P.E. 1952 Studies on recombination with influenza viruses in the chick embryo. III. Reciprocal genetic interaction between two influenza virus strains. Aust. J. exp. Biol med. Sci. 30, 469-477.
• (128) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1953 Back-recombination of influenza A strains obtained in recombination experiments. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 31, 361-372.
• (129) Burnet, F.M. & Berry, B.T. 1953 Recombination studies with two influenza virus B strains. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 31, 519-528.
• (130) Lwoff, A., Dulbecco, R., Vogt, M. & Lwoff, M. 1955. Kinetics of the release of poliomyelitis virus from single cells. Virology 1, 128.
• (131) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1954 Recombination of influenza viruses in the de-embryonated egg. 2. The conditions for recombination and the evidence for the possible existence of diploid influenza virus. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 32, 153-164.
• (132) Burnet, F.M., Lind, P.E. & Stevens, K.M. 1954 A new technical approach to the interpretation of 'incompleteness' in influenza virus. Aust. J. Sci. 16, 145-147.
• (133) Burnet, F.M., Lind, P.E. & Stevens, K.M. 1955 Production of incomplete influenza virus in the de-embryonated egg. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 33, 127-142.
• (134) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1954 Reactivation of heat inactivated influenza virus by recombination. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 32, 133-144 & 1957 Further studies of recombination between heat-inactivated virus and active virus. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 35, 531-540.
• (135) Burnet, F.M. & Lind, P.E. 1957 Further studies of recombination between heat-inactivated virus and active virus. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 35, 531-540.
• (136) Ada, G.L. & Perry, B.T. 1954 The nucleic acid content of influenza virus. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 32, 453.
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• (138) Pons, M.W. & Hirst, G.K. 1968 Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of influenza virus RNA. Virology 34, 386.
• (139) Kilbourne, E.D. 1969 Future influenza vaccines and the use of genetic recombinants. Bull. WHO 41, 643.
• (140) Murphy, B.R. & Webster, R.G. 1985 Influenza viruses. In Virology (ed. B.N. Fields et al.), p.1179, New York: Raven Press.
• (141) Burnet, F.M. 1943 Human infection with the virus of Newcastle disease of fowls. Med. J. Aust. 2, 313-314.
• (142) Waterson, A.P. 1962 Two kinds of myxovirus. Nature, Lond. 193, 1163.
• (143) Burnet, F.M. 1924 Preliminary note on a new method of serological investigation in cases of suspected typhoid fever. Med. J. Aust. 1, 205-208 & Observations on the agglutinins in typhoid fever. Br. J. exp. Path. 5, 251-260.
• (144) Burnet, F.M., Freeman, M, Jackson, A.V. & Lush, D. 1941 The production of antibodies: a review and theoretical discussion. (Monograph from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Research in Pathology and Medicine, No. 1), Melbourne: Macmillan.
• (145) Gajdusek, D.C. & Mackay, I.R. 1958 An 'autoimmune' reaction against human tissue antigens in certain acute and chronic diseases. II. Clinical correlations. Arch. Int. Med. 101, 30.
• (146) Simonsen, M. 1957 The impact on the developing embryo and newborn animal of adult homologous cells. Acta path. microbiol. scand. 40, 480.
• (147) Breinl, F. & Haurowitz, F. 1930 Chemische Untersuchung des Prazipitates aus Hamoglobin and Anti-Hamoglobin-Serum and Bemerkungen ber die Natur der Antikorper. Z. Physiol. Chem. 192, 45.
• (148) Mudd, S. 1932 A hypothetical mechanism of antibody formation. J. Immun. 23, 423.
• (149) Pauling, L. 1940 A theory of the structure and process of formation of antibodies. J. Am. chem. Soc. 62, 2643.
• (150) Burnet, F.M. & Fenner, F. 1949 The production of antibodies. (Monograph of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne), 2nd ed., Melbourne: Macmillan.
• (151) Medawar, P.B. 1961 Immunological tolerance. Science 133, 303.
• (152) Burnet, F.M., Stone, J.D. & Edney, M. 1950 The failure of antibody production in the chick embryo. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 28, 291-297.
• (153) Burnet, F.M. 1967 The impact of ideas on immunology. Cold Spring Harb. Symp. quant. Biol. 32, 1-8.
• (154) Talmage, D.W. 1957 Allergy and immunology. A. Rev. Med. 8, 239.
• (155) Burnet, F.M. 1957 A modification of Jerne's theory of antibody production using the concept of clonal selection. Aust. J. Sci. 20, 67-69.
• (156) Burnet, F.M. 1956 Enzyme, antigen and virus: a study of macromolecular pattern in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• (157) Burnet, F.M. 1968 Changing patterns: an atypical autobiography. Melbourne: Heinemann. New York: Elsevier, 1969. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1970. Japanese edition: Tokyo, 1978.
• (158) Cellular immunology. (Books 1 and 2 combined) 1969 Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. Russian edition: Mir, 1973.
• (159) Ada, G.L. & Nossal, G.J.V. 1987 How cells make antibody: the clonal selection theory of immunity. Scient. Am. 257, (2) 62.
• (160) Nossal, G.J.V. & Lederberg, J. 1958 Antibody production by single cells. Nature, Lond. 181, 1419.
• (161) Ada, G.L. & Byrt, P. 1969 Specific inactivation of antigen-reactive cells with ¹²⁵I-labelled antigen. Nature, Lond. 222, 1291 & Nossal, G.J.V. & Pike, B.L. 1976 Single cell studies on the antibody-forming potential of fractionated, hapten-specific B lymphocytes. Immunology 30, 189.
• (162) Burnet, F.M. & Burnet, D. 1961 Analysis of major histocompatability factors in a stock of closely inbred white leghorn fowls using a graft-versus-host reaction on the chorioallantoic membrane. Aust. J. exp. biol. med. Sci. 39, 101-110.
• (163) Warner, N.L. & Burnet, F.M. 1961 The influence of anti-inflammatory corticosteroids on the growth of the chick embryo and the manifestations of the Simonsen phenomenon. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 39, 235-248.
• (164) Burnet, F.M. & Holmes, M.C. 1963 The influence of splenectomy in NZB mice. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 41, 449-456.
• (165) Simonsen, M. 1985 Graft-versus-host reactions: the history that never was, and the way things happened to happen. Immun. Rev. 88, 5.
• (166) Lafferty, K.J. & Jones, M.A.S. 1969 Reactions of the graft versus host (GVH) type. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 47, 17 & Lafferty, K.J., Prowse, S.J., Simeonovic, C.J. & Warren, H.S. 1983 Immunobiology of tissue transplantation: a return to the passenger leukocyte concept. A. Rev. Immun. 1, 143.
• (167) Joske, R.A. & King, W.A. 1955 The 'L.E.-cell' phenomenon in active chronic viral hepatitis. Lancet 2, 477.
• (168) Mackay, I.R. 1979 Burnet and autoimmunity. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Annual Review 1978-79, pp. 39-45, Melbourne.
• (169) Burnet, F.M. 1963 An experimental model of autoimmune haemolytic anaemia. Australas. Ann. Med. 12, 3-5.
• (170) Bielschowsky, M., Helyer, B.J. & Howie, J.B. 1959 Spontaneous haemolytic anaemia in mice of the NZB/B1 strain. Proc. Univ. Otago med. Sch. 37, 9.
• (171) Burnet, F.M., Holmes, M. & Gorrie, J. 1961 Transmission by splenic cells of an auto-immune disease occurring spontaneously in mice. Lancet 2, 628-639.
• (172) Burnet, F.M. & Holmes, M.C. 1962 Immunological function of thymus and bursa of Fabricius. Thymus lesions in an auto-immune disease of mice. Nature, Lond. 194, 146-147 & 1964 Thymic changes in the mouse strain NZB in relation to the auto-immune state. J. Path. Bact. 88, 229-241.
• (173) Burnet, F.M., Russell, P.J. & Hicks, J.D. 1966 Cyclophosphamide treatment of kidney disease in (NZB x NZW) F1 mice. Lancet 1, 1279-1284.
• (174) Theofilopoulos, A.N. & Dixon, F.J. 1985 Murine models of systemic lupus erythematosus. Adv. Immun. 37, 269.
• (175) Burnet, F.M. & Mackay, I.R. 1963 Auto-immune diseases: pathogenesis, chemistry and therapy. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas. Spanish edition: 1965. Japanese edition: 1967.
• (176) Burnet, F.M. 1972 Auto-immunity and auto-immune disease: a survey for physician or biologist. Lancaster: Medical and Technical Publishers.
• (177) Burnet, F.M. 1957 Cancer – a biological approach. Br. med. J. 1, 779-786; 841-847.
• (178) Thomas, L. 1959 In Cellular and humoral aspects of the hypersensitive state (ed. H.S. Lawrence), p. 529. New York: Hoeber-Harper.
• (179) Burnet, F.M. 1967 Immunological aspects of malignant disease. (Roy Cameron Memorial Lecture of the College of Pathologists). Lancet 1, 1171-1174 & 1969 The evolution of adaptive immunity in vertebrates. Acta path. microbiol. scand. 76, 1-11.
• (180) Burnet, F.M. 1964 Immunological factors in the process of carcinogenesis. Br. med. Bull. 20, 154-158; 1970 The newer immunology: an evolutionary approach. In Infectious agents and host reactions. (ed. S. Mudd), pp. 1-21, Philadelphia: Saunders; Immunological surveillance: an evolutionary approach. In Immunity and tolerance in immunogenesis. Proc. IV Perugia Quadrennial Int. Conf. on Cancer, Perugia, 1969, (ed. L. Severi), vol.1, pp. 45-61, Perugia: Division of Cancer Research.
• (181) Burnet, F.M. 1970 Immunological surveillance. Oxford: Pergamon Press; Sydney: Pergamon (Australia).
• (182) Burnet, F.M. 1970 Impressions and comments. In Immune surveillance. (ed. R.T. Smith & M. Landy), pp. 512-518, New York: Academic Press.
• (183) Burnet, F.M. 1978 Endurance of life, the implications of genetics for human life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
• (184) Doherty, P.C., Knowles, B.B. & Wettstein, P.J. 1984 Immunological surveillance of tumors in the context of major histocompatibility restriction of T cell function. Adv. Cancer Res. 42, 1.
• (185) Burnet, F.M. 1957 Biology and medicine. (Presidential address, Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science). Med. J. Aust. 1, 405-410 & 1958 Leukemia as a problem in preventive medicine. (Cutter Lecture, Harvard University). New Engl. J. Med. 259, 432-431.
• (186) Burnet, F.M. 1976 Immunity, aging and cancer: medical aspects of mutation and selection. San Francisco: Freeman.
• (187) Huebner, R.J. & Todaro, G.J. 1969 Oncogenes of RNA tumor viruses as determinants of cancer. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. US 64, 1087.
• (188) Bishop, J.M. 1984 Exploring carcinogenesis with retroviruses. Symp. Soc. Gen. Microbiol. 36, 121.
• (189) Burnet, F.M. 1971 Immunological surveillance in neoplasia. Transplant. Rev. 7, 3-25.
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• (191) Burnet, F.M. 1955 The Salk poliomyelitis vaccine. Med. J. Aust. 1, 660.
• (192) Burnet, F.M. 1952 The pattern of disease in childhood. (Charles Clubbe Memorial Oration). Australas. Ann. Med. 1, 93-108.
• (193) Burnet, F.M. 1970 Dominant mammal: the biology of human destiny. Melbourne: Heinemann; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971; Penguin Books, 1971. Spanish edition: Madrid: Alianza, 1973. Danish edition: Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973. Japanese edition: Tokyo, 1973.
• (194) Burnet, F.M. 1978 Endurance of life, the implications of genetics for human life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press & 1979 Credo and comment: a scientist reflects. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.
• (195) Burnet, F.M. 1973 A genetic interpretation of ageing. Lancet 2, 480-483.
• (196) Burnet, F.M. 1974 Intrinsic mutagenesis: a genetic approach to ageing. Lancaster: Medical and Technical Publishers.
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• (198) Burnet, F.M. 1930 Bacteriophage and cognate phenomena. In Medical Research Council, Great Britain: A system of bacteriology in relation to medicine, Vol.7, 463-509. London: His Majesty's Stationery Office.
• (199) Burnet, F.M. 1934 The bacteriophages. Biol. Rev. 9, 332-350.
• (200) Burnet, F.M.1936 The use of the developing egg in virus research. Special Report No. 220. London: Medical Research Council.
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• (202) Burnet, F.M., Keogh, E.V. & Lush, D. 1937 The immunological reactions of the filterable viruses. Aust. J. exp. Biol. med. Sci. 15, 227-368.
• (203) Burnet, F.M. 1945 Virus as organism: evolutionary and ecological aspects of some human virus diseases. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Russian edition: Moscow, 1947. Japanese Edition: Tokyo: Ishiyaku, 1956.
• (204) Burnet, F.M. 1946 The background of infectious diseases in man. Melbourne: The Melbourne Permanent Postgraduate Committee.
• (205) Fenner, F. 1968 The biology of animal viruses. New York: Academic Press.
• (206) Burnet, F.M. & Stanley W.M. (eds) 1959 The Viruses: biochemical, biological and biophysical properties. Vols. 1, 2 and 3, New York: Academic Press.
• (207) Burnet, F.M. 1976 Immunology: readings from Scientific American with introductions and additional material by F.M. Burnet. San Francisco: Freeman.
• (208) Burnet, F.M. 1959 Clonal selection theory of acquired immunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Nashville: Vanderbilt Univerity Press.
• (209) Burnet, F.M. 1969 Self and not-self. (Book 1 of Cellular immunology) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge Press. Japanese edition: Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1972. German edition: Stuttgart: Thieme, 1973. Italian edition: Bologna: Zanichelli, 1974.
• (210) Burnet, F.M. 1968 Biology and the appreciation of life. Melbourne: Sun Books. (Based on the Boyer Lectures of the Australian Broadcasting Commission for 1966).
• (211) Burnet, F.M. 1971 Genes, dreams and realities. Aylesbury: Medical and Technical Publications; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973. Italian edition: Milan: Edizioni Scientifiche e Techniche Mondadori, 1974. French edition: Paris: Flammarion, 1975.
• (212) Burnet, F.M. 1968 Changing patterns; an atypical autobiography. Melbourne: Heinemann.
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• (216) Farquhar, J. & Gajdusek, D.C. (ed.) 1981 Kuru. Early letters and field-notes from the collection of D. Carleton Gajdusek. New York: Raven Press.
• (217) Burnet, F.M. 1974 Hazards of virus research. Doc. Geigy (Hazards of Modern Medicine issue), pp. 3-4 & 1976 Experiments with viruses. Trends Biochem. Sci. 1(10), p.N228.
• (218) Sexton, C. 1988 Sir Macfarlane Burnet: A biography. Melbourne: Macmillan.

Written by E.S. Hills.

Frank Leslie Stillwell was born on 27 June 1888, in the family home at Hawthorn, an outer suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. He was the seventh of eight children to Alfred and Mary Eliza Stillwell (née Townsend) and was the youngest son.

His father was a printer and his grandfather, John Stillwell, who arrived in Australia from London in 1855, had also been a printer. Both parents of the grandfather were of Huguenot stock and were silk weavers in London. In his youth, Frank Stillwell, as were all his brothers and sisters, was encouraged to work hard at school, and he was given every chance by his parents. It is remembered that as a boy he was well-liked but was delicate and suffered several illnesses, out of which he grew to enjoy college life in later years. His ailments were chiefly to do with his lungs, and his 17 months as a young man in Antarctica finally cleared them up.

He attended the Auburn State School from 1893 to 1900, and later Hawthorn College to which he won a scholarship. It was from Hawthorn College (a school which no longer exists) that he won an exhibition of £40 and went to study at Melbourne University in 1907. He elected to study Science but included Mining Engineering in his course also. He held a resident scholarship at Ormond College, one of the affiliated colleges of the University of Melbourne.

When Stillwell started his university studies, John Walter Gregory had only recently resigned from the Chair of Geology and the position of Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria which he also held, being, according to a long letter he wrote to the Argus newspaper, unable to continue in the face of lack of facilities for the development of mining geology, and Ernest Willington Skeats, a double first-class honours man in geology and chemistry from the Royal College of Science, London, had just assumed the Chair vacated by Gregory in 1905. Skeats and Stillwell were, in fact, to be closely associated thereafter, and both played a major part in the developments of mining geology during a period in which the mining industry, while facing many problems, made great advances in Australia.

In his university years, Stillwell gained several prizes, holding the Caroline Kay Scholarship, a Government Research Scholarship, and the Kernot Research Scholarship. After graduating BSc with first-class honours at the Final Examination in 1911, he worked for his Master's degree on the geology of a local region (Broadmeadows) in which he showed a growing interest in the microscopical and chemical aspects of rocks and minerals. A few years later, and in fact after the minimum time had elapsed for the attainment of this high honour, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Science with a thesis on 'The metamorphic rocks of Adélie Land', and in 1919 he won the coveted David Syme Prize for scientific research in Australia-wide competition.

During these early years Stillwell was most active. Not only had he studied the geology of Broadmeadows and the monchiquite dykes of Bendigo, then an active and important goldfield, but after graduation he joined the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911–1914) as geologist, and spent 17 months in Antarctica under the leadership of Douglas Mawson. He was stationed at the Main Base at Commonwealth Bay, Adélie Land, and during the summer season of 1912–1913 was leader of a three-man team which surveyed 50 miles of the coast line east of Commonwealth Bay. It was on this assignment that he collected and studied in the field the metamorphic rocks which were described and discussed in his report, published in 1918, in which he propounded the concept of metamorphic differentiation in order to explain contrasted mineral assemblages which were formed during metamorphism from an initially uniform parent rock. Although his work had already been recognised in Science Progress of April 1919, as notable and worthy of rank with contemporary Scandinavian investigations, it was to be 30 years after its publication that his concept was re-discovered and G.H. Francis, of Cambridge, wrote to Stillwell pointing out that he had made great use of his work in connection with his own researches into the Lewisian metamorphic rocks of Inverness-shire. Stillwell always retained strong personal links with his Antarctic colleagues, and there is little doubt that his period in Antarctica had a great influence on him. Not only did his health clear up but he also made friendships which lasted him all his life, and his abiding interest in 'The Home of The Blizzard', that land of snow and ice where his name is preserved in Stillwell Island near Cape Denison, must have served partly to fill some of the emotional gaps in his life. Stillwell never married. He was indeed a retiring and even shy man, especially as a young man. Despite the clarity of his thought and writing, it was not until the later years of his life that he expressed himself at all freely in public and, indeed, he was almost tongue-tied in the presence of a large audience. Nevertheless he had a warmth behind a very conservative and rather retiring exterior, which those who were fortunate enough to work at all closely with him soon discovered, and his friendships and family ties always remained strong.

On returning from Antarctica early in 1914, he went to Adelaide as Acting Lecturer in Mineralogy during 1914 and 1915. After enlistment in 1916 with the Australian Military Forces he was withdrawn from the Army to assist in the newly-developed Commonwealth Advisory Council of Science and Industry, which was later to develop into the present Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Stillwell worked with the Advisory Council until 1919, conducting detailed studies on the occurrence of gold in the Bendigo mines on behalf of the Gold Research Committee which had been set up under the Council. His papers on the Bendigo gold occurrences cover detailed studies in the mines and in the laboratory, which demonstrated the association of gold with particular geological structures and with certain minerals, and his theories concerning these. He was particularly influenced by Taber's notions as to growth pressures developing during crystallisation in porous rocks in the absence of pre-existing fissures, and was also led to believe that gold was concentrated and precipitated by carbonaceous material in black slates. From 1919 to 1921 he worked at Broken Hill, New South Wales, as assistant geologist under the direction of Dr E.C. Andrews, of the Mines Department of that State. Dr W.R. Browne, doyen of Australian geologists today, and Frank Stillwell both made petrographic studies of the country rocks surrounding the Broken Hill ore bodies, but the two young geologists did not agree as to the origin of those rocks, and a controversy developed therefrom. Many years later, in 1954, both men were simultaneously elected to fellowship of the newly-established Australian Academy of Science, and renewed acquaintance in the Academy for the first time in many years.

On completing his work at Broken Hill, Stillwell returned to Victoria as staff geologist to the Bendigo Amalgamated Goldfield Company, but during 1922 and 1923 he visited mining fields in Europe, South Africa and the United States of America.

This overseas tour, which was made at his own expense, brought to his notice the developing subject of mineragraphy, that is the study of opaque minerals and particularly the ore minerals in polished section under the reflecting microscope On his return to Australia and his assumption of the first Research Fellowship of the University of Melbourne, he began his mineragraphic studies of Australian ores, working on the Broken Hill deposits. This work immediately revealed the economic as well as the scientific potentialities of the study of polished ores, for, in particular, he was able to locate, in the form of minute dispersed particles, a good deal of the silver content in the galena in the Broken Hill lode, which he demonstrated was present in the form of the mineral dyscrasite. This discovery immediately aroused interest among scientists and mining men and led to his appointment as Research Petrologist in 1927 to the newly formed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

Extending his sphere of interest, he visited the West Australian goldfields and remapped the Kalgoorlie field in 1927 and 1928. Here he joined geological and mineralogical work in the careful examination of the rock types in order to discover the relationship between their emplacement or alteration, and the emplacement of the gold-bearing ores. This brought together an array of data which hitherto had been treated separately and drew attention to the possibility of the extension of the Kalgoorlie field into areas where similar geological conditions could be demonstrated to exist. It was largely as an outcome of Stillwell's findings that further exploration and development was stimulated, and the Kalgoorlie field was revived and extended.

On his return to Melbourne Stillwell continued work on the Kalgoorlie telluride ore minerals, publishing an important paper on them in 1931. From 1929 until his retirement at the age of 65 in June 1953, he was in charge of the Mineragraphic Section of C.S.I.R. (later CSIRO) which section is housed in the University of Melbourne adjoining the Department of Geology. For many years he took the courses in mining geology for the advanced students for Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Mining Engineering, and also gave instruction in mineragraphy in the laboratory, where many of the Melbourne graduates who are now working throughout Australia first met him. He was a patient teacher if somewhat pedantic, and, in order to appreciate him, it was necessary to recognise his reliance on logic, clear thinking and skill in the application of techniques. He never gave up an idea without a fight, and perhaps his conservativeness at times caused him to cling to an outmoded idea. But indeed the range of his work and its importance had been such that he was in the field of ore mineralogy and mineragraphy the undoubted leader in this country and a major figure in the world. Under his direction, ores, mattes, slags, spiesses and mill products from all over Australia were investigated, with results of great economic importance particularly in regard to tracing the causes of losses in mineral recovery of gold, copper, lead, zinc, tin and other ores and thus in checking the efficiency of mineral separation methods used by the mines. Nearly every major ore deposit and many smaller occurrences in Australia were investigated by Stillwell and his associates in the Mineragraphic Section, where he was joined in 1935 by the late A.B. Edwards, who was his most distinguished student and colleague. Edwards' untimely death in 1960 was a great blow to Stillwell, but he was fortunate in that others were there to carry on in his laboratories, where he was afforded facilities to continue his own work until his death.

During his retirement he was appointed consultant to the Broken Hill Geological Committee, and continued his work with Broken Hill rocks and minerals. His last paper on these was published in 1959, 37 years after his early work on the Broken Hill district.

In all Stillwell published 68 scientific papers, dealing in later years chiefly with mineragraphy.

Stillwell was a member of the Royal Society of Victoria from 1910 until his death, and of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy from 1921. In both these bodies he played an important role. He was a member of the Committee of the Victorian Branch of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy for several years and at one time its Chairman. In the Royal Society of Victoria he was Councillor from 1929 to 1963, Honorary Secretary from 1929 to 1947, Vice-President (1949–52), President (1953 and 1954) and Honorary Editor of the Society's Journal from 1956 to 1963.

Many honours came his way and he deeply appreciated them. In 1948 the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy awarded him the Institute Medal. He was awarded the Clarke Memorial Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1951, and was appointed Correspondent of the Geological Society of America in 1952, and Honorary Member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in 1953. In 1954 he was created an officer of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his services to Australia and to the Geological Sciences, and it was in this year that he was elected to fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science. To honour his 70th birthday, the Stillwell Anniversary Volume was published in 1958 by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.

As a University man, Stillwell was a life member of the Melbourne University Graduate Union, and the Graduate Union received its first legacy from him, a sum of £2,000. [He left munificent legacies also to the Royal Society of Victoria (£4,000), the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (£2,000), the Geological Society of Australia (£1,000) and to the Australian Academy of Science (£1,000).] He had been a keen college cricketer, being indeed an accomplished batsman and a man with an abiding interest in sport. He took up tennis in middle life and played regularly with colleagues for several years, but eventually it was bowls which became his major outdoor interest. He was, too, always a keen chess player. All this despite the fact that in his youth he had had lung trouble, and in later years he faced with great fortitude recurring deterioration of the sinews of his hands causing partial loss of the use of his fingers and necessitating periodical operations. He pursued a life which in his youth was extremely strenuous and called for the highest degree of physical courage; in later years he pursued his scientific researches and his many other activities with equal fortitude and tenacity. He was a man of few spoken words, but of great loyalty and devotion not only to Science, but also to his colleagues and to his family and friends.

As mentioned above, the death of his younger colleague, A.B. Edwards, was a great loss to him. Edwards had acknowledged Stillwell's role as "tutor, guide, instructor and colleague" in the foreword to his book of the Textures of the ore minerals, and Stillwell's tribute to Edwards in the American Mineralogist (Vol. 46, 1961, pp. 488–96) expresses his own deep feelings about his friend and associate.

Stillwell and his scientific colleagues were men of a period, seeing in Australia the growth and development of the application of science to industry, and having inborn the abilities and desires which, with opportunity and support, lead on to great achievement. He explored the Earth under rigorous conditions at the surface, in the depths of the mines, and in the laboratory. He was an initiator, along with many others who in their own disciplines were likewise initiators and from whom the present growth of Science in Australia derives an enormous amount. One can, in looking back, identify these people and fortunately many of them are still with us; but to Stillwell it would have been a challenge to continue this work, and this challenge is one that must now be faced with all the energy, the honesty and the élan with which the men of Stillwell's generation faced their problems.

One of his younger colleagues who formerly knew him in the Geology Department, University of Melbourne, and later worked with him in the Mineragraphic Section of CSIRO, Dr George Baker, has not only assiduously collected together his materials and papers but has also very kindly provided much of the factual information on which the writer's account of Stillwell is based.

As one who knew Stillwell as a student and was taught by him, as one who worked with him as his first demonstrator in practical classes in mineragraphy in the University of Melbourne, and who was closely associated with him in the Royal Society of Victoria, I believe that the appreciation which has been expressed of Stillwell is in every sense true and just.

Stillwell was a great man of science. A little hampered as well as endowed by nature, moulded by the influences of his time, and at times frustratingly conservative and rigid to younger associates, he was a true pioneer, an explorer of Nature and an intellectual master whose influence has spread like ripples from a stone in a pond, affecting geology and geologists, mineralogy and mineralogists, mining and mining men, not only in Australia but throughout the world.

This biography owes much to Stillwell's surviving younger sister, Miss Olive Stillwell, who very kindly provided not only biographical material but also her thoughts about her brother and his career. It is from Miss Olive Stillwell that we know what many of us had sensed – that he was deeply appreciative of the course of events in his life and work and particularly of the respect and support which permitted him to continue in harness until the day of his death. He died in Melbourne after a short illness on 8 February 1963, in his 75th year.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, vol. 1(1), 1966. It was written by E.S. Hills.

Francis Patrick Dwyer started out his career with a special interest in organic chemistry, but became a pioneering figure in biological inorganic chemistry, laying the foundations for this discipline in Australia. He was a Professor at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science the year before his sudden death at the age of 51.

Download the memoir

Written by J.O. Newton.

• Introduction
• The early years 1916-1934
• Birmingham University 1934-1943
• Los Alamos 1943-1947
• Harwell 1947-1951
• Head of Department of Nuclear Physics at the ANU 1950-1970
• British atomic weapons tests and related activities 1952-1973
• Dean and Director 1966-1973
• Final period 1973-1990
• Conclusions
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgements
  • References

Introduction

With the death of Sir Ernest Titterton on 9 February 1990, Australian has lost one of its most controversial scientists. Well known because of his forthright and uncompromising views on the subjects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power and because he 'pushed the button' for the world's first nuclear weapon, he was highly regarded by some and hated by others.

The early years 1916-1934

Ernest William Titterton was born in the small village of Kettlebrook near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England on 4 March 1916. He was the son of William Alfred and Elizabeth Titterton (née Smith) who, three years later, had their only other child, Maurice.

For many years his father was a clerical worker in a paper manufacturing mill, eventually working himself up to a managerial position. Unfortunately the mill was forced to close down in the Great Depression of the 1930s and he was unemployed for several months. As was common in those days, the parents had been thrifty people, saving as much as they could, and they had to live on their savings for that period. After that, Titterton's father had a series of physically demanding manual jobs which he was ill-fitted to perform, but which kept the family going though in much reduced circumstances. After two years, he managed to get a clerical position in another paper mill, which position he retained until he retired at the age of sixty-eight. Elizabeth Titterton was fully occupied as a housewife and mother and kept tight control over the family finances as was very necessary. During all of this difficult period, the parents gave love and every support to the two boys and shielded them from the great difficulties they were experiencing.

William Titterton had a great interest in music, particularly choral music. He was a member of the choir at St Editha's church in Tamworth and, when Ernest was eight years old, he took him along to become a member too. The choir was very good and, in addition to singing at the Sunday church services, performed such works as Handel's 'Messiah' and Haydn's 'Creation'; it was associated with the Tamworth Choral Society which produced public concerts of popular musicals by Gilbert and Sullivan, Edward German, and so on. Ernest would spend two nights a week at rehearsals and sing in up to four services on Sundays. Most probably this gave him his great love for music of all types, which lasted throughout his life. His father took a keen interest in Ernest's general education. For example he bought him a blackboard and easel, which could double as a desk, when Ernest was at primary school.

Ernest's formal education began at the age of four, at the single-room infants' school in Kettlebrook; his father used to lift him over a small wall separating their garden from the school playground. At the age of six he moved from the mixed infant school to a council school for boys only, in the mining village of Glascote. This school was well equipped and even had some science teaching, rather unusual in those days; it stimulated his first interest in science. The boys in this school were rather rough and had frequent fights. Initially, being small, he came badly out of these but eventually he learnt to give as much as he got.

Ernest did well at school and at the age of ten won a scholarship to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in the nearby town of Tamworth. This was a small (140 boys) but very well equipped school, where his academic success continued and he was always top or nearly top of the class. Here he also gained a liking for sport and became very proficient in cricket and hockey, playing for the school's first teams in both. He obtained his School Certificate with seven credits at the early age of fourteen and then went into the sixth form. In those days the sixth form was limited to the more academically talented boys who were expected to proceed to university; they specialized either in the humanities or in science. Ernest took physics, mathematics and some chemistry. He was fortunate in having an exceptionally able physics teacher, William Summerhayes, who also carried out part-time research in thermal diffusion at Birmingham University. This was done in collaboration with Dr Arthur Shakespear, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society and also a Governor of the School. Because of this the boys had the unusual and exciting experience of seeing a scientific paper being prepared, going to referees, corrected in proof stage and finally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This stimulated young Ernest's ambition to become a scientist and to eventually publish papers himself. Summerhayes set up many original demonstrations and experiments for the practical class and strongly believed that the boys should carry out experiments themselves. As an example, Ernest and another boy were asked to measure, during a weekend, the diurnal variation of the earth's magnetic field; this involved taking measurements every 15 minutes for the whole 48-hour period. The results were written up and published in the school magazine. There is little doubt that Summerhayes was the major influence in exciting Ernest Titterton's interest in science.

He was also fortunate to have a very good teacher in mathematics, Frank Burkett, who was headmaster of the school. Ernest Titterton was well appreciated for both his scholastic achievements and his personality, as the following reference from Frank Burkett shows:

He was an exemplary pupil, always hard working and extremely conscientious. He was a boy of wide interests, very well read, and possessing exceptional musical ability both as organist and pianist. He had a very pleasing personality and threw himself wholeheartedly into all School activities. He showed himself to be both original and resourceful.

He was a good all-round sportsman and proved to be a very good Captain being both efficient and tactful.

As a School Prefect he was a great success being both conscientious and reliable. In my opinion he was one of the best half dozen boys we have had in the last fifteen years.

Ernest was put up for the Higher School Certificate examination three times in all the first two being trial runs. His subjects, apart from the first time when he took chemistry also were physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics. Summerhayes wished him to go to Cambridge, but unfortunately this was not possible because of his father's reduced financial situation. Instead, in 1934, he went to Birmingham University as a trainee teacher with a scholarship that paid his fees, together with board and residence at Chancellor's Hall, located about a mile from the University.

Ernest Titterton's musical career developed further after he gained a scholarship to grammar school. His father felt that he should learn the piano and provided half-hourly bi-weekly lessons for eighteen months. Ernest was a talented student and his skill developed rapidly. However, in retrospect he felt that the teacher did not exercise sufficient discipline in making him play scales and use correct fingering; he found this to be a severe disadvantage in later life. He continued to develop his abilities after the lessons were completed, becoming an excellent sight reader. He accompanied his father, who had a good tenor voice, in recitals and took over playing the piano for morning assembly at school. When his voice broke at the age of about thirteen, Henry Rose, the church organist, showed him how to use the three-manual church organ and the pedal organ. Later he gave him free lessons, allowed him to play for children's services and finally, towards the end of his time at school, made him assistant organist, enabling him to play at any church service. His father was very proud of him and never missed a service at which he played.

At school, he, with three others, formed a dance band that first played for school dances and then for town dances. Later he joined an adult dance band that finally ended up playing at one of the local hotels, where they had the advantages of microphones and sound equipment. He saved much of the money earned from these activities and used it to buy a three-speed bicycle which, later, he used to travel the long journey from the University to home.

His skill in popular and classical music made him popular at university. He played the piano for physics school socials and dances and also in the students' union and for the University Review at the Theatre Royal. He also joined a five-piece band for which he sang as well as played the piano. The well-known City of Birmingham organist, G.D. Cunningham, often made broadcasts playing the four-manual organ in the Great Hall of the University. He allowed Ernest to sit next to him and watch whilst he rehearsed, and later to play the organ. His father often used to come and listen. Thus he became a fine organist, enabling him in later life to play on organs in many different countries.

Birmingham University 1934-1943

Titterton's excellent preparation at school enabled him to begin with the second-year courses at University; even so, on the whole, he found them easy. The third-year courses were more challenging and he achieved his BSc pass degree in 1936 with distinctions in physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics. He proceeded to the honours course, obtained a First and was top of the year in physics. This excerpt from a testimonial given by the Head of the Mathematics Department, Professor G.N. Watson, FRS, indicates the high regard in which he was held:

He was an exceptionally able student, whose work was at a consistently high level. He was not content merely to memorise results for examination purposes, but took a keen and intelligent interest in all that he did. Altogether, he was the best student who has taken Mathematics up to the principal stage for several years.

He took an active interest in sport, playing tennis socially at Chancellor's Hall and hockey for the University, being in the first XI for each of the three years from 1934-1936.

In 1937 Titterton was awarded a University scholarship and became a research student under the supervision of Professor Mark Oliphant, who had just been appointed to a chair of physics at Birmingham University. The scholarship paid the very modest sum of £92 per annum, barely enough to live on. Because of this, he had to live at home and travel to the University and back by train and bus on six days each week. His research project, carried out in collaboration with another student, was to discover whether, as had been previously suggested, the very weak alpha activity of samarium was triggered by the electron or gamma-ray components of cosmic radiation. To accomplish this, they had to do measurements in a place where the cosmic radiation was much weaker than at ground level. A coal mine 5,000 feet deep was chosen for this purpose. It was a very 'wet' mine with a constant mist enveloping everything. This made it both uncomfortable and very difficult to carry out the measurements with his shallow ionization chamber, together with a low-noise amplifier acquired from Wynn-Williams at the Cavendish Laboratory. Titterton and his collaborator successfully completed the project in spite of this and the fact that Oliphant could be only a part-time supervisor because he spent much time at Cambridge, completing work there, and also at Berkeley. They showed that, within experimental accuracy, the alpha activity was the same at the bottom of the mine as it was at ground level. For this work Ernest Titterton received his MSc degree in 1938.

Ernest's scholarship required him to be a teacher for a certain period and to do this he had to take a one-year course for the Diploma of Education. This he found 'soft' and superficial, after the rigorous physics and mathematics courses that he had previously attended. However, he enjoyed the teaching practice which he carried out at King Edward's Grammar School for Boys, the most distinguished school in the Birmingham area. Mr Rogers, the Headmaster, held him in high regard as the following excerpt from a testimonial shows:

It is clear that Mr Titterton not only has a thorough grasp of his subjects, but that he is deeply interested in the method and technique of teaching them and is determined to equip himself as thoroughly as possible from a theoretical point of view.

In the classroom itself he shows the same keenness and vitality and his work is carefully prepared and is presented in a lively and vivid way so that the lesson becomes interesting and stimulating. His control of a class is good. He is a gentleman of very pleasing personality and he has been deservedly popular in the Common Room. I have found him very pleasant to deal with, and his willingness and enthusiasm have been very attractive. Mr Titterton has obviously the makings of an excellent teacher and should be able to render very valuable service on the staff of any school, not only in the classroom but also in Music and in School activities.

Whilst doing this diploma course he had to do part-time teaching at Birmingham Technical College three nights a week, in order to help support himself. This meant arriving back in Tamworth at about eleven at night followed by a two-mile walk to his home; the next day he had to be up at six in the morning to get to Birmingham in time for work. He passed the diploma course with distinction in 1939, being top of the class and awarded the Elizabeth Cadbury Prize.

At King Edward's School he had an accident in the gymnasium that may have influenced his subsequent career. He severely tore his quadriceps muscle, which never entirely recovered. As a consequence he was later judged unfit for military service, ensuring his entry to the wartime scientific research sector as a civilian.

Wishing to go elsewhere than Birmingham or Tamworth, Titterton chose a post at the co-educational grammar school at Bridgenorth in Shropshire. There he taught physics in all classes up to the sixth form, employing many of the techniques he had learnt from William Summerhayes. He took part in sporting and musical activities, even composing a school song, and was well liked by staff and students. He very much enjoyed teaching but the war broke out shortly after he started. He was asked by Oliphant to return to Birmingham University to join an Admiralty team charged with developing devices to produce high-power pulsed radiation with a wavelength of about 10 cm. The purpose was to obtain higher resolution in the detection of aircraft by radar, or RDF as it was then called. Hence he spent only six weeks teaching in Bridgenorth and then became an Admiralty Research Officer.

At the beginning of the war there were two types of oscillator that could produce centimetre waves at low power. These were the klystron, invented a few years previously by the Varian brothers at Stanford University, and the magnetron invented by E.S. Megaw at GEC, Wembley, England. The Birmingham group under Oliphant's leadership attempted to develop both types to produce high-power outputs suitable for transmitters. The breakthrough was made by Randall and Boot who developed the resonant magnetron which first produced power in continuous mode in February 1940. In collaboration with Megaw, production models were developed for use in aircraft. Titterton had the job of making a modulator for the magnetron to produce 25 kV rectangular pulses with a duration of about 1 µs and a repetition rate of 500 per sec. He realised that this would require the use of spark gaps and developed a system with rotating spark gaps. It was spectacularly successful when used with the magnetron, producing a pulsed output of more than 10 kw. It required a major development programme in collaboration with industry to make a reliable modulator small enough to put in an aircraft. Titterton and his group developed a triggered spark gap to replace the rotating one and production models were produced finally by Metropolitan-Vickers. Oliphant commented that 'during this time Titterton was a key member of the team, working like a Trojan, satisfying everyone, totally dedicated and unselfish' Sometimes he was involved in considerable personal danger, such as when the laboratory was bombed at night and when the klystron-powered equipment, which he and a New Zealand colleague were testing at Portsmouth, was bombed and destroyed. All of this work was of course 'Top Secret' but, under wartime regulations, Titterton was allowed to submit it for his PhD degree. His examiners were the distinguished nuclear physicists J.D. Cockcroft and P.I. Dee, both of whom were working on radar at that time. He received the degree in 1941.

In 1939 Oliphant had brought the experimental nuclear physicist Otto Robert Frisch to Birmingham. Frisch, together with his aunt Lise Meitner, had given the correct interpretation of the process of nuclear fission and had demonstrated that an enormous amount of energy, 200 million electron volts, was produced in each fission event. Neither Frisch nor the outstanding theoretical physicist, Rudolph Peierls, who was also at Birmingham, were allowed to take part in the radar work because they were not of British origin. They were allowed to work in nuclear physics because its major importance was not recognized at the beginning of the war. However, together they produced the famous report showing the practicability of making nuclear weapons if the rare isotope (0.7%) uranium-235 could be separated from natural uranium. This led to the formation of the Maud Committee, code-named Tube Alloys, to oversee the development of nuclear weapons in the UK. Ernest Titterton, whose work on the modulator was nearly over, was assigned to work as a research assistant with Otto Frisch because of his previous experience in radioactivity and his expertise in fast pulsing. Initially he helped Frisch make measurements of some of the important cross-sections for neutron-induced fission with the aid of a strong radon-beryllium source that produced a copious supply of neutrons. To detect the fission events, they had an ionization chamber containing about one gram of uranium. An account of this work and an unexpected result is given by Frisch in his book, What Little I Remember (1):

That ionization chamber led to quite an important discovery. The electronic equipment for it had been constructed by Ernest Titterton, who has since become Professor and Head of the Physics Department at Canberra in Australia as well as being knighted, but who at that time was a young student, very bright and active, whom Oliphant had detailed to help me with the work. I kept complaining that the chamber from time to time, produced a pulse which looked just like a fission pulse but surely couldn't be; there was no source of neutrons, or was there? We went so far as to search the laboratory to see if by any chance a small source had been left in a drawer. We tested the electronics and tried all kinds of improvements. Nothing made any difference, and in the end I had to admit that uranium was occasionally suffering fission spontaneously. Because of the war and the secrecy surrounding our work, Titterton could not publish that important discovery; it was made about the same time by the two Russian physicists G.N. Flerov and K.A. Petrzhak who are generally quoted as the discoverers of spontaneous fission. (1)

Later Titterton went to Liverpool University to carry out an experiment to determine whether most of the neutrons following fission were emitted promptly or after a significant delay. This information was of crucial importance for the construction of a bomb, though not for a reactor, because if the delay was long it would not be mechanically possible to hold the system together for sufficient time to build up an efficient chain reaction, leading to a nuclear explosion. Frisch had already moved to Liverpool because of the much better experimental facilities there; they had a working cyclotron. To do the experiment, they had to pulse the cyclotron beam and measure the delay time between the initiation of fission events by the beam pulses and the production of the neutrons. Titterton pulsed the beam by deflecting it on to the target by an electric field driven by his spark-gap modulators. No delay was found within the accuracy of the measurement (about a microsecond), suggesting that a bomb was feasible.

By September 1940, Britain had disclosed its military secrets to the USA, including the very important resonant magnetron. Britain was not safe enough, because of the war on its doorstep, nor did it have sufficient resources, to carry out the nuclear bomb project on its own. Therefore it was decided in 1943 to transfer the entire project to the USA. Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, was the leader of the British team and Professor Mark Oliphant was his deputy. Titterton was one of the small number of British scientists to go there, and he joined the Manhattan Project based at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

The Germans also had their nuclear project (2) (3), which started earlier than those of the UK and USA, causing considerable concern to the Allies. By 1940 they had made substantial progress and had access to the world's largest producer of heavy water and to large stocks of uranium compounds from occupied Europe. About seventy scientists, including the Nobel prizewinner Werner Heisenberg, were involved in the project. Although fairly substantial support was given, it was very small compared to that given by the Allies. Nevertheless at the end of the war the Germans had demonstrated the feasibility of enriching ²³⁵U with an ultra-centrifuge and were on the verge of having a working reactor; but for the massive Allied bombing campaign beginning in 1943, most likely this would have been successfully achieved. However by 1942 the Germans considered that it was not feasible to make a bomb in time to influence the outcome of the war.

When Titterton took up his job as a research officer at Birmingham University at the beginning of the war, he met Peggy Eileen Johnson, who was an able laboratory assistant. She carried out a mixture of technical and typing jobs and was located fairly close to Ernest's office. They soon got to know one another well and she helped him in producing the prototype of the triggered spark-gap modulator. He married Peggy, the daughter of Captain and Mrs Alfred Johnson, on 19 September 1942 at Hagley Parish Church, close to Birmingham.

Los Alamos 1943-1947

The site of the Manhattan Project was in a very remote region, high in the mountains of New Mexico. Apart from a school that had been taken over, there had been virtually no habitation in the area. Security was extremely strict and the area and the whole project was controlled by the military under General Groves. Consequently the community of scientists, which shared the same social facilities, was very close knit. This must have been very exciting and stimulating for Ernest Titterton, still only 27 years of age, since a major fraction of the greatest physicists from the USA, together with others from Britain and Europe, were working there. For example, the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr and his son Aage, later also to get a Nobel prize, had the house next door to the Tittertons. Hans Bethe, another Nobel prize-winner to be, lent them a kitchen table and a carpet; Bruno Rossi lent them a radio and the Bohrs often used to drop in to hear the news on it. There was a grand piano in the main lodge, where the social activities took place, and Ernest was very popular, entertaining the scientists and their wives with pop-music, jazz and light classical music. Here he collaborated with the brilliant and eccentric Richard Feynman who played the drums.

He initially shared an office with Otto Frisch, but their paths soon diverged. Titterton was assigned, because of his expertise in fast timing, to a group working on the assembly and testing of nuclear weapons, whereas Frisch was more interested in reactor problems. One of Titterton's first duties was to repeat the Liverpool experiment, looking for delays in the prompt neutrons, as this was of such crucial importance for the bomb project. This he did in collaboration with an American, B. McDaniel, on the newly commissioned Harvard cyclotron. The method was improved over that used in Liverpool by electronically pulsing the ion source located at the centre of the cyclotron. Again no significant delay was found, showing that a very fast chain-reacting system would be possible.

For an explosive chain reaction to occur, a critical mass of fissile material must be exceeded. The critical mass (of order 10kg) for a particular geometry occurs roughly when the number of neutrons produced by fission within the material (about 3 per fission event) is equal to the number that escape from the surface. There were two basic weapon designs. The first, strongly favoured by the British and by Chadwick, was simple in concept. A near-critical cylinder of ²³⁵U was driven into the centre of another near-critical cylinder with a hole in it, essentially by gun technology, thus forming a super-critical mass. A pulse of neutrons from a radium-beryllium source at the centre initiated the explosive chain reaction. This system was called the 'Thin Man' because its length was much greater than its diameter. It was assumed that this rather simple type of bomb would be certain to explode, though only an upper limit to its power could be estimated.

A much more efficient use of the fissile material (²³⁵U or ²³⁹Pu), then in very short supply, would be obtained with the use of spherical geometry, which minimizes the surface-to-volume ratio and hence the critical mass. Therefore there were strong reasons for designing a bomb of this type. The initial idea was to collapse, by suitable explosive technology a sub-critical hollow sphere to a solid sphere, which would then be super-critical. Titterton and his collaborators developed a pulsed (µs) high voltage (250 kV) X-ray system together with other techniques to study the collapse of a small model of such a device as a function of time. The method worked well but showed that the implosion was not symmetrical, presumably because the shock wave that hit the surface was not spherically symmetric. Because of this it was thought necessary to develop 'explosive lenses' that would tailor the shock wave precisely to match the surface of the sphere. In addition, it was decided to replace the hollow sphere by a near-critical solid sphere that would be compressed to become super-critical. Titterton helped develop a two-dimensional explosive lens system that was then handed over to the high-explosive division for extension to three dimensions. He then had to test the new system, which involved developing new methods as only full-scale models could be constructed and the X-ray method was not applicable because of its limited penetrating power. This was all done successfully. Titterton was also involved in field tests of the aerodynamical properties of the spherical implosion bomb system. Its rather large diameter spherical shape was far from ideal for a free falling bomb, and it had to be fitted with a large tail-fin structure to stabilize it and prevent it from rotating. Tests were essential to make sure that the bomb would detonate at the desired height and that all the timing circuits, required for simultaneous detonation of the explosive lenses, operated correctly.

This more sophisticated implosion bomb, made from ²³⁹Pu rather than ²³⁵U, had to be tested. Ernest Titterton was responsible for the complex timing system to initiate the explosions that would detonate the bomb, and for the electronic monitoring system for its first test. By this time he was the senior member of the timing group. On 16 July 1945, he was given the historic task of triggering the world's first nuclear bomb in a test explosion, code-named 'Trinity', that took place at Alamogordo in the New Mexican desert. The success of this bomb, planned, constructed and detonated on the basis of theoretical calculations, represented a stupendous achievement. The success, for good or ill, changed mankind's affairs forever.

Subsequently, on the order of President Truman, in early August 1945 the 'Thin Man' bomb was exploded over Hiroshima and an implosion bomb over Nagasaki, each with a power of about 20kt of TNT.

Following the Trinity test, a new project, code-named 'Operation Crossroads', was begun for the US Navy. The implosion weapons for this test were made at Los Alamos but the Navy wished to be involved with all of the maritime equipment installed on the ships and atolls around the target area. Therefore they took charge of this equipment and Titterton was appointed to advise the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, DC, on the timing requirements. Soon after the end of the war with Japan, Congress passed the McMahon Act, which excluded all but US nationals from working on nuclear weapons. The British mission had therefore to leave and return to the UK. The two exceptions were Dr William Penney (later Lord Penney) and Ernest Titterton, who were asked to stay on for Operation Crossroads because of their expertise in shock-wave and timing measurements respectively. There were two tests at Bikini, the first bomb being detonated above sea level and the second below. The purpose was to determine the effect on naval vessels. Titterton did the count-down for both tests. On the naval ship going to the tests, he became very popular with the crew as he gave them some simple lectures on the bomb tests and, perhaps more importantly, repaired the ship's movie projector! Soon after returning from Crossroads, he was made Head of the Electronics Division at Los Alamos. Titterton had played a very important role in the bomb developments and in the tests. He was obviously held in high regard as Norris Bradbury, who had succeeded Oppenheimer as Director of Los Alamos, tried hard and long to get him to stay or return to his position there.

The period at Los Alamos had a major influence on his future career. It gave him the opportunity to be acquainted with the great figures in nuclear science and technology of that time and a strong interest in nuclear power and weapons that lasted throughout his life. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he felt no guilt regarding his part in the development of these weapons. He was of the opinion that it was much better that the Allies first produced them rather than Hitler's Germany, that their use in Japan had saved many US and Japanese lives, and that fear of their use had kept, and would most probably continue to keep, the peace between the major powers.

On the personal side, in 1945 Ernest and Peggy Titterton had their first child Jennifer, who unfortunately was born with a spina bifida. This developed into a growth on the middle of her back that contained part of the central nervous system. A new and delicate ten-hour operation was performed on her at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Though fairly successful, it left her with limited control of her lower limbs. The Tittertons returned to England in 1947.

Harwell 1947-1951

On his return to England in mid-1947, Titterton joined the newly formed Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell. This was located in a sparsely occupied part of the country on the Berkshire Downs about sixteen miles from Oxford. The site had previously been an RAF airfield and initially housing for scientists was provided locally in ex-RAF houses and messes and in groups of prefabricated houses. So again he joined a fairly close-knit community, many members of which he knew from Los Alamos or from his wartime work in England. At home he immediately set about cultivating the garden of his 'prefab' house and, in particular, growing vegetables. This developed into one of the passions of his life, which only ceased when his accident prevented it.

He became a member of the General Physics Division under Professor Herbert Skinner and was put in charge of a research group that was to carry out work with nuclear emulsions and cloud chambers, though with the eventual aim of using the 170 MeV synchrocyclotron under construction at Harwell. He had to build up the group and one of the early people he recruited was a very capable technician called Tony Brinkley, who had worked on radar from 1938 until July 1946 when he transferred to Harwell. Tony carried out the exacting and tricky job of loading thick (up to 800 microns) emulsions with elements to be studied and later, after irradiation, processing them. He also took a significant part in analysing the results. Tony was to stay with Ernest for the remainder of his career.

Initially the only sources of neutrons for irradiations at AERE were the 'zero energy' reactor GLEEP and a 500 kV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. Hence Titterton sent plates containing stable elements such as lithium to laboratories in the USA for irradiation by some of his Los Alamos colleagues. He also made some irradiations with the 1 MV Cockcroft-Walton machine at the Cavendish Laboratory. Later, radioactive elements were loaded and irradiated at the world's first 33 MeV electron synchrotron, which had just been constructed at TRE Gt Malvern, the Air Ministry radar establishment. Because of the high background from the radioactive elements, the loading and processing had to be done on-site. When the large reactor BEPO became operational, neutron irradiations of uranium and thorium were made at Harwell. A few irradiations were made with the 170 MeV synchrocyclotron, which commenced working towards the end of his period at AERE.

Titterton exploited the photographic technique very effectively and carried out pioneering work. His research fell into three main areas. The first and perhaps most interesting of these was the work on the fission of heavy nuclei into three parts (ternary fission). Only one ternary fission event occurs for about 500 binary events, so the process is difficult to observe. Fission was induced by slow neutrons, which produce very high yields, for the case of ²³⁵U, and by fast neutrons and gamma-rays, which produce much lower yields, for ²³⁸U and ²³²Th, which are not fissile with slow neutrons. He carried out by far the best experiment up to that time on the energy spectrum and angular distribution of the alpha particles emitted in ternary fission for the ²³⁵U case (the most likely third particle is an alpha particle). In this, more than half a million fission tracks were examined and about one thousand ternary alpha particle events found. The energy spectrum was bell shaped with a mean energy of 15 MeV and extending up to 30 MeV, whilst the angular distribution was strongly peaked at 90° to the direction of the two heavy fragments. He indicated that these results were consistent with the idea that the alpha particle is produced nearly at rest between the two heavy fragments and acquires its energy and direction from the electrostatic repulsion between it and the fragments. This is very close to the view of this process held at the present time, though even now it is not well understood. He also observed cases in which two alpha particles were emitted and attributed this to ternary fission involving the unstable ⁸Be, which decays into two alpha particles within about 10^-16sec.

His second area of research concerned the disintegration of highly excited light nuclei into one or more particles. The reactions were mostly induced by gamma rays (photodisintegration). These were either monochromatic gamma-rays with energies ranging from 6 MeV to 17.6 MeV produced by nuclear reactions induced by protons from Cockcroft-Walton accelerators on targets of ⁷Li or ¹⁹F, or bremsstrahlung gamma-rays, with a continuous spectrum extending as high as 33 MeV, from the electron synchrotron. Much was learnt about the nature of these reactions and energy states of light nuclei. Unfortunately the energy of the new synchrocyclotron at Harwell was too low to produce a useful yield of p-mesons as had been hoped. Titterton therefore studied 'stars' (multi-particle disintegrations) produced in nuclear emulsions by very fast neutrons (~150 MeV) from a Be target. Though these were of qualitative interest, it proved not possible to get quantitative information from them. He sought the help of K.J. Le Couteur, Reader in Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool, in interpreting these data. Titterton was impressed by Le Couteur's abilities and this association led him later to strongly encourage the appointment of Le Couteur as the first Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University.

Titterton's research at AERE was very successful and prolific; he published 28 papers in the period 1949 to 1952. By the time he left Harwell, he had established a flourishing group. An excellent cloud chamber, with an innovative stereo camera, and a pulse height analyser had been developed. Unfortunately the cloud chamber produced results too slowly compared with the emulsion technique, so that in spite of working well it was never used in experiments.

Whilst at Harwell, he also acted as a consultant for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston. In his final year there, the designs for a British nuclear weapon, together with the techniques required for producing the nuclear material and fabricating it, were nearly complete. Discussions were already proceeding as to where the weapons tests would take place and at the time he left, three possibilities were being considered. These were the US test site in Nevada, a site on the Canadian shield in the barren north of Canada, and the Monte Bello islands off the north-west coast of Australia.

In August 1950 Titterton was offered the Foundation Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University (ANU) by his old supervisor, Sir Mark Oliphant. Oliphant had recently been appointed Foundation Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences at the ANU and was intending to build a large, 2 GeV (later changed to 10 GeV) proton accelerator to carry out experiments in high energy or 'particle' physics, as it is now called. This was to be of unique design, since the magnetic field was to be provided by high-current electromagnets without the aid of iron cores. The currents (greater than a million amps) were to be provided by a homopolar generator, which was successfully built though the full project was never completed.

Oliphant wanted Titterton to set up a group initially to carry out traditional nuclear physics with accelerated particles and later, when the big machine was working, to engage in particle physics. He was to be provided with a 1.2 million volt Cockcroft-Walton type accelerator, built by Philips in Holland, and had the task of supervising its construction and final tests. For this purpose he remained at AERE for about six months after being appointed a professor at the ANU.

Before leaving AERE in April 1951, he occasionally joined a group of distinguished people who formed a sub-committee of the interim council of the ANU, which met every two months in Oxford. The members of the group representing various fields were Sir Howard Florey (Medicine), Professor Keith Hancock (Social Sciences), Sir Mark Oliphant (Physics) and Professor A.C. Wheare (International Relations).

Titterton asked Tony Brinkley to move with him to Canberra. Tony was very apprehensive about leaving and relates how Titterton dealt with this in his typical way. 'Ernest called me up one day with three copies of my resignation from Harwell. He said "sign it boy, you will never regret it". I signed and I didn't ever regret it.'

Head of Department of Nuclear Physics at the ANU 1950-1970

When Ernest Titterton arrived in Australia on the liner Orcades in May 1951, he started with a clean slate. Tony Brinkley, who had preceded him by a month, was the only other member of his Department. He had brought with him many nuclear emulsions from irradiations done in the USA, Harwell and Malvern, together with two microscopes for their analysis; other microscopes were on order. Brinkley found and trained some people in the technique of emulsion scanning so that some research could take place until the 1.2 MV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator (HT1) came into operation. Titterton's immediate task was to construct a building for the new accelerator and then to assemble it and get it working. He had great talent for carrying out this type of project, having tremendous drive and organizational ability resulting in excellent value for a limited amount of money. His longer-term aim was to build up a very good laboratory that would be recognized world-wide as one of the leaders in the field. For this he needed to recruit academic staff of very high calibre as they became available. He hoped that these would be mainly of Australian origin, some from the Department's students, and that eventually there would be about ten academic staff, half of them non-tenured, together with about ten technicians and ten students. These staffing numbers were achieved and exceeded by the early sixties. He aimed to keep one non-tenured staff position open in order to finance visitors to the department. His contacts, developed at Los Alamos, with many of the leading figures in nuclear physics, were very helpful in this respect.

In 1954 Titterton heard that the 33 MeV electron-synchrotron at TRE was to be closed down. He wrote to Sir John Cockcroft, then Director of AERE Harwell, to ask if he could have it for the ANU. Cockcroft agreed, provided that the ANU would dismantle and pack it and pay for transport to Australia. This had to be arranged formally via the UK and Australian governments and Prime Minister Menzies asked Titterton to come and explain it to him. Menzies thought it was a very good idea and a generous gesture on the part of the UK.

In this same year Titterton was elected as one of the earliest Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science of which he was later to be a member of Council and Vice-President (1964-66). He also became entitled to a year's study leave and, feeling that all was going well in the department, decided to take it at AERE Harwell. This was a very convenient time for overseeing the dismantling and packing of the synchrotron. In addition to carrying out research, he took the opportunity to talk to his old colleague from Los Alamos days, Sir William Penney, who was now Director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston near Reading, about the British nuclear weapons tests in Australia. During his voyages to and from the UK on the Orient liners Orcades and Otranto, he wrote most of his first book, Facing the Atomic Future. This gives an excellent and well-balanced account of the situation at that time of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and the social, ethical and political problems associated with them.

The synchrotron arrived in Canberra soon after Titterton returned from Harwell. It was set up in the basement of the Oliphant Building of the Research School of Physical Sciences and the beam of bremsstrahlung gamma rays from it was directed into a tunnel under the road separating the Oliphant and Cockcroft Buildings. It made a very loud 50 Hz noise and created a sizeable intensity of gamma radiation in the foyer of the Oliphant Building. Titterton succeeded in interesting Menzies sufficiently to come and see the accelerator when it was working. Being a lawyer, he did not understand much of what Titterton told him but did catch on to the idea that the gamma-ray flux was directed into a narrow cone and that, at about a metre from the machine, one could accumulate a lethal dose in less than an hour without realising that anything was happening. With a twinkle in his eye, Menzies said that he would send Titterton a list of people for this treatment! Menzies was very cognizant of the difficulty he and other politicians had in understanding science, and felt strongly that this situation should be improved. He must have been impressed with Titterton's ability to present scientific ideas in a clear and simple way, as he said that he would use him from time to time to talk to and educate politicians about science. This he did, probably to the ANU's advantage in the sense that it brought to the attention of politicians that the ANU contained down-to-earth useful people as well as those living in ivory towers, whom they might perceive as useless.

Later in 1954, a third accelerator was added. This was a 600 keV Cockcroft-Walton machine, constructed by Ken Inall, who was then a member of the department. Like HT1, it was a high-current machine, used mainly for producing neutrons. Hence by this time the department was well equipped with accelerators.

For his own work, Titterton had a large group of emulsion scanners run by Tony Brinkley who did most of the data analysis. The main purpose was to study photonuclear reactions with 17.6 and 14.8 MeV mono-energetic gamma rays obtained with the Cockcroft-Walton machines and continuous bremsstrahlung gamma-rays from the synchrotron. They also studied some neutron-induced reactions.

Titterton and Brinkley were the first to observe ternary fission in the decay of ²⁵²Cf by spontaneous fission. This measurement offered a better possibility for observing more weakly ionizing products of ternary fission, such as protons, than did the cases where the plates had to be irradiated to induce fission and many extraneous background tracks produced. They found 179 ternary events out of 50,000 binary events. Of these, nine events had tracks that could be attributed to particles lighter than alpha particles, the dominant component in ternary fission. Titterton could not be persuaded to publish this, possibly because Niels Bohr had previously told him, on a visit to Harwell, that the third particle must be an alpha particle. He missed a significant discovery in so doing. It is now known that protons, deuterons and tritons are also emitted and in a proportion agreeing, within experimental error, with the numbers that Brinkley found.

Titterton's work in this field was recognized by his being asked to write a review article on photodisintegration experiments with nuclear emulsions for Progress in Nuclear Physics, Volume 4; it was published in 1955.

Photodisintegration experiments afforded a method of studying the giant-dipole resonance in nuclei. However at that time monochromatic photon beams with variable energy were not available. Consequently it was very difficult to study the resonance in detail. An alternative method, which later proved to be very powerful, was to study the inverse reaction in which protons were the bombarding particles and gamma rays were emitted. The EN tandem accelerator that the department later acquired was the ideal machine for carrying out such measurements. Titterton realised the value of this method and pressed hard in the late 1950s to use the injector cyclotron, built for the high energy accelerator, for this purpose. Consequently, he and his collaborators, D.S. Gemmell, W.J.B. Smith and A.H. Morton, were the first to make measurements of this type.

Titterton's contacts with Menzies and government ministers probably helped him to get funds for the 5 MV terminal EN tandem accelerator, which commenced operations in 1961. This was a very successful machine, the fourth of its type to be built, and helped the Department greatly to raise its status in world nuclear physics. During its prime research period it averaged 16 hours/day of operation for every day of the year. The synchrotron ceased operation in 1961 and was given to the University of Western Australia. Titterton's photonuclear emulsion experiments also ceased at this time, though data analysis continued until around 1964. He supervised a number of students who worked with the tandem until 1969, after which he took no further part in research. Even during this period, though he took a close interest in the students' activities, he did not take an active part in the experimental work. The years at Harwell and at the ANU until the early '60s were the most productive in his research career.

In 1969 Titterton was successful in gaining $A2.2m for upgrading the Department's accelerator facilities. This resulted in the purchase of a 26 MeV negative-ion cyclotron to inject into the EN tandem (first beam in 1972) and more importantly, the 14UD tandem accelerator that commenced operation in 1974. Though at the beginning of 1970 he ceased to be Head of the Department on becoming Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences, he continued to take a leading role in the accelerator project. The original proposal was made in terms of an 8 MV terminal FN tandem from the High Voltage Engineering Corporation, which also manufactured the EN tandem. However, a number of better possibilities arose by the time that the funds were made available. Titterton showed characteristic shrewdness, courage and business acumen in persuading the department to choose the 14UD and in negotiating a deal that was good for the Department, with its limited funds, and good for the National Electrostatics Corporation in enabling it to show that it could successfully produce large tandem accelerators. The choice, backed by most of the Department, required courage because the 14UD was based on new technology devised by Professor Ray Herb at the University of Wisconsin. It proved to be a correct choice and for many years the 14UD was the world's most powerful tandem accelerator.

Bringing the 14UD into operation was a mammoth task because, unlike the EN tandem, only the bare bones of the accelerator were purchased. Without the able and dedicated academic and technical staff of the Department, it would not have been possible. It required a great deal of complex engineering design and construction, either in the Department, in the Research School or in Australian industry. An example was the 22m high by 5.5m diameter pressure vessel, to contain the accelerator and 30 tonnes of sulphahexafluoride gas, which has to be supported and positioned to an accuracy of 0.25mm. Extensive building construction such as the 43m high tower to contain the accelerator, was also required. Titterton's drive and organising ability was behind all of this. He made sure that there was adequate but not excessive radiation shielding, taking account of the fact that the 14UD was to be an accelerator for heavy ions, which produce relatively low levels of radiation compared to protons and deuterons. This was most important in keeping the cost within reasonable limits. Thus the total cost of accelerator and buildings was much less than that for the buildings alone for an essentially identical accelerator later installed overseas. Though exasperating and designedly provocative, as was his way, there is no doubt that his drive, perspicuity and ability to see the minimum required to accomplish a task gave the ANU a marvellous bargain in the 14UD project.

Up to the time that he became Dean of the Research School in 1965, he maintained very firm control. He made all decisions on staffing and equipment without obvious consultation; with a few exceptions they were good decisions. He listened to people's complaints and often acted upon them, though they were not given the satisfaction of knowing this. Titterton believed that responsibility was taken and not given, which made it difficult for some people in dealing with such a strong and forceful character. Mostly he allowed staff freedom in carrying out their research, though he adopted the tactic of opposing new research developments or proposals but later supporting them if the proposer persisted. The Department produced a large number of PhD graduates. Titterton drove and at the same time encouraged the research students, instilling into them enthusiastic 'get-up-and-go', resourcefulness and enterprise. This was recognized as the 'Canberra Stamp' by many overseas laboratories, who appreciated the high quality of these students. This was a great source of pride to him.

On the whole, Titterton was successful as Head. From nothing he built a department with a good international reputation and excellent equipment. In the Australian context, where there was and still is not any clear procedure for gaining funds for large projects, the latter was a very considerable achievement. However, on the debit side some members of staff highly resented his overbearing manner.

British atomic weapons tests and related activities 1952-1973

On 16 September 1950, British Prime Minister Attlee passed a message to Prime Minister Menzies asking for a survey of the barren and uninhabited Monte Bello islands, lying 120 km off the north-west coast of Australia, as a possible site for a nuclear weapons test. This was agreed and a later request, also agreed, was made for a test in October 1952, October being the only month when weather conditions were commonly suitable. Agreement was given because Menzies felt that it was to Australia's advantage, both from the point of view of strengthening the UK's position as leader of the Commonwealth and of improving technical co-operation with the UK in the field of nuclear energy. It should be appreciated that this was a very critical period in the Cold War. In April 1952, the British asked Menzies if he would agree to Titterton assisting in the forthcoming test, code-named 'Hurricane', in view of his experience with tests in the USA. They also requested that Menzies ask the Vice-Chancellor of the ANU to release him for this purpose. Menzies agreed and accordingly on 23 April 1952, A.S. Brown, Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department, wrote to the Vice-Chancellor who, after consulting Oliphant, acceded to the request. Shortly after being approached himself, Titterton had a personal meeting with Menzies, who explained his views and asked him to act as an observer, looking after Australia's interests, and to give the British team under Dr Penney every possible help. Professor L.H. Martin (Defence Scientific Advisor and Head of School of Physics, University of Melbourne) and Mr W.A.S. Butement (Chief Scientist, Department of Supply) were also appointed observers. None of the observers had any formal responsibility for the test, which was entirely a British responsibility. However they, together with an Australian meteorologist from Melbourne, were closely involved in the predictions of suitable weather patterns for the test, which took place on 3 October 1952. Operation Hurricane was of particular interest to Australia since it involved firing a weapon located in the hold of a ship. Delivery by such means to an Australian port would be very difficult to detect and could have catastrophic consequences.

The following year a second series of land-based tests (Totem 1 and 2), with the weapons mounted on steel towers, was arranged. These were to take place at Emu Field, located about 480 km north-west from the rocket testing station at Woomera and in the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia. Since these tests took place in the centre of Australia, the criteria for choosing suitable weather and wind conditions for the explosions had to be more stringent than those for Hurricane where most of the radioactive fallout would go into the ocean. The same team of Australian observers was present at these tests, but in this case the British invited the participation of Australian personnel in experiments related to the tests. After discussion with Martin and Butement, it was decided that Titterton and others from the ANU should attempt to measure neutron fluxes as a function of distance from ground zero using photographic emulsion and neutron-threshold detector techniques. The others who took part were Tony Brinkley and Dr John Carver, later to become Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences at the ANU. Both the tests, which took place in October 1953, and the neutron experiments were successful. During the two week long delay while waiting for suitable weather conditions for the Totem 2 test, Titterton was able to resume the table tennis contests with Penney which they had enjoyed so much when in the USA during the war.

Following the Totem tests it was decided that a 'permanent' testing ground would have to be developed to cater for an extended period of nuclear tests. The Emu site suffered from inadequate water supplies and access difficulties. A site at Maralinga, just north of the transcontinental railway line, was chosen. However, the British were anxious to carry out tests in which the bombs contained light elements, as a preliminary to the thermonuclear tests that were to be carried out at Christmas Island. The Monte Bello islands were chosen for this series because the Maralinga site might not be ready in time and also because the second explosion was to have a yield of about 60 kt, which was considered too large for a central Australian site. The tests, code-named 'Mosaic', took place in May and June 1956. This period of the year is not generally favourable because prevailing westerly winds would carry fallout to the mainland. However, suitable conditions do occur briefly once or twice a month. A more formal arrangement for Australian observers was instituted. The Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee (AWTSC) was set up in July 1955 and had joint responsibility with the UK team for the decision to fire a weapon; it had the power of veto if it felt that the conditions would endanger people, flora or fauna. In addition it was required to set up a fallout monitoring system throughout Australia. Eventually about sixty monitoring stations were established. It reported not only on fallout from the British tests but also from others, such as the French tests in the Pacific. The results, together with health implications, were tabled in Parliament and also published by the AWTSC in the scientific literature. The first members of this committee were Martin (Chairman), Titterton, Butement, C.E. Eddy (Director, Commonwealth X-ray and Radium Laboratory [CXRL] ) and J.P. Baxter (Chairman, Australian Atomic Energy Commission). Shortly afterwards L.J. Dwyer (Director, Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology) was co-opted because none of the other members had the meteorological skills required for the fallout predictions. Some members of the AWTSC, including Titterton attended the Mosaic tests and subsequent ones.

All further weapons tests in Australia were carried out at the Maralinga site. Four weapons were exploded in the 'Buffalo' series between 27 September and 22 October 1956. Before the final 'Antler' series, with three tests between 14 September and 9 October 1957, the duties of the AWTSC were split between two new committees. The new AWTSC initially consisted of Titterton (Chairman), Dwyer and D.J. Stevens (Director CXRL, following the death of Eddy). It was responsible for all matters of public safety arising from the tests. The National Radiation Advisory Committee (NRAC) had Sir Macfarlane Burnet as chairman and also included Martin and Butement. It reported to the Prime Minister on radiological effects in the community. Both committees were disbanded by the Whitlam government in 1973, though after protests from Martin, another committee with similar duties to NRAC, the Australian Ionizing Radiation Advisory Council (AIRAC) was formed. Neither Titterton nor Martin was a member of the new committee though the latter was invited to be.

In addition to the major weapons tests there was a large number of minor trials. These were related to the design of nuclear weapons and as a consequence were more secret than the major weapons tests; no Australians were allowed to take part, nor were full details given by the British. The AWTSC had no control over these tests though it was at times consulted by the Australian government regarding them. These tests took place at Emu in September and October 1953 and continued at Maralinga, on and off, until April 1963. Only conventional explosives were used so that there was no problem with radioactive fallout outside the range area. However, within the range area there was some chemical and radioactive contamination. The most controversial of these tests were the Vixen B series which took place between September 1960 and April 1963. These involved the burning or explosion of plutonium and were carried out in order to assess the effects of an accident to a weapon in transit or storage.

Titterton was the subject of severe criticism from the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia which held hearings between August 1984 and September 1985. The President of the Commission was the Honourable James R. McClelland, a judge and ex-Labor politician. It is difficult to accept its report (4) (hereafter referred to as RCR) as fair and balanced on scientific matters and on events that took place thirty years earlier. It evokes the suspicion that, as for many government-inspired investigations, it was set up to reach the conclusions it did. These were contrary to those of previous investigations, the most detailed of which was AIRAC9 (1983) (5). It also raises the question once again as to whether an adversarial legal investigation is the proper way to investigate scientific questions. Its conclusions regarding the AWTSC and Titterton (RCR, p.526) read:

2. The AWTSC failed to carry out many of its tasks in a proper manner. At times it was deceitful and allowed unsafe firing to occur. It deviated from its charter by assuming responsibilities which properly belonged to the Australian Government.
3. Titterton played a political as well as a safety role in the testing program, especially in the minor trials. He was prepared to conceal information from the Australian Government and his fellow Committee members if he believed to do so would suit the interests of the United Kingdom Government and the testing program.
4. The fact that the AWTSC did not negotiate with the UK openly and independently in relation to the minor trials was a result of the special relationship which enabled Titterton to deal with the AWRE in a personal and informal manner. He was from first to last, 'their man' and the concerns which were ultimately voiced in relation to the Vixen B proposals and which forced the introduction of more formal procedures for approving minor trials were a direct result of the perceived inadequacies in the manner in which he had carried out his tasks.

The statement that Titterton was 'from first to last, "their man" ' rejects any other interpretation of his actions. It appears contrary to the attitude that the Commission adopted in other cases. For example (RCR p.600) the statement in the AIRAC9 report on the weapons tests that 'AIRAC found no evidence that Aborigines were injured in nuclear tests', was strongly criticized. It was suggested that a better formulation would be that 'AIRAC was not supplied with any evidence which would enable it to decide one way or the other whether Aborigines...'. It is certainly true that Titterton was of British origin and closely associated with Penney, and that he wished the tests to be successful; so in fact did the Australian government. The British were very concerned to re-establish their relationship with the USA on nuclear matters and as a consequence were reluctant to pass on information to Australians regarding details of the weapons. It is likely that Oliphant was not associated with the tests because the Americans regarded him as a security risk. Titterton, with his American clearance, was a person with whom they could safely communicate, though details of the weapons were excluded even from him. However, it does not necessarily follow that, because of his relationship with the British, he did not carry out his responsibilities to Australia to the best of his ability. Titterton was in many ways his own worst enemy. He was a very bright and shrewd person but on occasions very abrasive and impatient with those who disagreed with him. He was also very impatient with bureaucratic procedures and would short-circuit these if possible; basically he was a 'doer'. One of the main objections to Titterton by the Commission appeared to be that he had a direct line to the British and that this was indicative of a conspiracy. However, it might well have been an advantage to Australia for the British to have had a knowledgeable person in whom they could safely confide and thus enable him to form better judgements than would otherwise have been the case.

Titterton was severely criticized because he advised the British to say that the fission yield of the 1960 Vixen B minor trials was zero. The Commission said (RCR, p.519) 'This, of course, was a misrepresentation of the nature of Vixen B as Titterton well knew'. Titterton probably took the view that it would be better not to worry the bureaucrats about the very small fission product yield, which was completely insignificant from a safety point of view; the standard employed was that 'any fission products produced must be radiologically insignificant compared to the activity of the parent fissile material' (RCR, p.521). In 1960 the requirements for approval were tightened up and more written evidence was required. According to RCR (p.520), 'Titterton's role and influence diminished after that'. Nevertheless it is interesting that the Vixen B tests continued until 1963.

The Royal Commission criticized many of the weapons tests on the grounds that the weather conditions for firing were unsuitable or that the observed fallout pattern did not precisely follow that predicted. The accuracy of a prediction depended on the accuracy of the British fallout model, the estimated power of the weapon and the meteorological forecast. Even today, short term meteorological forecasts are not very reliable; thirty years ago, with no satellite observations, they were very much less so. In all, it would seem that the major weapons tests were a great success as far as safety was concerned; there is no tangible evidence that anyone was harmed by the fallout. It may possibly be true, as the Commission repeatedly pointed out, that a few people may develop cancer as a consequence of the low-intensity fallout radiation. However, Titterton's view was that any action, such as crossing the road, involves some risk of accident or death, sad though it might be. He felt strongly that the risks involved in various actions and technological developments should be compared, and that it was ridiculous to spend effort and money on reducing small risks when the same amount spent on reducing a large risk would produce a much higher dividend. Unfortunately lawyers and most of the general population who are not trained to consider probabilities, tend to judge such matters purely on emotional grounds. If the British were so disregardful of safety in Australia and Titterton was their lackey, as the Commission seemed to think, it is a miracle that there were not serious consequences from the tests which, by any standard, were of a major and potentially very dangerous nature.

Dean and Director 1966-1973

When Oliphant retired as Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences (RSPhysS) at the end of 1963, Professor John Jaeger, Head of the Department of Geophysics, was appointed Acting Head of the School for two years, with the title of Dean. Titterton followed him as Dean for two years from January 1966. However, at the end of this period the University decided to reinstate the Directorship and appointed Titterton for a five-year period. Deans, with their short period of tenure, were allowed to retain their departmental Headships but the University decided that Directors would have to relinquish them. Since Titterton was not due to retire until 1981, he quite reasonably requested and obtained an assurance that, apart from exceptional circumstances, he could expect to be reappointed for a second term.

Under his leadership, the School prospered and expanded in size. He established two new departments. That of Applied Mathematics, under Professor Barry Ninham, proved to be a great success and has made very significant contributions in fields such as optics, colloid physics and intermolecular forces (the latter an essentially experimental subject). Titterton deserves considerable credit for this success because it was his insight and determination that led to the formation of this very non-typical department of applied mathematics. The Department of Solid State Physics was less successful. It was formed with the aim of utilizing the (at that time) uniquely high magnetic fields (300 T) available with the homopolar generator as a current source. This objective was never achieved, partly because of the low duty cycle of the homopolar generator.

An event of considerable importance to the Research School was the establishment of the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). After many discussions between interested parties the Australian government indicated in 1967 that it was prepared to join the UK in building and operating a large optical telescope in Australia. A formal agreement was signed in 1969, but unfortunately this omitted any specific reference to the management of the telescope. This omission led to acrimonious discussions between the ANU and the Telescope Board that only ceased in 1973 (6). The telescope was to be located on Siding Spring Mountain, where the ANU had already established an observatory. The Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories (MSSSO) were operated by the Department of Astronomy in the RSPhysS. Its Director and Head of Department was Professor Olin Eggen, a forthright man with a good sense of humour and an astronomer of the old school. Eggen, who was strongly supported by Vice-Chancellor Sir John Crawford wanted the ANU to act as the agent for the Telescope Board and manage the telescope as part of an integrated observatory under his control. This view was not acceptable to the British side who naturally did not wish to see the telescope under the control of one of its major users; later it transpired that astronomers from other Australian observatories did not like it either.

Titterton set out his views on this question in a paper in 1970. He was strongly opposed to Eggen's proposal, pointing out that it would put a heavy burden of responsibility on the Head of the Department of Astronomy and saying:

This seems to have overwhelming disadvantages to us; it demands a greatly increased administrative structure under the aegis of the School and opens the possibility that we, through our special geographical advantage, are attempting to control the operation. There would be absolutely no compensating advantages in research.

His opinion was that the telescope should be under the control of an independent director who should be an eminent astronomer, responsible directly to the Board. He pointed out that

if a front ranking astronomer were appointed...this would be greatly to our advantage. It would enrich our academic circle and increase the stature of the Observatory.

He maintained these views throughout the long period of conflict and in February 1973 succeeded in getting the Faculty Board of the RSPhyS to reverse its decision to support the establishment of an Observatory Services Unit (OSU), administered by Eggen but responsible to the Vice-Chancellor, to provide support for all telescopes at Siding Spring. This was done on the grounds that Eggen was by now clearly not going to be Director of the AAT. He pointed out that

Regrettably the real situation was developing into a struggle between the ANU on the one hand and the Australian and British Astronomers on the other.

There is no doubt that Titterton was correct in his assessment of this situation but he may well have made enemies in the Chancellery for opposing the view of the Vice-Chancellor. In spite of the Faculty Board's decision, the OSU was established by the University but never fulfilled its function and was subsequently abandoned. The Telescope Board appointed its own staff to manage and develop the AAT.

Another important event during Titterton's period as Director was the splitting off of the Department of Geophysics and Geochemistry from the RSPhysS to form the new Research School of Earth Sciences in 1973. Long before this, in 1955, Professor John Jaeger, Head of the Department, had proposed a School of Earth Sciences and in 1961 and 1962 he presented a detailed case that reached the Board of the Institute, though without success. He re-opened the matter again in 1969 though, since he was nearing retirement, he left the final campaign mainly to Professor A.E. Ringwood. Titterton and the Faculty Board of RSPhysS were opposed to an expansion of Geophysics and Geochemistry within the School because it would have to have been at the expense of other disciplines, some of which would themselves have had a good case for expansion. Titterton was also opposed to the formation of a new School, partly because he thought that the academic case was not strong enough and partly because of the increased costs of administration that would inevitably result; for example there would have to be two School Secretaries instead of one, two workshops, and so on. The battle between Ringwood and Titterton was long and acrimonious but Titterton eventually lost it in the University Council, possibly as a result of overstating his case.

The last years of Titterton's directorship were not happy. In many respects he was a professor of the old autocratic school, dogmatic and pugnacious into the bargain. This type of behaviour was becoming much less acceptable in the 1970s. Furthermore, though he was perceptive, farsighted and more often than not correct in his major policies over which he took great trouble, his frequent lack of tact, aggressive manner and incessant monologues antagonized many people. As when he was a Head of Department, he did not take kindly to criticism and did not give people the opportunity to know that he sometimes listened to their suggestions. Though he would support projects involving large sums of money, he was extremely tight on lesser matters such as additional salary increments for people who merited them, money for fieldwork, and so on. Sometimes he descended to extreme pettiness such as not allowing a light in the nuclear physics lavatory on the grounds that people might sit there and read the newspaper. This was not a good way to run a large School with a variety of departments, headed by people distinguished in their own right. It gradually built up resentment, not only amongst Heads of departments and units, but also amongst many other members of the School.

This first showed itself openly in the matter of the chairmanship of Faculty in mid-1971. Faculty, of which all academic members of the School were members, had no powers except to advise, and its main function was to keep members informed about developments in the School and University. The Director had normally been chairman but some members felt that Titterton did not act impartially, coming down hard on those who proposed matters with which he disagreed. Some felt inhibited in speaking, fearing that if they said anything out of turn it might damage their career. Because of this, there was a move to have an elected chairman of Faculty. Had Titterton been a better politician, he would have agreed to this without delay, as Faculty was a toothless body which, in normal times, frequently had difficulty even in raising a quorum. In doing so he would have gained kudos, but unfortunately, he fought to the bitter end, apparently not appreciating the very strong feelings growing rapidly within the School. Matters finally came to a head with a special meeting of Faculty at which the Academic Registrar was present, probably the only meeting attended by almost every member of the School. The motion that there should be an elected Chairman of Faculty received over 100 votes, whilst there were no votes for the motion that the Director should remain Chairman. This episode marked the beginning of a significant decline in his popularity within the School. He also became unpopular with the Vice-Chancellor, probably due, at least in part, to his opposition to Sir John Crawford's strongly-held positions on the Anglo-Australian Telescope and Earth Sciences. From this point on, Titterton, though in no way an unapproachable snob, seemed to become more and more isolated and out of touch with grass-roots feeling within the School. He appeared to feel that there was a conspiracy against him by some 'ratbag' elements. All of these things ensured that he would not be extended for a second term as Director as he had been led to expect when he was first appointed.

A committee, under the chairmanship of Dr H.C. Coombs, was appointed to consider who was to be the next Director of RSPhysS in the Institute of Advanced Studies. A similar committee has subsequently been established near the end of each Director's term. However, this was the first occasion on which this was done and most probably the reason was to ensure that Titterton would not be reappointed. His term came to an end on 15 September 1973.

With hindsight, Ernest Titterton's non-reappointment was due to people concentrating on the more irritating aspects of his character, forgetting his very real accomplishments as Dean and Director. The School developed and prospered during his stewardship and there is little doubt that he worked long and hard for its success. In spite of his tough and authoritarian nature, there was much more information provided to the Faculty Board and more discussions on important issues than was the case with subsequent Directors.

Final period 1973-1990

After he ceased to be Director, Titterton returned to his former department as a professor, though not as Head. Many years previously he had foreseen the eventual necessity to upgrade the 14UD tandem accelerator if the Department of Nuclear Physics were to maintain its position among the top international nuclear science laboratories. He came to the conclusion, as did the Department, that the most suitable and cost-effective upgrade would be to use the 14UD as an injector to a superconducting linear accelerator. This would approximately double the energy of heavy ions achievable with the 14UD alone, for a price in real dollars considerably less than that for the original machine. As one of his main activities, he chose to look further into this question and to follow up similar developments in other parts of the world. The University provided him with funds for this purpose in addition to his normal study leave money. Unfortunately times had changed since 1969, when the funding for the 14UD was approved. Money for research became increasingly difficult to get. The matter was made even more difficult by the fact that, unlike most other 'advanced' countries, Australia had and still has no established mechanism for the assessment of and provision of funding for research equipment proposals unless they involve only very small cost. Proposals are usually neither approved nor turned down, they are simply passed from one section of the bureaucracy to another, causing frustration and demoralization to those who make them. As a consequence, although much effort was put into the proposal by members of the Department including Titterton, no final decision has yet been reached.

Titterton continued his interest in the subject of nuclear power, giving lectures, making television appearances and writing articles. In 1978 he wrote a book, Uranium, Energy Source of the Future?, with F.P. Rowbotham as co-author who put the case against nuclear power. He was also on the Council of Macquarie University from 1978 to 1984. He retired at the end of 1981 but continued as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Nuclear Physics. Shortly after retiring he had a stroke which initially left him partially paralysed, but he made an almost complete recovery. He was divorced in 1986.

In September 1987 Titterton was seriously injured in a motor accident, shortly after leaving home for the University. His mind was as clear as ever but he became a quadriplegic. Though there was some initial hope of a partial recovery, it eventually became clear to him that he would remain like this until the end of his life. To be completely dependent on others for even the simplest action, to be 'rolled' every two hours to avoid bed sores, was to this previously very active and fiercely independent man, a fate worse than death. Nevertheless, he approached this situation with his usual courage and took the positive step of dictating his memoirs into a voice-activated tape recorder. In this he was helped by a technical device constructed specially for him. By blowing down tubes he was able to operate his tape recorder, to choose one of two channels on his radio, or to operate a buzzer to call for attention. These were the only actions that he could carry out without help.

During this period he had the opportunity not only to observe his own condition but also those of others who had problems similar to his own, who suffered from brain damage, senility and the like. He found this a very depressing experience, particularly when great efforts were made to keep alive people who were hopeless suffering cases, seemingly so that they could suffer even more. Titterton became a firm believer in euthanasia. In November 1989 he gave a recorded interview for the National Brain Injury Seminar, in which he discussed the tragic situation of some of these people. A few of his opinions are given in the following quotations: 'Nursing homes, put bluntly, are places where people on the scrap heap of life go to end their days'; 'These people are just cabbages. They do not enjoy living and the answer to that is to accede to their wishes and induce a dignified painless death through euthanasia as is now practiced in Holland.' In answer to a question requesting one simple sentence on his own situation, he said: 'There is no hope and the sooner I'm dead and buried the better'.

Ernest Titterton's wish to die was granted suddenly and unexpectedly on 8 February 1990. In accordance with his desire, his ashes were scattered along the cliffs of the English Channel near Folkestone.

Sir Ernest is survived by his former wife, his three children, Jennifer, Andrew and Ashley, and two grandchildren.

Conclusions

Ernest Titterton was an enigmatic and controversial character. He was a man of great talent, enthusiasm, courage and drive. Seemingly, in his early days at school and university, he was held in high regard on both the intellectual and social sides. Though normally thought of as a right-wing conservative, in England, perhaps due to his early experiences in the great depression, he was once a strong supporter of the Labour Party. His meanness with money was legendary. There are countless tales of this, which caused him considerable unpopularity. Nevertheless this should probably be considered a neurosis rather than a fault. In his latter days he was a relatively wealthy man, yet even when lying in the nursing home as a helpless quadriplegic, he was not prepared to spend anything to help make his existence a little more pleasant. On the other hand, as a guest, he could be charming and extremely considerate.

His personal achievements in nuclear physics research were competent rather than inspired, in spite of his undoubted ability. Probably this was because his activities prior to going to Harwell in 1947, at the age of 31, were mainly in the technical field of electronics. Thus he started work in nuclear physics rather late in life. Furthermore, after quite a short period at AERE, he took the job at the ANU where a great deal of his effort had to be devoted to starting up a new department from scratch. His most productive period in basic research was 1947-53. Probably his greatest achievements were his wartime work at Birmingham and Los Alamos, his establishment of the Department of Nuclear Physics at the ANU and developments during his earlier period as Dean and Director of the RSPhysS. Other notable contributions were his work with the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee and with the Council of the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering, of which he was a founding member, 1958-83, and President, 1973-74. For services to science and government, Ernest Titterton was appointed as a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1957 and knighted in 1970. Since his Los Alamos days, Titterton held a strong, one might say passionate, interest in the subjects of nuclear power and weapons. His view of the latter is well put in the following excerpt from a letter which he wrote:

Nuclear proliferation will continue, just as all other weapons have proliferated, and we should accept this as a fact to be understood and lived with into the future.

It is no use wringing one's hands and attempting the impossible - keeping 'the nuclear genie in the bottle'. The nuclear genie is very much out of the bottle and nations representing over 50% of the world's population already have access to such weapons.

What we have to do is to strive for a wide understanding of the realities of the situation, present and future, so that man can control his actions and settle his problems without resort to warfare.

He said, regarding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, forty years afterwards:

Those two weapons caused enormous damage. Everyone was very sad that it was so. Nevertheless it had to be done. We had to swap 200,000 Japanese lives for literally millions of lives of our people. It's a curious way of looking at it, but it was a humanitarian act.

He was a tireless advocate for nuclear power, which he felt offered the world a safe and relatively non-polluting source of energy. By safe he did not mean that there was no risk, but that relative to other major power sources, such as coal, the risks were very much less and that nuclear power was by far the safest major technology that has ever been developed. Certainly on its record to date in the West, this is true. The disaster at Chernobyl understandably had a very adverse effect on public opinion regarding nuclear power. However, the combination of a badly designed reactor with a positive temperature coefficient, together with the quite extraordinary lack of administrative control over its operation that led to the accident, seems almost inconceivable in advanced countries, though much less so in third-world countries. Much of the opposition to nuclear power and the advocacy of alternative power sources such as solar and wind power has been based on emotional grounds and very little on fact. Titterton had no patience with people, most of whom had little real understanding of any of these matters and who frequently took the view that anyone who did was automatically prejudiced and therefore should be ignored. His views were well summed up by the following comment, though it was made in a different context, in reply to a question at the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests:

I do not have very much scepticism of scientists as a group. I have considerable scepticism of pseudo scientists, who learn a little and think they know a lot.

In this matter he showed both the good and bad aspects of his personality. He was courageous in standing up for what he believed in, regardless of the consequences, and he spoke and wrote very lucidly and well.

However, he often could not resist twisting arguments to suit his purpose and stamping down very hard on those with whom he disagreed – much of this was unnecessary and made him many enemies. He seemed to play the great dictator rather than the great persuader and as a consequence his advocacy of nuclear power probably did more harm than good. Sometimes one felt that he didn't care what others thought but it seems more likely that he lacked understanding of how others felt; certainly there seems little doubt that his commitment to science and to nuclear power was genuine and intense.

Ernest Titterton was a tough, authoritarian individualist and he came to admire conservative politicians with similar characteristics, such as Menzies, Sir Charles Court and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He was very much opposed to left wing unions and the Labor Party, which he felt were ruining the country by their support of restrictive work practices and excessive social welfare. This is probably why he was not invited to be a member of the AIRAC in 1973. His life's principles are well summed up by this quotation from Abraham Lincoln that I found amongst his papers:

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.9, no.2, 1992. It was written by J.O. Newton FAA, Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow, Department of Nuclear Physics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University; formerly Head of the Department.

Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to this memoir and I would like to thank them all. I am very grateful for information provided and in some cases comments on the manuscript to Mr T.A. Brinkley, Mr G. Burrows, Prof. J.H. Carver, Prof. R.W. Crompton, Prof. F.J. Fenner, Dr J.M. Freeman, Dr K. Inall, Prof. T.R. Ophel, Mr C.G. Plowman, Prof. I.G. Ross, Mr Maurice Titterton and Prof. P.B. Treacy. Special thanks are due to Mrs Ashley Oates and Dr D.F. Hebbard for access to transcriptions and tapes of Sir Ernest's memoirs, to Rosanne Clayton for help in accessing his personal papers held in the Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, and to the ANU for access to records. I am especially indebted to Sir Mark Oliphant for his willing and invaluable help. Last but not least I would like to thank Mrs Anne Gillard for her patience and help in preparing an excellent manuscript.

References

• (1) O.R. Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
• (2) M. Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• (3) D. Irving, The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany, 2nd edn (New York: Da Capo, 1983).
• (4) Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia (Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1985).
• (5) British Nuclear Tests in Australia: A Review of Operational Safety Measures and of Possible After Effects (AIRAC Report, 9) (Australian Government Printing Service, Canberra, 1983).
• (6) S.C.B. Gascoigne, K.M. Proust and M.O. Robins, The Creation of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Ernie Tuck was one of Australia's most outstanding applied mathematicians, with an international reputation as a leading authority on water waves and ship hydrodynamics. He made seminal and incisive theoretical analyses in many areas, especially on wave resistance of slender ships and wave interaction with obstacles. His work is characterised by his ability to find the essentials of a complex problem, and then to apply apparently simple, but revealing analyses, using a combination of perturbation and asymptotic techniques with numerical calculations. He was an outstanding expositor, supervised 25 doctoral students, and will be remembered by his many colleagues as a brilliant scientist and an enthusiastic and caring person.

Download the memoir

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol. 23(2), 2012. It was written by Roger Grimshaw, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University.

Written by Evan J. Williams.

Edwin James George Pitman was born in Melbourne on 29 October 1897 and died at Kingston near Hobart on 21 July 1993. His father, Edwin Edward Pitman, was born at Morecombe, Whitchurch in the county of Dorset on 7 May 1862, and his mother, Ann Ungley (née Hooks) at Marylebone on 10 January 1865; they met on the ship to Australia, married and settled in Melbourne. The father worked for a firm making prime movers and other machinery.

Edwin J.G. was the fourth of eight children, preceded by three girls and followed by two more girls, Leonora and Pamela, a boy Charles and a girl Elsie.

He early developed a retentive and critical faculty; his mother described him as 'the critic' and 'that piece of blotting paper'. Although the family did not have many books, he acquired a taste for reading from a Sunday School teacher - a worker in a flour mill - who had a large library and would let him borrow any books that interested him.

His schooling was at Kensington State School and South Melbourne College. The College had an unusual Head, O'Hara, and an unusual curriculum. On Saturday morning the boys would work through examination papers in Arithmetic and Algebra, including in the later years Cambridge Tripos papers; in the afternoons they would study Shakespeare. Even so, Edwin was dissatisfied with the course, believing that, although it was advanced it was not rigorous enough.

In his final year, O'Hara insisted that he apply for a residential scholarship at a college of the University of Melbourne; as a result he gained not only the Wyselaskie and Dixson Scholarships in Mathematics but also a scholarship to Ormond College. At Ormond, the Master at the time was D.K. Pieken, a New Zealander who had been teaching a modern account of the Number System His notes filled a gap in Edwin's training and were avidly studied. Also at Ormond was C.E. Weatherburn, then a lecturer who taught applied mathematics and physics to Edwin on his own.

His time at the University was interrupted by two years of war service, in the 14th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force in 1918-19. During demobilization he spent a year in London, studying at the London School of Economics: 'Sociology or something of that kind'. He also studied French and German at the Berlitz College, which enabled him to read the works of Paul Lévy and A.N. Kolmogorov.

Returning to Melbourne in 1920, he completed the degree course and graduated B.A. (1921), B.Sc. (1922) and M.A. (1923). In the meantime he was appointed Acting Professor of Mathematics at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand (1922-23). He returned to Australia when appointed Tutor in Mathematics and Physics at Trinity and Ormond Colleges and Part-time Lecturer in Physics at the University of Melbourne (1924-25). In 1926 Pitman was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tasmania, a position he held until his retirement in 1962.

University of Tasmania

Pitman's career at the University of Tasmania was rather arduous. As head of a small department of mathematics in a poorly-funded university, he had from the beginning a heavy teaching load. In addition, as a condition of accepting the appointment, he was required to have some knowledge of statistics and to be prepared to teach the subject. Pitman, who had attended only a few lectures in the subject at Melbourne and was not impressed, nevertheless agreed to these conditions and regularly gave courses in statistics, often to only one or two students at a time.

About two years after his appointment, an experimenter at the State Department of Agriculture, R.A. Scott, brought him some data and statistical analyses from field trials on potatoes, together with a copy of R.A. Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Pitman checked the calculations and studied the Fisher book, which led to continuing collaboration with the Department of Agriculture on its field trials. Pitman later described himself as 'a mathematician who strayed into Statistics'; nevertheless, his contributions to statistical and probability theory, to be described below, were substantial.

Pitman early became involved in university administration, mainly because he considered the place was so badly managed, and was appointed to the Council, the university's governing body. Much of the academic administration was run by the Board of Studies, a body comprising prominent citizens and other outside people, while the Professorial Board functioned only as a disciplinary body. Eventually he was able to persuade the Board of Studies to transfer its functions to the Professorial Board.

Later he was active in negotiations that enabled the university to move from its rather cramped site on the Domain to the Rifle Range in Sandy Bay; the proposal was initiated in 1939 but the move did not occur until 1955 and later. Then, in the early 1960s, he arranged with the Chairman of the Hydro-Electric Commission for moves to jointly acquire a computer.

During this period he adopted a motto from the introduction to the poem, 'The Testament of Beauty', by Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. It begins

Mortal Prudence, handmaid of divine Providence
hath inscrutable reckoning with Fate and Fortune;
We sail a changeful sea through halcyon days and storm
and when the ship laboureth, our stedfast purpose
trembles like the compass in a binnacle; from which follows the motto
Our stability is but balance, and conduct lies
in masterful administration of the unforeseen.

A reading of Richard Davis' Open to Talent, a centenary history of the university, gives the impression that Pitman did exert considerable influence, often behind the scenes, because of his 'masterful administration of the unforeseen'.

The Orr case, which has been adequately documented elsewhere, created much controversy in the university. Peter Sprent, a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics in 1956 and now Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Dundee University, writes that 'there is internal bickering fanned by loonie-left activists. It was only some years later that I discovered these fools had spread scurrilous tales about Pitman's role in the Orr affair, and that some UK statisticians were gullible enough to believe them.'

During World War II, Pitman was Wing Training Officer for 6 Wing Air Training Corps stationed in northern Tasmania. This is a part-time appointment but was in fact virtually a full-time job; it involved travel from Hobart to Evandale, a distance of about 170 kilometres, several times a week.

Professional Societies

Pitman was active in the formation of the Australian Mathematical Society in 1956. H. Oliver Lancaster FAA, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Statistics, University of Sydney, writes

Edwin Pitman became the second President of the Australian Mathematical Society, in 1959 and 1960, following Thomas MacFarland Cherry. He was very successful as President in a period of consolidation and extension. He was an excellent chairman of committees, always held in a friendly atmosphere.

He also took an active part in the Summer Research Institutes organized by the Mathematical Society, and used them as a sounding board for his research on statistical inference.

He was a renowned member of the Statistical Society of Australia, attending its biennial conferences. In 1978 the Statistical society established the Pitman Medal, as recorded in the Australian Journal of Statistics 21(1979) 173-4

In recognition of the unique, original and influential contributions of E.J.G. Pitman to the theory of Statistics and Probability, the Central Council of the Statistical Society of Australia resolved in August 1977 to 'institute the award of a gold medal to a member of the Society for high distinction in Statistics', to be named the Pitman medal, and that 'Professor Pitman be awarded the first of these medals'.

The President of the Society, Dr C.A. McGilchrist, in presenting the Medal, said

With little formal training in Statistics and few contacts with fellow statisticians, he produced work of such outstanding quality as to earn for him an international reputation and to have a substantial effect on the development of statistical method, particularly in the inferential and non-parametric fields. For many Australian statisticians he has a very special place. We, on the Australian continent, have a tendency to feel isolated and his work is a clear indication that isolation is as much a state of mind as it is of geographical location.

Pitman had been elected an Honorary Life Member of the Society in 1966; he was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1954, in the first group of elected Fellows.

Research

Pitman's published work comprises 21 papers and a monograph. Much of his research has been presented in lectures and in other ways. He has said, 'I've never given a thought to publications. I've thought I'd solved a mathematical problem, but anyone else could solve it...' Nevertheless, the published work has been very influential, in clarifying the underlying ideas of inference and in defining new and relevant concepts. The reason for this may be found in the Preface to his 1979 publication Some Basic Theory for Statistical Inference, described as 'an attempt to present some of the basic mathematical results required for statistical inference with some elegance as well as precision...The topics treated are simply those that I have been able to do to my own satisfaction to this date.' This is an interesting remark also because Pitman was in his 82nd year when the book was published, even if its greater part may have been written a little earlier.

Pitman's 1936 paper, 'Sufficient statistics and intrinsic accuracy', Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 32, 567-579, defines the class of probability distributions that admits a complete sufficient statistic and also gives a critical account of the related concepts of information and intrinsic accuracy. It yields priority to Darmois(1), which however is a mere statement of results. In later work(2), Pitman discusses the limits on accuracy of estimation and the inapplicability of the information concept in non-regular cases. His two papers(3) on inference about location and scale parameters are classics; they define clearly the class of continuous distributions to which the theory may be applied and the limitations to which the inferences drawn from the analysis are subject.

Pitman presented the first systematic account of non-parametric inference(4) and lectured extensively on the subject, both in Australia and in the United States. The kernel of the subject, as described by him, is 'Suppose that the sum of two samples A, B is the sample C. Then A, B are discordant if A is an unlikely sample from C.' Again, he writes, 'The approach to the subject, starting from the sample and working towards the population instead of the reverse, may be a bit of a novelty'; and later, 'the essential point of the method is that we do not have to worry about the populations which we do not know, but only about the sample values which we do know'.

The notes of the 'Lectures on Non-parametric Inference' given in the United States, though never published, have been widely circulated and have had a major impact on the development of the subject. Among the new concepts introduced in these Lectures are asymptotic power, efficacy, and asymptotic relative efficiency.

The 1957 paper(5) is a lengthy review of Fisher's Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference, giving a critique of Fisher's presentation of significance tests and of fiducial inference; and the 1965 paper(6) is a more general discussion of inference, bringing out the central significance of the likelihood ratio.

A major contribution to probability theory is his elegant treatment of the behaviour of the characteristic function in the neighbourhood of the origin, in three papers(7). This governs such properties as the existence of moments. There are also interesting properties of the Cauchy distribution(8), and of subexponential distributions(9).

Although Pitman's work advanced the theory, he was also always concerned with the use to which results could be put. In his treatment of the Cramér-Rao Inequality, for instance, he states, 'We want to apply the Cramér-Rao inequality to statistics that we do not know, and so the regularity conditions should ask as little as possible of the statistic S...and should be mainly concerned with the family of measures which we know completely'. Elsewhere(10) he remarks 'Regularity conditions for theoretical results are often flung down with scant regard for the possible user. They are often too strong, and they are often difficult to verify in actual cases'. With this consideration in mind, he defines smooth families of measures in such a way that every statistic with essentially bounded variance from such a measure is regular.

The 1937 paper(11), in which the property of closeness of an estimator is defined and discussed, has received little attention until recent years. It was a response to Karl Pearson's paper(12) which raises the question of what is the best estimator of a parameter. Pitman sagely remarks that 'any definition of "better" and "best" must depend on the use which is to be made of the estimate'; he then goes on to define 'closeness' as a property defined in terms of probability inequalities, unlike other criteria based on moments. This criterion has not proved popular, possibly on account of the difficulty in applying it; also, it is not transitive though this does not detract from the validity of the criterion 'closest'.

It is puzzling that this paper should have appeared within a year of Pearson's paper, in view of slow communications between continents in that era; it is possible that Pitman was developing this criterion even before he saw Pearson's paper.

In 1991, a symposium on 'Pitman's Measure of Closeness' was held at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The conference proceedings were published as a 330-page issue of Communications in Statistics; subsequently three of the contributors published a monograph on the subject, entitled Pitman's Measure of Closeness: A Comparison of Statistical Estimators. It seems unlikely that Pitman was aware of this work.

Pitman's research, although encompassed in relatively few published papers, has been influential because each contribution has been the result of mature and careful crafting. The conditions imposed on results are the minimum required for precision, and chosen for their applicability by the user. These qualities are especially exemplified in the work on inference about location and scale parameters, and the treatment of the Cramér-Rao variance bounds.

Visiting Appointments

Pitman was much in demand as a visiting lecturer, especially in the United States. His first contact with statisticians outside Australia was in 1948-49, when he was invited to visit Columbia University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton. It was on this visit that he developed his methods of nonparametric inference. His next visit to the United States was in 1957, when he was appointed a Visiting Professor at Stanford.

After his retirement in 1962, he was able to travel more frequently. In 1963 he visited Berkeley, where he contributed to the International Research Seminar at the Statistical laboratory, and then to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He spent 1965 at the University of Adelaide. For 1966 and 1967, the University of Melbourne appointed him as Visiting Professor, where he did further work on the behaviour of characteristic functions, as well as exploring some novel properties of the Cauchy distribution. In 1969 he visited the University of Chicago. At the University of Dundee in 1973 and at Melbourne in 1974 he put the finishing touches to the monograph.

Pitman was a shrewd judge of colleagues. Of Abraham Wald, whom he met at Columbia University, he said, 'I admired him very much. He was a damn' good mathematician. I gave a seminar, and I realized he knew exactly what I'd said, and understood it all. And he was very modest and very kind.' However, of Neyman he said, 'I never got anything from him, in conversation or hearing him lecture. He'd done most of his best work before I met him, and of course, people differ in what they get from a presentation. He didn't always do me justice in his writings and lectures...I'll just mention that Neyman and I got on all right; he was a splendid host and used to have lots of parties; it was wonderful being in his department (at Berkeley) for a while.'

Much of Pitman's research was carried out to clarify the work of R.A. Fisher. He had a good relationship with Fisher, whom he entertained in his home in Hobart when Fisher visited Australia in 1953. However, after Pitman wrote a justly critical review of Fisher's Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference, there was coolness between them. Later, Fisher's daughter, Joan Box, brought them together, although the Fisher monograph was never discussed again.

Awards and Honours

Edwin Pitman's contribution to statistical theory, and to mathematics generally, was widely recognized. He was elected to high status in several professional societies: in 1948, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; in 1954, a Fellow of the Academy; in 1956, a Member of the International Statistical Institute; in 1965, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; in 1966, an Honorary Life Member of the Statistical Society of Australia; in 1967 and 1968, an Honorary Life Member of the Mathematical Society of Tasmania and the Australian Mathematical Society respectively. As already mentioned, he was the eponymous first recipient of the Pitman Medal. In 1981 the American Statistical Association recorded on videotape a lecture by him, for historical purposes.

The University of Tasmania awarded an Honorary D.Sc. in 1977, his eightieth year; and in 1987, to mark his ninetieth birthday, named the Mathematics Library the Pitman Collection.

Reminiscences

Since Edwin Pitman outlived most of his contemporaries, those who remember him are mainly former students. Evan Williams, a student of Pitman in the 1930s, has written(13) in the introduction to a dedicatory volume

Pitman's contributions to statistics are characterized by depth of insight, rigour of treatment, clarity of expression and elegance of style. We hope that we have been able to mirror some of these qualities in the papers presented here. This publication is a means of expressing our gratitude to Pitman, who has been, and remains, an inspiring teacher and friend...Pitman has always been modest about his work, leaving the results to speak for themselves. In his first paper on distribution-free inference he describes his approach as "a bit of a novelty". He has seldom engaged in controversy, believing that it is more profitable to find and publish the facts, and that any conclusions demonstrably false will soon be forgotten.

Peter Sprent, a student of Pitman in the 1940s, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Dundee, provides the following insights

On first acquaintance, I summed up Edwin Pitman as somewhat cool and aloof, perhaps a little indifferent to those around him. I was misled because Edwin was so highly organized and self-disciplined that he conducted himself - in public at any rate - with almost military precision. He would have achieved less both as an academic and as an administrator had he not led such a disciplined life. In his own University he was remembered as a key figure in a small group who steered an under-staffed, poorly financed and sometimes badly administered University through turbulent seas to calmer waters...Edwin's most endearing characteristic was modesty about his achievements. He gave a course on inference, culminating in a treatment of asymptotic relative efficiency, not even telling us it was his concept.

He was not without humour. Asked to describe his field of interest to a group of mathematicians, his response was 'Pure but bold', which he later elaborated as 'A pure mathematician bold enough to venture into statistics'.

Geoffrey S. Watson, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Princeton, was a student of Pitman for the academic year 1948-49 at the institute of Statistics in the University of North Carolina. In his article 'A Boy from the Bush'(14) he writes

Pitman's ability to go to the heart of any question took my breath away. He is justly famous for his contributions to statistical inference...the only lecture notes I still read were those from his Course 'Applied Probability'. It is a tragedy that they were not typed and circulated, like his notes on 'Nonparametrics', for they contained much novel material, and many results that were later proved and published by others, usually by much more cumbersome and less insightful methods.

And later, in correspondence

Applied Probability was my favourite course and I wish that that was the one I had tried to get typed up. He started with samples from the uniform distribution and used all sorts of tricks for all sorts of problems. For many years I saw a stream of papers with some of these results appear in the journals. I wept when I saw a paper on Spacings, with clumsy proofs and much hoohah...I emphasize that this (Pitman's notes) was an entirely original selection and arrangement of probability material.

Ingram Olkin, Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, was also a student of Pitman in the 1948-9 academic year. He recalls some of Pitman's innovations

He coined the term squariance, which avoided issues of how to define variance, with a denominator n or n-1. This never caught on, but it is still a good idea. He also coined the term 'efficacy', and used it extensively. But I forget what his definition was.

Donald Ylvisaker, Director, Division of Statistics at UCLA, was a student at Stanford in 1957; he writes

One prizes those contacts, however small, with a great man...I have always marvelled at my good fortune in having learned some nonparametrics from Pitman...One went to such classes to see a master at work - sly calculations, down-to-earth language, clues on taste.

Describing an oral examination before Pitman and others

I got through his portion and the sympathetic questioning of the other committee members. There followed a tortuous fifteen minutes during which I was dragged through a mind-twisting and nonstandard problem of the type that Pitman seemed to enjoy. Later he took me aside: You are one of the better students here and we are going to pass you, but you should become interested in Probability and Statistics'...It took me much too long to understand that he was exactly on target, and I view this episode now as an indication of what an astute man he was.

Bruce Brown, Reader in Mathematics at the University of Tasmania, was a graduate student at Melbourne in 1966 and his thesis was examined by Pitman. He writes of the experience

He examined my M.Sc. and hauled me over the coals over it, in his inimitable manner, which was very beneficial to me...Before that, I recall him in the tea room, which had a cross bar well above head height. I remember him lightly jumping up then hanging from it, saying how good it was for the spine. Apart from being impressed with the athleticism of a man in his late 60's, I was left with the impression which I later confirmed from his mathematical work as being characteristic - of spareness; being wiry, ascetic, minimalist. These characteristics also were part of his personality, part of which was (apparently) not ever for a moment suffering a fool gladly.

Family and Community Activity

No chronicle of Edwin Pitman's life and achievements would be complete without due recognition of the contribution of his wife Elinor. Elinor Hurst was the youngest member of a large Hobart family; she was educated at the Friends School where she was Dux, and at the University of Tasmania where she graduated in Arts. She and Edwin were married on 7 January 1932. They resided in a large sandstone house, then on the outskirts of Hobart, where Elinor was able to create a tranquil home environment in which Edwin could carry on his work. They had four children: Jane, now Reader in Mathematics at the University of Adelaide; Mary (Mrs John Baldwin), Professor of Environmental Science at Concordia University, Montreal; Edwin Arthur (Ted), a civil engineer with the Tasmanian Department of Main Roads; and James, Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

To Elinor must go much of the credit for the success of his travels overseas, when he took his family with him. Elinor simply established the home environment in the new location, as well as providing support for his work and for entertaining. The daughter Mary writes of the home life in the United States

Our lives as a family were entirely organized around his. His work was considered most important, and he liked to work at home, with breaks for lunch, tea, and dinner; one room of the downstairs, what might have been a den off the dining room, was used as his study, and he worked there....After dinner he normally read aloud to us, Dickens and Trollope. He decided when we would have family outings, and what they would be.

Describing their visit to the United States in 1948-49, she writes

Just before our departure he took Jane and me to a College basketball game between North Carolina and George Washington. These were things that we never did before or after in Tasmania with my father, who was not usually very interested in sports; but he certainly tried to see that we experienced American culture, and made an effort to participate. We made a family expedition to see Ringling Bros Circus, which was very impressive, and the highlight of our time in Chapel Hill. My father always liked circuses, and juggling, and took Jim to the Circus when young. Even as late as 1989, when I was out visiting (Hobart), I organized tickets for him to go with Ted and Ted's children to the Russian Circus which he thoroughly enjoyed. (When he went into the Army for the first World War, he actually did entertainment and magic shows.)

When at Chapel Hill, the Pitmans were entertained by, among others, Harold and Suzanna Hotelling, who used to hold a monthly Sunday afternoon occasion for graduate students, faculty and visitors. These gatherings had a lasting impression, for after their return to Hobart, Pitman started having Sunday afternoon teas for selected mathematics students, members of the department and others.

Edwin Pitman enjoyed an active social life. He was keen on theatre, and in 1933 produced the play 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep', with brother Charles as Stage Manager. He joined a group of Bridge players, who met every Saturday night when in Hobart until the late 1950s. He also played tennis, including the occasional game of Royal Tennis at the local court.

He was an active member of the Church of England in Australia and took part in the negotiations that led to its transformation to the Anglican Church of Australia. At various times he served on the Diocesan Council, the Tasmanian Synod, and as a delegate to the Australian General Synod. He was a member of the Christ College Trust, the body responsible for Christ College at the University of Tasmania, Hutchins School in Hobart and Launceston Grammar School.

Final Years

In April 1982, three months after their golden wedding anniversary, Elinor Pitman suffered a stroke, which left her partly paralysed but with mind and speech unimpaired. Despite persistent encouragement from Edwin, she did not regain the confidence to walk without assistance. Nevertheless, they were able to go on outings together, including concerts and the theatre, thanks to the provision of wheelchair access at many venues in Hobart. Eventually Elinor moved to a nursing home.

In 1991 Edwin fell and fractured his femur. He then moved from their home in Davey Street to a serviced apartment at the Derwent Waters Residential Club in Claremont, north of Hobart. As this was not sufficiently comfortable, he moved to a nursing home at Kingston, south of Hobart, where he was joined by Elinor, and where Elinor continues to reside.

On his death, on 21 July 1993, Edwin was buried at the Hobart Regional Cemetery in Kingston. He lives on in the memory of many of us who are grateful for his life and legacy.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol.10, No.2, 1994. It was written by Evan J. Williams, who works in the Department of Statistics, University of Melbourne.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to P.O. Bishop, Mary Baldwin (née Pitman), Bruce Brown, John Jenkin, Ingram Olkin, Edwin Arthur (Ted) Pitman, James Pitman, Jane Pitman, Peter Sprent, Geoffrey Watson and Donald Ylvisaker for their comments and contributions.

Notes

• (1) Darmois, G. 'Sur les lois de probabilité à estimation exhaustive', C.R. Acad. Sci. 200 (1935), 1265-1266.
• (2) Pitman, E.J.G., 'The Cramér-Rao inequality', Aust. J. Statist. 20 (1978), 60-74; and Some Basic Theory for Statistical Inference, London: Chapman and Hall, (1979).
• (3) Pitman, E.J.G., 'The estimation of the location and scale parameters of a continuous population of any given form', Biometrika 30, (1939) 391-421; and 'Tests of hypotheses concerning location and scale parameters', Biometrika 31, (1939) 200-215.
• (4) Pitman, E.J.G., 'Significance tests which may be applied to samples from any populations', Suppl. J. R. Statist. Soc. 4, (1937), 119-130; 'Significance test which may be applied to samples from any populaitons. II. The correlation coefficient test', Suppl. J. R. Statist. Soc. 4, (1937), 225-232; and 'Significance tests which may be applied to samples from any populations. III. The analysis of variance test', Biometrika 29, (1938), 322-335.
• (5) Pitman, E.J.G., 'Statistics and science', J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 25, (1957), 322-330.
• (6) Pitman, E.J.G., 'Some remarks on statistical inference', Proc. Int. Res. Seminar, Berkeley (Bernoulli-Bayes-Laplace Anniversary Volume), (1965), pp.209-216. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• (7) Pitman, E.J.G., 'On the derivatives of a characteristic function at the origin'. Ann. Math. Statist. 27, (1956), 1156-1160; 'Some theorems on characteristic functions of probability distributions'. Proc. 4th Berkeley Symp. Math .Statist. Probab. II, (1961) 383-402; and 'On the behaviour of the characteristic function of a probability distribution in the neighbourhood of the origin'. J. Aust. Math. Soc. 8, (1968), 432-443.
• (8) Pitman, E.J.G., (with E.J. Williams). 'Cauchy-distributed functions of Cauchy variates'. Ann. Math. Statist. 38, (1967), 916-918.
• (9) Pitman, E.J.G., 'Subexponential distribution functions'. J. Aust. Math. Soc. A29, (1980), 337-347.
• (10) Pitman, E.J.G., 'Reminiscences of a mathematician who strayed into statistics. In The Making of Statisticians, ed. J. Gani, (1982), pp.112-125. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• (11) Pitman, E.J.G., 'The 'closest' estimates of statistical parameters', Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 33, (1937), 212-222.
• (12) Pearson, K., 'Method of moments and method of maximum likelihood', Biometrika 28 (1936), 34-59.
• (13) Williams, E.J. (ed.), Studies in Probability and Statistics (1974). Jerusalem: Academic Press.
• (14) Gani, J. (ed.) The Craft of Probabilistic Modelling (1986). New York: Springer-Verlag, pp;43-60.

Written by S.R. Hall and A.McL. Mathieson.

• Introduction
• Background
• Scientific contribution
• Structure elucidation
• Contributions to academia
• Contributions to the profession
• On the sporting field
• Service to the community
• A memorial tribute
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Bibliography

Ted Maslen's premature death on 2 February 1997, during a long distance run, shocked his many friends and colleagues around the world. A man of great energy and diverse talents, he made substantial contributions to the community and to sport as well as to Australian science.

Introduction

Prior to the Second World War, only a few scientists in Australia were involved in atomic structure studies using X-ray diffraction techniques. These were J. Shearer in the Physics Department of the University of Western Australia, D.P. Mellor in the Chemistry Department of the University of Sydney and, to a limited extent, J.S. Anderson in the Chemistry Department of the University of Melbourne. At the University of Adelaide, in the Physics Department, there were studies of electron scattering by R.S. Burdon.

During the War, the countries that normally supplied scientific equipment and materials to Australia were fully occupied with the provision of war needs. So, by necessity, Australian scientists had to devise means of production and that without delay. Thus, for example, an optical glass industry was created, optical devices manufactured, radar equipment constructed, and so on, as detailed in Mellor's volume of 'Australia in the War of 1939-1945' [1].

With the end of the War, the sense of confidence in the capability of science to solve problems and to contribute to post-war development encouraged the Federal government to support scientific research. One result was an effort to introduce advanced techniques by attracting scientists from overseas to contribute their knowledge and by arranging that young scientists in Australia proceed overseas to learn and then return to develop their new skills. As a result, nuclei of X-ray crystallography groups were created in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

In Perth specifically, C.J. Birkett Clews was appointed to the Chair of Physics of the University of Western Australia, having studied structure analysis by single-crystal X-ray diffraction at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He initiated a number of students into the subject, one of whom was E.N. Maslen. After graduating BSc (Hons) in Physics in 1956, Maslen went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

In Oxford, he worked with Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Nobel Prize, Chemistry, 1964). His work there was mainly on the X-ray structure determination of certain antibiotic compounds but even in this biochemical area he gave evidence of an interest in the more physical aspects of crystallography. In 1960, he was awarded his DPhil. On his return to the University of Western Australia as a lecturer in the Physics Department, he proceeded to lay the foundations for what was to become a major school of crystallography, thus becoming a key figure in the development of this subject in Australia. He was a pioneer and later an established figure in the investigation of chemical bonding by precision studies of the electron density distribution in crystals. He contributed to many theoretical and experimental aspects of X-ray diffraction and explored basic questions in quantum chemistry. Latterly he utilized the great potential of synchrotron X-radiation in his studies. He was responsible for the formation of the Crystallography Centre at the University of Western Australia in 1972 and was its director until 1993 when he became head of the Physics Department.

As a recognized authority in the precision electron-density study of crystals, Ted was prominent in presenting the work of his group at international meetings. As a result, he became a important figure in the activities of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS).

Background

Edward Norman Maslen was born at Kalgoorlie on 8 August 1935. His parents were William Michael Maslen, born on 1 October 1907 at Greenbushes, WA and Nellie Victoria Maslen (née Detez) born on 27 March 1905 at Merredin, WA. His father joined the Accounts Branch of the State Public Service in 1924 and, following correspondence courses in accountancy and part-time studies in English and Economics at the University of Western Australia, was attached to the Public Works Water Supply Department as an accountant. It is of interest to note that, at this time, he took up rowing with the Swan River Rowing Club. Because of changes associated with the Depression of 1929, he was transferred to Kalgoorlie. He completed his accountancy studies in 1933 and secured qualification with the Commonwealth Institute of Accountants with top marks for the State in Mercantile Law and Taxation. In 1934, he was admitted to the Chartered Institute of Secretaries with the second-highest marks in Australasia. In 1940, he became Officer-in-Charge of the Water Supply Department in Geraldton where Ted's schooling began at Saint Patrick's College (formerly Christian Brothers' College). His mother used to say that, even as a youngster, Ted always got into things and you didn't know what he would be up to next, indicative of his inquiring mind and superabundant energy. Ted was the second child and had an older brother, Victor, and a sister, Sue. All three became physicists, graduates of the University of Western Australia. In 1951, Ted won a General Exhibition and, in 1952, went to the University of Western Australia and St George's College to do a science degree. He was an outstanding student, gaining the Geology Prize in his first year and a Hackett Scholarship for 1955. He also became involved in student affairs, being elected in 1955 as President of the Guild of Undergraduates. 1956 was a momentous year for Ted. Apart from his role as President, he was very active in a student appeal to raise funds for a medical school within the University. For the latter, while competing in an athletic meeting, he inadvertently spiked himself and as a result contracted tetanus which was then a serious and often fatal disease. This was front-page news for several days and, even now, many people identify him as 'the student for whom traffic was diverted to keep his Royal Perth Hospital ward quiet'. This episode provided a very positive spin-off. The publicity was largely responsible for ensuring a generous subscription to the medical school fund and there is a photograph of a young, beaming Ted Maslen sitting up in a hospital bed handing over a cheque for £10,000 to the fund raisers. While all this was going on, Ted was a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship, the announcement of which was withheld until he recovered. He was awarded the scholarship in 1956 and went to Oxford University at St John's College for the next three years. He completed his DPhil. studying molecular structure by X-ray diffraction techniques under the supervision of Dr Hodgkin. This was an inspirational period for Ted and was a dominant factor in his life-long interest in crystallography.

At Oxford, he met Sheila Robinson. Sheila's parents were Cyrus William Robinson, born on 29 October 1903, and Nora Teresa Robinson, born on 3 July 1905, both of Sunderland, England. Sheila and Ted were married in 1960, just before Ted took up a lectureship in the Physics Department of the University of Western Australia. They had three sons, Patrick, Daniel and Mark and five daughters, Barbara, Rebecca, Nicola, Catherine and Frances. The youngest of the boys, Mark, is following in his father's footsteps, having graduated from the University of Western Australia with First Class Honours in Physics. Several of the children, Patrick, Barbara and Nicola have followed Ted's interest and have degrees in Physical Education. Rebecca has degrees in Law and Commerce, Frances is an accountant, Catherine a physiotherapist and Daniel is studying viticulture.

This record of Ted's formative years reveals the personal characteristics of energy, enthusiasm, determination and personal involvement that in adult life were to manifest themselves in his dedication to his scientific research, his concern for his family, his students and, in the wider context, the University and the community.

Scientific contribution

During his forty years as a scientist, Ted Maslen contributed to almost every facet of crystallographic research. His main interest came to be precision electron density studies, but he was prepared to embark enthusiastically on allied projects ranging from the purely theoretical such as the solution of quantum mechanical systems, to the totally practical such as the design of collimators and diffraction instruments. Above all he was a determined individualist, confident enough in his abilities to 'go it alone' in a new field if expertise was not close at hand.

Structure elucidation

X-rays are scattered by electrons and the periodic scattering from atoms in crystals leads to interference, that is, diffraction. The electron density distribution of a crystal can be determined from measured X-ray diffraction intensities, provided the relative phase of each diffraction vector is derivable from other considerations. The determined distribution corresponds to the time-averaged integrated electron density of the atoms in the crystal and includes features due to bonding and vibrational modes. This approach leads to an atomic structure of the molecule or ionic entity in terms of a three-dimensional electron density distribution, thus defining its geometric parameters. Neutron diffraction provides similar structural information but in terms of atomic nuclei, so that a combination of X-ray and neutron diffraction can be useful and instructive.

Maslen's initial X-ray diffraction experience was the structural study of a pyrimidine (1), as part of his Physics honours thesis at the University of Western Australia. His doctorate from Oxford was for work on X-ray structure analyses of larger molecules of natural origin, the important antibiotics, cephalosporin C (2) and phenoxymethylpenicillin (3). Analysis of the latter allowed exploration of how sharpened Fourier coefficients improved structure determination (45).

On return to the University of Western Australia, Maslen followed two structural lines: one derived from his experience at Oxford on natural product molecules, while the other, associated with the structural properties of molecules with charged groups, zwitterions, focused mainly on aromatic molecules with amino and sulphonic acid groups. In addition, as appropriate to a physics department, his interest was in more general diffraction matters, particularly in measurement procedures that could improve the precision of structural studies. In time, this theme assumed dominance.

In respect of natural products, this was a period when X-ray diffraction became an important physical procedure capable of revealing the total structure of these relatively complex organic molecules, including their absolute configuration and details of conformation. By comparison with the more conventional methods of organic chemical analysis and synthesis, the diffraction approach provided unambiguous information about molecular structure, even though, at that time, it was a slow process because each diffraction intensity on film needed to be estimated by eye and the electron densities had to be calculated manually or with very slow computers. An additional obstacle was that suitable heavy-atom derivatives of the target compounds were required to assist in the phasing process, and these had to form suitable crystals. Nevertheless, organic chemists keenly sought the results of these analyses and Maslen determined the structures of a number of derivatives of natural products (5-10) using heavy atom and anomalous dispersion techniques. For methyl melaleucate iodoacetate (7, 7a), the anomalous scattering of CuKa radiation by an iodine atom was utilised to establish the phase angles of many reflections. This led to an estimation of the imaginary component, Df”, of the scattering factor for iodine (48).

Maslen determined other natural product structures (11, 12) using the so-called 'direct methods' phasing procedures based on the statistical structure-invariant relationships of Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman (Nobel Prize, Chemistry, 1985) which did not require a 'heavy' atom. In the second case, the normalized structure factors were not distributed evenly through diffraction space due to high anisotropic atomic displacement parameters and Maslen established a correction (18) (see 49,50) that led to an improvement in the modelling of the distribution, and hence to the solution of the structure by 'direct methods'.

Maslen's work on amino-benzene-sulphonic acids and amides (13-17) was aimed at studying the interaction between substituent groups attached to a benzene ring and a comparison of their hydrogen-bonding. In the case of ß-sulphanilamide (16), three-dimensional X-ray film data (a major measurement effort at that time) were used in conjunction with two-dimensional counter neutron diffraction data. Since the neutron data referred to nuclei, this provided improved information about bond length variations in the disubstituted benzene and in the related charged and neutral groups. His X-ray study of orthanilic acid revealed peaks of electron density above and below the plane of the benzene ring adjacent to the C – C bonds, indicative of p bonding contributions. This, and several other studies, highlighted for Maslen the opportunities for acquiring detailed information on chemical bonding from diffraction measurements.

During the 1960s he did other structural studies (19-25) to resolve specific chemical problems. However, as structure solution methodologies were better established, Maslen's focus shifted more to determining the fine detail of electron density distributions around and between atoms. With the creation of the Crystallography Centre at the University of Western Australia in 1972, structure analysis came under the general supervision of Dr A.H. White of the Chemistry Department. Even so, Maslen's interest in this aspect of crystallography continued throughout the 1970s, as is indicated in (26-43).

Electron density and bonding

Maslen's precision electron density studies, and particularly his use of the promolecule concept, were his most important and prolific contributions to crystallography. He became a recognised expert and respected authority in this field, though, not infrequently, his research directions and findings were somewhat controversial. As in most of his endeavours, Ted was a confident individualist who was undeterred by the consensus view or from offering unconventional interpretations, and this occasionally led to interesting editorial exchanges when the work was submitted for publication. His advice to colleagues on these occasions was 'one must always be prepared to educate referees'.

The electron density associated with bonding between atoms relates only to the outer electrons of the individual atoms, and therefore constitutes only a minor component of the total electron density distribution determined from a diffraction study. It is best observed by calculating the electron density difference distribution (or map), Dr = r_exp – r_calc between the experimental electron density, r_exp, derived from the X-ray diffraction data, and the corresponding distribution, r_calc, calculated from the co-ordinates and scattering capabilities of the non-bonded spherical atoms in the structural model as modified by their vibrational characteristics. Because these differences are usually small, the choice of modelling parameters that influence r_calc is a highly critical step.

Maslen's initial studies were on the bonding densities between carbon atoms. He recognised the importance of appropriate X-ray scattering curves in the resolution of Dr and applied the only theoretical curves available at the time, namely that by McWeeny [2] concerning bonded carbon. His examination (75) of the theoretical values of McWeeny in relation to graphite showed that, within the aromatic plane of the molecule, there is little deviation from isotropy. Prior to this treatment, the imaginary contribution to the scattering factor had been largely ignored and so he undertook to derive this for carbon in the case of diamond and graphite. These results showed the relation of this component to the antisymmetric distribution arising from s bonding in the case of diamond and the build-up between the carbon atoms, a result similar to that demonstrated by Dawson [3].

To determine the extent to which conventionally-measured diffraction data contained evidence of bonding, Maslen carried out a literature survey of electron density distributions (77). He observed that, for trigonally-bonded carbon, the aromatic C-C bonds contain a residual central peak of maximum ~0.2eA^-3 with half height extensions about 0.3A in and 0.75A perpendicular to the trigonal plane. The most critical conclusion from this study was that the use of least squares to refine the structural model as isolated spherical atoms could obscure the detail of electron density variations associated with bonding.

This latter realization focused his attention on the possible use of aspherical scattering factors in the multipole refinement approach of Stewart [4], which he first applied to 1,3,5-triacetylbenzene (78). In an extensive survey (79) of multipole applications he concluded that the use of bond-directed scattering factors (78) was preferable and this led to five studies using this approach (80-84). The first was a neutron diffraction study of powdered diamond, the second a re-analysis of the available X-ray data on diamond, while the third investigated different electron density models for silicon using existing highly-accurate absolute measurements. The fourth paper, on s-triazine, was a more complex study while, in the final paper, he examined melamine using nuclear-centred multipole density functions in which the radial exponents were varied.

In an invited review of advances in precision density studies (85), Maslen summarized the field at the time. He pointed out that 'it now appears possible to observe directly the effects of forces on the density, which previously were merely inferred. As a consequence, charge density analyses are being used to improve our understanding of a wide range of physical and chemical concepts and phenomena, such as the degree of ionicity and the strength of covalent forces in chemical bonding, the nature of metal-metal bonds, hydrogen bonding, photochemical reactions, superconductivity transitions and Jahn-Teller distortions.'

His review also foreshadowed a change in interest from the lighter elements and mono-atomic crystals to compounds containing heavier metals and longer-range interactions. This was at a time when heavy-atom structures were generally considered as unsuitable for precision analysis. In the study of several transition metal complexes (86, 87) he gave close attention to the region adjacent to the metal atom. In the redetermination (88) of the classical structure, copper sulphate pentahydrate, dominant density differences near two crystallographically-independent Cu atoms were related to the re-distribution of the Cu 3d electrons associated with bonding. He claimed that the polarized density resulted from second-nearest-neighbour interactions and that these were significant and important to bonding.

From this point on, Maslen showed a preference for studying families of compounds in which the structure remained unchanged except for the central metal atom. This enabled modifications in Dr distributions to be interpreted in terms of changes in the orbital distribution of the central metal atoms. In the study of Tutton's salts, (NH₄)₂M(SO₄)₂.-6(H₂O)₆, an isomorphous series with a divalent metal, M = Mg, Ni, Zn or Cu (95-99) by X-ray and neutron diffraction methods, Maslen observed that the Dr distributions near the metal atoms were similar except for differences arising from the d-electrons. An extensive examination followed of the nona-aqualanthanoid(III) tris(trifluoromethanesulphonates), [Ln(H₂O)₉](CF₃SO ₃)₃ complexes with Ln = La through to Lu, which form an isomorphous series of hexagonal structures (100, 101), and these presented an intriguing series of closely-related electron density maps.

Maslen's earlier density studies had involved predominantly 'neutral' atoms. This was because the partitioning of the electron density distribution is more difficult when atomic charges are involved and the Hirshfeld partitioning approach preferred by Maslen had to be applied judiciously. For example, the charges he determined for a series of transition metal perovskites, KMF₃, M = Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, and Zn (102-105) changed monotonically through the series but the polarization near Zn is significantly aspherical and the Zn, K and F atomic charges were +0.18, +0.47 and – 0.21e, respectively. That is, the determined polarity is consistent with conventional charges, but the magnitudes are less than the formal values (see also 121).

A study of the copper perovskite KCuF₃ (105) by Maslen guided the analysis of the more-difficult-to-crystallize superconducting compound YBa₂Cu₃O_7-x (106) in relation to determining a position-space model for the superconducting behaviour. It is evident from this and later studies (for example 126, 128, 133) that his views had moved away from the conventional wisdom of anion-anion interactions dominating the distribution of the electron density, to holding that the cation-cation interactions were more significant.

At about this juncture, Maslen's group became more concerned with the effect of extinction on their measurements of intensity. Extinction is an important universal effect in the measurement of intensities from even small single crystals and is due to multiple interference within the crystal. Correction for this effect is generally based on theoretical mathematical models derived originally by Darwin [5] and elaborated by Zachariasen [6] and others, which Maslen had used in his earlier Dr studies. However, in a careful analysis of data in relation to a-Al₂O₃ (67), Maslen revealed that the param
eters derived from this procedure were physically unrealistic, the corrections being rather sensitive to the weighting of the observations of the intense low-angle reflections. He devised an alternative procedure for the assessment of extinction, more closely allied to experiment. In this, corrections for extinction are evaluated in respect of equivalent reflections with different path lengths through the crystal (68, also 71-73). (Such 'corrected' intensities for equivalent reflections should, in principle, be equal.) Corrections by this procedure tended to be smaller than those based on minimizing the difference between F_obs and F_calc. The reliability of this procedure is, however, dependent on knowing the crystal shape accurately, the crystal being asymmetric, and on precisely measured intensities for symmetry-equivalent diffraction data (that is, the method is optimal for high-symmetry space groups).

From this time on, Maslen placed increasing reliance on the use of synchrotron radiation at the Photon Factory at Tsukuba in Japan, especially using off-focus beams to ensure better beam uniformity. The much greater beam intensity and monochromaticity greatly improved the signal/noise ratio of the measurements and this was important because he and his colleagues were early users of 'microcrystals' (that is, crystals less than 1000 microns³ in volume) to minimize extinction effects. This reduced the effect of random errors in the measurements and substantially enhanced definition of the density distributions. These improvements in precision provided the basis for an investigation of optical, electrostatic and magnetic properties attributable to aspherical electron density. Maslen's study of rhombohedral carbonates with Ca, Mg, and Mn (115-120) showed a correlation of the Dr distributions with physical properties of optical anisotropy. Lattice mode frequencies predicted from eigenvalues of the T and L tensors for the CO₃ rigid group motion in these structures were close to spectroscopic values. The Dr topography near the CO₃ groups showed the influence of the cations and correlated strongly with the refractive indices.

Maslen's interest in heavy-atom bonding extended across much of the periodic table, and included the rare-earth elements. Typical synchrotron studies were the rare earth oxides (139, 140) and the perovskite-type orthoferrites (133-5) in which strong magnetic interactions between heavy-metal atoms gave rise to pronounced bonding effects that were readily studied by r methods.

Maslen's use of the modelling factors that determined electron density distributions evolved considerably over his career. However, underpinning much of these efforts was the consistent application of the Hirshfield approach to partitioning electron density in relation to the individual atoms. The reasons for this are discussed in the next section. Definitive articles on X-ray scattering (64) and X-ray absorption (65) were contributed by Maslen to the International Tables for Crystallography.

The promolecule

The choice of the non-interacting spherical ground-state atomic model for the calculation of r_calc is critical to the interpretation of the measured electron density distribution, and is referred to as the 'promolecule' or independent atom model (IAM). The method of partitioning the electron density distribution, so as to allocate the proper charge component to the individual atom, has an important bearing on the efficacy of this approach in the study of chemical bonding.

Maslen carefully scrutinized the two available schemes for partioning, those of Bader and of Hirshfeld, using theoretical wavefunctions for forty heteronuclear diatomic molecules (141). The atomic charges derived by these procedures were compared closely with electronegativity differences and with dipole moments. The Hirshfeld procedure, in which component electron distributions are overlapping and continuous, was preferred and applied thereafter by Maslen and his colleagues in estimating atomic charges from X-ray diffraction data.

He illustrated the importance of the promolecule approach in determining chemical properties from electron densities with the study of atomic radii, atomic charges derived from partitioning and electrostatic energies (142). These results were compared with the corresponding quantities from theoretical and experimental studies of a large number of diatomic molecules. He pointed out that the promolecule intrinsically contains useful chemical information, the effect of which on the Dr distribution is sometimes mistakenly attributed to chemical bonding.

Subsequently, Maslen showed that the differences between experimental and accurate Hartree-Fock binding energies are strongly correlated with the classical
electrostatic interaction between spherical atoms for a large number of diatomic and polyatomic molecules (143). These results led to an estimate for the molecular extra correlation energy. He extended this approach (144) to test the IAM model with calculations of cohesive energies that compared favourably with the Madelung energies for a wide range of solids. IAM energies provide better estimates for the alkali halide lattices than do the Madelung energies.

In respect of atom size and charge in the alkali halides LiF, NaF and LiCl (145), Maslen claimed that the lowering of the potential energy, due to overlap of atomic electron densities, is an accurate approximation to the bonding energy.

Maslen also applied the IAM approach to the 3d transition metals (146), a class of solids the cohesive energy of which is not approximated by the classical electrostatic overlap energy due to the near-degenerate nature of the ground states. He showed that if the 3d metals were regarded as being in prepared states prior to bonding, the bonded electrostatic energies are better approximations to the observed binding energies.

Maslen's study of diatomic molecules led to a re-appraisal (147) of Berlin's theorem [7]. It had been observed experimentally that the central build-up of difference electron density typical of carbon-carbon bonds did not occur in the case of bonds N–O, O–O, Cl–Cl, and so on. Berlin's theorem underpinned the common assumption that an increase in the electron density at the mid-point of a covalent bond is essential to the stability of the bonded nuclei. While Berlin's theorem focused on the total electron density, which must be positive everywhere, the difference between the experimental density and the spherical model density may be positive or negative. In studies of theoretical electron densities for N₂ and F₂, Maslen observed that the only substantial contribution to the overall binding appeared to come from regions along the internuclear axis and close to the nuclei. According to this interpretation, the build-up of density near the mid-point of the bond plays almost no role in binding the nuclei and is not a necessary condition for binding.

Somewhat later, in his final publications in this area (148-152), Maslen stated that it was physically reasonable to subdivide the total electron density of the promolecule in proportion to each atom's contribution to the electrostatic potential. He assessed atomic charges as the differences between atomic numbers and the integrals of partitioned electron densities. Promolecular charges evaluated for 160 lattice-compounds indicated that cations acquire control over the electron distribution at the expense of the anions. He attempted to show a consistent relationship between the ground state electron configurations and the atomic radii in which the invariant component of the radius associated with the atomic cores can be equated with the value at which the integral of the density equals the number of the core electrons. The tests made on diatomic molecules were promising and would presumably have been pursued further had it not been for Maslen's untimely death.

Theoretical chemistry

During the 1980s, part of Maslen's research activity, and that of his students, was directed towards the application of the emerging symbolic computing methodologies. His use of algebraic packages, such as Mathematica and REDUCE, to tackle quite daunting quantum mechanical problems, was a tribute to his remarkable scientific versatility.

Maslen's papers (153-157) marked the first phase of a very determined attempt to find an exact closed-form expression for at least the ground-state wave function of helium. Though not successful in this, his work did lead to the discovery of a closed form for a second-order term in the expansion of that wave function, that had eluded previous attempts by others over a long period. Maslen's introductory paper opened by challenging the pessimistic view of the possibility of finding exact solutions for three – and four-body systems and series methods were applied in conjunction with a spherical polar co-ordinate system to the problem. However, simple exact expressions could only be obtained for early members of the series: even if this hurdle could be overcome, there still remained an infinite number of arbitrary coefficients to be determined. Maslen showed that this number could be reduced dramatically by taking account of the expected asymptotic behaviour of the wave function. The summary paper reflected on the question 'can an exact solution be obtained' and it concluded that this could be done if, in some representation, only a finite number of the arbitrary coefficients were non-zero. This set of papers greatly clarified the problems involved in seeking an exact wave function for helium.

Maslen followed with five exploratory papers (158-162) which, in addition to other useful results, threw light on the mathematical form of the exact wave function for helium and studied the relative merits of several sets of co-ordinates.

His next three papers (163-165) represent a second attempt to obtain the exact wave function for helium and great use is made of computer algebra to handle the heavy mathematical calculations. The first of these papers included an echo of his earlier comment in stating that the outlook for simple closed-form helium wavefunctions is more favourable than is generally believed. In (164), use is made of spherical polar co-ordinates to achieve full reduction of the second-order term to a closed form. However it was clear that the task of extending this achievement to higher-order terms would be immense. Paper (166) presents some useful reduction formulae for generalized hypergeometric functions of one variable while (167) derives a compact analytical formula for two-electron two-centre integrals over Slater functions. This work of Maslen and his co-workers has been recognized by Myers et al [8] as 'impressive both in its accomplishments and its innovative use of symbolic algebra'.

Primary research goal

While much of Ted Maslen's research was directed at understanding and resolving specific problems, a consistent goal throughout his career was the development of a unified view of chemical bonding. Probably the most succinct insights into what he saw as his 'holy grail' are contained within an eight-page document entitled A Unified View of Chemical Bonding, prepared in 1993 for internal circulation to his research students.

In this he states that to understand chemical bonding, precise knowledge is needed of the properties of atoms relevant to the interaction that brings them together. He observed that the topographies of the experimentally-determined aspherical densities are usually consistent with the view that the valence electrons that overlap with the cores of their neighbours are transferred by exchange repulsion to the interatomic regions of low electrostatic potential. However, he also stated his belief that regions remote from the atomic sites would reveal density information important to understanding physical and chemical phenomena. Thus from an initial concern with the density distribution between individual atoms, a more diversified view related to the distribution of cations is evident. Although his early death prevented a full development of this approach, his indelible legacy to the field of high-quality measurements and their perceptive evaluation has undoubtedly contributed significantly to the ultimate understanding of the chemical bond in terms of electron density distributions.

Contributions to academia

On his return to Australia from Oxford in 1960, Maslen began, with characteristic vigour, to activate the crystallography group. Though he expected of his students no less than he demanded of himself – the highest possible academic standards – his genuine concern for their progress and welfare meant that postgraduates were quickly attracted to his group. Over the years he supervized more than forty MSc and PhD students.

At Oxford, Maslen had been one of the early crystallographers to use electronic computers for structure determination. When he returned to Perth there was only one computer in Australia, SILLIAC, at the University of Sydney and Maslen made use of the facilities provided at that machine by Dr H.C. Freeman's group of crystallographers there. Although access to SILLIAC was a vast improvement over the use of calculators, a cycle of computing could still take the Perth group several weeks, and a local computer was clearly desirable. Maslen successfully campaigned, with Dr R. Dingle of the Physics Department and Dr J. Ross of the Psychology Department, for the purchase of a computer, and in 1962 an IBM 1620 was installed. Throughout the 1960s, crystallographers were the major users of the computing facility, both at the University of Western Australia and at most other university computing centres around the world. Maslen was a member of the University's Computer Coordinating Committee for many years and encouraged the University to take an important step in purchasing one of the world's first commercial time-sharing digital computers, a DEC PDP6, which was delivered in 1966. An attempt to control a Hilger and Watts four-circle diffractometer with the PDP6 was unsuccessful, but provided useful training for some students in real-time computing and machine control. Maslen soon recognised the potential of the minicomputer and
microcomputer as cost-effective computing options for crystallographers and physicists, and in the mid-1970s he argued vigorously that mainframe computers were no longer economical for universities.

During the period 1970-80, Maslen contributed much to university administration. In 1970, he became Chair of the University of Western Australia's Physical Sciences Research Grants Sub-committee. The 1970 Cole Report to the University Senate recommended that large-scale instrumentation be shared between departments. The combined efforts of Maslen and A.H. White of the Chemistry Department led to the establishment in 1972 of the Crystallography Centre with Maslen as director and White as deputy director. He held many other administrative posts, being an elected member of Professorial Board 1972-78 and 1984-86, a member of the University Research Committee 1973-78, of the Radiation Safety Committee from 1974 (Chair from 1977), and a member of the St George's College Council, 1978-87.

In addition, there were extra-curricular commitments: as a member of the Cancer Council (Western Australia) 1971-81, of the Radiological Council (Western Australia) 1974-85, and of the CSIRO State Committee for Western Australia 1976-80. He was a member of the Western Australian Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee 1970-75 and was secretary from 1978. Indifferent to the conventional trappings of ceremony, Maslen would arrive at the annual selection meeting, held at Government House under the chairmanship of the Governor, on his battered bike with his well-worn green case containing the papers and reports. While he had no direct say in the choice of the Scholar, he was an adept secretary, bringing an item of relevant information to the committee's attention at the crucial moment.

With some reluctance, Maslen became Head of the Physics Department in 1993. The department, like others in Australia, faced problems with decreasing student numbers and reduced budgets. Maslen played a leading role in developing biophysics courses at the University and it is arguable whether, without his leadership, this programme, which has grown from a handful of second-year students in 1995 to representation at all levels, would have happened at all.

The position of Physics Head in the mid-1990s was not easy. Redundancies were necessary. Almost without exception, however, his colleagues considered Maslen to be the right man at the helm for the times. His dealings with university administrators were not always so well received. In the first place, Maslen was very direct or, as a senior colleague put it, 'for him diplomacy was just another term for telling lies'. This is not to say that he was intentionally rude or abrasive but he was scrupulously honest and curried no favours, at any level. Ted was tenaciously outspoken and even passionate, both in committee and in correspondence. On campus and elsewhere, he was viewed as a valuable ally and a formidable foe.

In a letter in which Maslen expressed his concerns about current university decision-making, he wrote: 'Traditional academic protocols are a distillation of the collective wisdom over generations. Those protocols have never become tiresome restrictions on brilliant minds, but, on occasions, have held in check the mediocre and the hare-brained.'

Contributions to the profession

In 1974, Ted was Chairman of Topic 1, 'Real Atoms in Crystals', of the International Conference on 'Real Atoms and Real Crystals' that was sponsored by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) and the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and held in Melbourne. He was Vice-President of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (SCA) 1978-79 and its President 1980-81. He was a member of the IUCr Commission on Charge, Spin and Momentum Density 1975-81 and was elected to the IUCr Executive in 1984. For the 1987 Triennial Congress, Perth was selected as the conference venue and Ted appointed Chair of the Organising Committee. In order to contain costs, the Crystallography Centre eschewed professional support to deal with organizational details. In the event, there was a significant profit, the SCA, which underwrote the conference, being the beneficiary. This outcome arose for two reasons: attendance was greater than had been originally planned for, and the registration fees were in US dollars and there was a fortuitous shift in exchange rates during the conference. The resultant income is now used to help students attend crystallographic conferences. In 1997, in recognition of Ted's
efforts in respect of the Congress, these funds were called the 'E.N. (Ted) Maslen 1987 Studentships and Scholarships'.

Maslen's membership of the IUCr Executive ended in 1990 but, because he was a strong advocate of electronic publishing for IUCr journals, he was appointed to the post of IUCr Director of Archiving and Crystallographic Information 1990-1993. Prior to that he had chaired a working party on crystallographic information (1987-1990). This eventually resulted in the development of the Crystallographic Information File [9] that was adopted by the IUCr for data exchange and is now used widely in the structural sciences for journals and databases. He later became the Chairman of the IUCr Committee on Electronic Publishing, Dissemination and Storage of Information 1993-96.

Maslen also made a foundational contribution to the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) neutron-scattering group set up in the late 1950s as an interface between the Atomic Energy Commission and the universities. He was one of the first neutron scattering users at Lucas Heights and his group established an excellent collaborative presence at that facility. In the early years of the group, he would drive across the Nullarbor to AINSE with a car-load of research students. The driving was shared so that continuous progress could be made, and at change-over time the fresh driver would be required to fill the tank before getting behind the wheel. It then became a competition to see who could drive the car furthest on a single tankful of petrol. These cross-country expeditions on the then-unsurfaced Nullarbor 'highway' were part of student folklore. On one occasion Maslen managed to obtain some cheap accommodation for himself and his students in Sydney, only to find that no-one could sleep because of the incessant foot traffic outside their rooms in this particular Kings Cross Hotel. He complained to an incredulous hotel management but was given a refund.

On the sporting field

For his whole life, Ted was an intensely keen and competitive sportsman, especially in rowing and athletics. He is often remembered for his sporting achievements as a student. Although the University Athletic Club had been long established, there were just six members when Ted joined in 1952.

With him, there were no half-measures. For the next three summer vacations, he worked as a weighbridge clerk on the wheat bins some hundreds of kilometres from Perth but did not miss a Saturday afternoon competition at suburban Leederville Oval, travelling the long distance on his motor cycle. He was elected Captain of the Club in 1955. He also took up rowing at the University of Western Australia, joining the university boat club in 1952 and becoming club Captain in 1954.

At Oxford, he enthusiastically took to both academic work and sporting endeavour. One morning, he and a friend went by train to London, changed into running gear and ran non-stop from Marble Arch back to St John's – some sixty miles. His rowing prowess was honed at Oxford. His Isis eight took the Head of the River in 1957 and was the reserve crew for that year's annual Oxford-Cambridge clash. He was successful also in double sculling events. The trophy oars, suitably inscribed, hang proudly in the Maslen home. Ted acquired an Oxford half-blue.

In Perth, to ensure time for exercise, he carefully controlled how his time was allocated. As the family increased, Sheila had greater need of the car and Ted started to ride his bicycle to university. He rose at 5:30am, attended early morning mass and made breakfast and lunch sandwiches for the family, and then rode his bike some fifteen kilometres to the University of Western Australia campus. At the university, his end-of-day regime included an hour's run, often in the company of students and other staff, and then home by bike.

In spite of a tendency for his shoulder to dislocate, he liked to play cricket and football. On one such occasion when playing football at Oxford, his shoulder dislocated and he quietly asked a colleague in the other team if he would mind pulling on the arm to get it back into the socket. Ted played on but his colleague's concentration never quite recovered and Ted's team won easily.

In Western Australia, Ted stroked the senior eight from 1960 to 1970. University had not won a State eight's championship in eight years, then in 1963 Ted stroked a novice crew to victory. He subsequently rowed for Western Australia in the Kings Cup. In 1964, having stroked the University eight, the coxless four and the coxed four and been undefeated for the whole season, Ted was named Oarsman of the Year.

He was President of the University Athletic Club from 1960 to 1962. The club went on to become the State's most successful, and he remained a member for forty-five years. He was the ultimate 'club man'. He would run, walk, hurdle, jump, pole vault, to help his team score points and to encourage others. Ted is most fondly remembered for his Herculean efforts in the steeplechase. This event was always run on the hottest part of the day and Ted was always there – without a hat, and barefoot on a scorching track – trying to win or get a place, but above all to run a personal best time and score points for his club. He always gave 110% and invariably finished in a state of exhaustion, from which he quickly recovered to compete in the 5,000 metres a little later in the day, again to finish in a state of exhaustion but pleased with a good day's distance running.

In 1977 at the Australian Veterans' Championships Ted raced against Albie Thomas, Olympian and former world record holder for the mile. In a fast and hard-fought race Ted came to the line a second in front of that great Olympian in 4 minutes 15 seconds – an Australian veteran record for the mile. That was the highlight of his athletic career, he said. The Western Australian State steeplechase records for the veteran classes, M35, M40, M45, M50 and M60 were all held by Ted.

Service to the community

Ted gave outstanding service to the South Perth City Council, serving as a councillor for thirteen years between 1976 and 1995 as an independent. He not only kept an eye on the big planning picture but was conversant with detail at a local level to ensure maintenance of lifestyles and quality of life. He was one of the earliest to protest, on behalf of the inner Perth municipalities, at the mounting traffic volumes being disgorged into the city each day. He thus became an early advocate of ensuring that these traffic volumes were kept off suburban streets not designed for the high-density traffic, but directed to streets that were.

He was an ideal councillor in at least one important respect. In a State where party politics exists, but not overtly, in local government, Ted was genuinely of an independent mind and spirit. His personal politics remained his private affair. He believed strongly that solutions to problems lay in better information, planning and action. He often surprised authorities by his knowledge in their area of expertise and, on detailed investigation, he was more often than not successful with his proposed solution. In such cases, he was always fair, always direct, but uncompromising in getting at the truth.

Party politics aside, Ted in the local council did not 'politic' in the personal or factional sense. Again, as would appear consistent with his general intellectual rigor, he took the view that logic and merit would, or at least should, be the deciding factors. Thus he did not need to resort to the histrionics that might fall to others in public life. There was also an element of what was proper and what was improper in one's conduct. He obviously felt that, at a political and a personal level, the task could be done without the bitterness or division that so often passes as public debate in Australia.

A memorial tribute

A memorial evening was held to honour Ted on 2 June 1997 in Winthrop Hall at the University of Western Australia. This evening, only the third such occasion in the history of the University, reflected the esteem in which he was held as an undergraduate, a Guild President, a Rhodes Scholar and a member of the Physics Department for 37 years. It brought together his many friends and colleagues from academia, science, sport and the community. Among the many tributes paid to Ted on this evening, some of which have been included in this record, the most poignant were those made on behalf of his ex-students by Roger Price. Ted saw his responsibility for his many students, and their careers, as being more important than his own academic advancement. It was this selfless dedication to the discipline and to science that makes it fitting to close this record with a selection of his student's reminsciences:

'He let people be themselves, and did not push his students, but whenever you showed enthusiasm for a project, Ted matched it many times over.'

'Ted gave the uncanny impression that you were the sole focus of his time and energy.'

'At 5 in the morning at the Photon factory in Japan, Ted and I finally found the reflection we had been looking for after several days with little sleep and over 18 hours without a break...then my experiment began in earnest. I have Ted to thank for these data which formed the basis of my PhD. Anyone less concerned for my welfare as a student would have given up.'

'One of the reasons why Ted was held in such high regard by the young of his discipline was that he understood that doing good, coal-face science is hard work. Pursuit of scientific knowledge at the frontier is as difficult as any human endeavour that you can name. And invitations for physicists to endorse a breakfast cereal are few and far between. It tests mental endurance, inventiveness, and often lays siege to self-esteem. It demands a willingness to destroy one's most cherished intellectual edifices when the evidence is unassailable.'

'As a student at the threshold of the great intellectual journey, you need a mentor, a friend, and an expert guide through the thicket (and sometimes the minefield) of existing publications, half-formed ideas, blind alleys and conjectures on which you must base your own research. Ted was all of these.'

'He was "one of us" – whether it was when he shed his shoes but otherwise remained fully clothed for a cricket match, when he bounded out of the Physics Department every afternoon at 5 o'clock wearing a raggy singlet for a run through Kings Park accompanied by that day's fellow joggers, or when he expressed frank delight in a student's solution of a complex algebraic problem – the kind of delight reminiscent of the best moments of wonderment in one's early career as a student.'

'Ted was an eccentric, in the sense that the term is used to describe those charismatic, unconventional and fulfilled individuals who greatly enrich our lives.'

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.13, no.3, 2001. It was written by:

• S.R. Hall, Crystallography Centre, University of Western Australia.
• A.McL. Mathieson, Chemistry Department, La Trobe University, Victoria.

Numbers in brackets refer to the bibliography; numbers in square brackets refer to the references.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr Victor W. Maslen, brother of Ted, for providing details relating to family matters and for preparing the summary of material for the section on theoretical chemistry. Thanks are also due to Ted's collaborators, Mark Spackman and Victor Streltsov, for their help with the precision density and promolecule sections, and to Allan White for his contributions. We are grateful for permission to use items from the memorial service at the University of Western Australia contributed by David Carr, Cyril Edwards, Michael McCall, Bernard Moulden, Phillip Pendal and Roger Price.

References

1. Mellor, D.P. The Role of Science and Industry. Series 4, Vol. 5 of 'Australia in the War of 1939-1945', Canberra: Australian War Memorial.
2. McWeeny, R. X-ray scattering by aggregates of bonded atoms IV. Applications to the carbon atom. Acta Cryst. 7, 180-186 (1954).
3. Dawson, B. Aspherical atomic scattering factors for some light atoms in sp³, sp² and sp hybrid valence state approximations. Acta Cryst. 17, 997-1009 (1964).
4. (a) Stewart, R.F. Generalized X-ray scattering factors. J. Chem. Phys. 51, 4569-4577 (1969). (b) Stewart, R. F. Valence structure from X-ray diffraction data: an L-shell projection method. J. Chem. Phys. 53, 205-213 (1970).
5. Darwin, C.G. The reflection of X-rays from imperfect crystals. Phil. Mag. 43, 800-829 (1922).
6. Zachariasen, W.H. A general theory of X-ray diffraction in crystals. Acta Cryst. 23, 558-564 (1967).
7. Berlin, T. Binding regions in diatomic molecules. J. Chem. Phys. 19, 208-213 (1951).
8. Myers, C.R., Umrigar, C.J., Sethna, J.P. and Morgan III, J.D. Fock's expansion, Kato's cusp condition and the exponential ansatz. Phys. Rev. A44, 5537-5546 (1991).
9. Hall, S.R., Allen, F.H., and Brown, I.D. IUCr Commission on Crystallographic Data, Commission on Journals, Working Party on Crystallographic Information. The Crystallographic Information File (CIF): A New Standard Archive File for Crystallography. Acta Cryst. A47, 655-685 (1991).

Bibliography

Structure analysis

1. Maslen, E.N., Jukes, D.E. and Clews, C.J.B. The crystal and molecular structure of 2:5 diamino-4-mercapto-6-methyl pyrimidine. Acta Cryst. 11, 115-121 (1958).
2. Hodgkin, D.C. and Maslen, E.N. The X-ray analysis of the structure of cephalosporin C. Biochem. J. 79, 393-402 (1961).
3. Abrahamsson, S., Hodgkin, D.C. and Maslen, E. N. The crystal structure of phenoxymethylpenicillin. Biochem. J. 86, 514-535 (1963).
4. Clews, C.J.B., Maslen, E.N., Rietveld, H.M. and Sabine, T.M. A neutron diffraction examination of p-diphenylbenzene. Nature 192, 154-155 (1961).
5. Maslen, E.N., Nockolds, C.N. and Paton, M.G. The stereochemistry of lirioresinol-B. Aust. J. Chem. 15, 161-162 (1962).
6. Duffield, A.M., Jefferies, P.M., Maslen, E.N. and Rae, A.I.M. The structure of bruceol. Tetrahedron 19, 593-607 (1963).
7. Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. The determination of the crystal structure of methyl melaleucate iodoacetate. Acta Cryst. 18, 265-279 (1965).
   7a. Chopra, C.S., Fuller, M. W., Thieberg, K.J.L., Shaw, D.C., White, D.E., Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. Triterpenoid compounds: VI Constitution of melaleucic acid 2. Tetrahedron Letters, 1847-1852 (1963).
8. Oh, Y.-L. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal and molecular structure of davallol iodoacetate. Acta Cryst. 20, 852-864 (1966).
9. O'Connell, A.M. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of beyerol monoethylidene iodoacetate. Acta Cryst. 21, 744-754 (1966).
10. Paton, M.G. and Maslen, E.M. The crystal structure of dibromoeriostoic acid. Acta Cryst. 22, 120-133 (1967).
11. Oh, Y-L. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal and molecular structure of isoeremolactone. Acta Cryst. B24, 883-897 (1968).
    11a. Oh, Y-L. and Maslen, E.N. The structure and stereochemistry of isoeremolactone. Tetrahedron Letters, 3291-3294 (1966).
12. Huber, C.P., Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of oxotuberostemmonine. Tetrahedron Letters, 4081-4084 (1968).
13. Rae, A.I.M., and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of sulphanilic acid monohydrate. Acta Cryst. 15, 1285-1291 (1962).
14. Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of metanilic acid. Acta Cryst. 18, 301-306 (1965).
15. O'Connor, B.H. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of a-sulphanilamide. Acta Cryst. 18, 363-366 (1965).
16. O'Connell, A.M. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of b-sulphanilamide. Acta Cryst. 22, 134-145 (1967).
17. Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of orthanilic acid. Acta Cryst. 22, 216-228 (1967).
18. Maslen, E.N. A method for allowing for thermal anisotropy in evaluating Wilson plots and normalised structure factors. Acta Cryst. 22, 945-946 (1967).
19. Rietveld, H.M. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of cadmium n-butyl xanthate. Acta Cryst. 18, 429-436 (1965).
20. Paton, M.G. and Maslen, E.N. A refinement of the crystal structure of yttria. Acta Cryst. 19, 307-310 (1965).
21. O'Connor, B.H. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of Cu(II) succinate dihydrate. Acta Cryst. 20, 824-835 (1966).
22. O'Connor, B.H. and Maslen, E.N. A second analysis of the crystal structure of copper (II) diethyldithiocarbamate. Acta Cryst. 21, 828-830 (1966).
23. Jones, R.O. and Maslen, E.N. The crystal structure of the p-complex [C₆H₄(CO)₂ ]₂. Z. Krist. 123, 330-337 (1966).
24. Rae, A.I.M. and Maslen, E.N. An X-ray diffraction study of nickel cyanide ammoniate. Z. Krist. 123, 391-396 (1966).
25. Robinson, D.J., Kennard, C.H.L., Maslen, E.N. and Temple, D.M. Crystal structure of [1,1,4,4,-tetraethylpiperazinium] dichloride-4-(p-nitroaniline). J. Chem. Soc. B, 1317-1322 (1970).
26. Dewan, J.C., Kepert, D.L., Raston, C.L., Taylor, D., White, A.H. and Maslen, E.N. Crystal structures of tris(NN-diethyldithiocarbamato)oxo-niobium(V) and – vanadium (V). J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 2082 – 2086 (1973).
27. Brotherton, P.D., Maslen, E.N., Pryce, M.W. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of collinsite. Aust. J. Chem. 27, 653-656 (1974).
28. Maslen, E.N., Engelhardt, L.M. and White, A.H. X-ray crystal structure of {7,8,15,17, 18,20-hexahydrodibenzole[e,m]pyrazino-[2,3-b][1,4,8,11]tetra-azacyclo -tetradecinato(2-)}nickel(II) and of {7,8,15 16,17,18-hexahydrodibenzo[e,m][1,4,8,11] tetra-aza-cyclo-tetradecinato{2-)} nickel(II). J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 1799-1803 (1974).
29. Hall, S.R., Maslen, E.N. and Cooper, A. The crystal and molecular structure of 3a,6a-dihydroxy-5b-cholan-24-oic acid, C₂₄O₄H₄₀. Acta Cryst. B30, 1441-1447 (1974).
30. Maslen, E.N., Cannon, J.R., White, A.H. and Willis, A.C. The crystal structure of 3-methyl-5-phenylpyrazole. J. Chem. Soc. (Perkin II), 1298-1301 (1974).
31. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of bis(2,2':6',2'-terpyridyl)cobalt(II) bromide trihydrate. J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 1803-1807 (1974).
32. Brotherton, P.D., Wege, D., White, A.H. and Maslen, E.N. Crystal and molecular structure of tetracarbonyl–(7,7-dimethoxynorborn-2-ene)chromium(0). J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 1876-1878 (1974).
33. Maslen, E.N., Dewan, J.C., Kepert, D.L., Trigwell, K.R. and White, A.H. Stereochemistry of the MX₄Y system (M = metal; X = unidentate, Y = bidentate ligand): Crystal structure of tetrachloro-[1,2-bis(dimethylarsino)-3,3,4,4 -tetrafluorocyclobut-1-ene]rhenium(IV). J.Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 2128-2132 (1974).
34. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L., Skelton, B.W. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of bis(hydrazine)bis(hydrazinecarboxylato) cobalt(II). Aust. J. Chem. 28, 739-744 (1975).
35. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of aqua(2,2':6',2':6',2''-quaterpyridyl)sulphitocobalt(III) nitrate monohydrate. J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 323-326 (1975).
36. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L., White, A.H. and Yandell, J.K. Crystal structure of trans-aquabis(ethylenediamine)sulphitocobalt(III) perchlorate monohydrate. J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 327-329 (1975).
37. Maslen, E.N., Greaney, T. M., Raston, C.L. and White, A.H. The crystal structure of catena-di-m-acetylacetonato-cadmium(II). J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 400-402 (1975).
38. Maslen, E.N., Toia, R.F., White, A.H. and Willis, A.C. Crystal structure of (5E,12E)-7b-acetoxybertya-5,12-diene-3,14-dione. J. Chem.Soc. (Perkin II), 1684-1689 (1975).
39. Greaney, T.M., Raston, C.L., White, A.H. and Maslen, E.N. Crystal structure of potassium tris(acetylacetonato)cadmate(II) monohydrate. J. Chem. Soc. (Dalton), 876-879 (1975).
40. Maslen, E.N., Sheppard, P.N., White, A.H. and Willis, A.C. Crystal structure of the tricyclic diterpene derivative 18-hydroxydecipia-2(4), 14-dien-1-oic acid. J. Chem. Soc. (Perkin II), 263-266 (1976).
41. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of an epoxycembradienol, 3,15-epoxy-4-hydroxycembra-7(Z),11(Z)-diene. Tetrahedron, 33, 3305-3311 (1977).
42. Maslen, E.N., Raston, C.L. and White, A.H. Crystal structure of (Z)-cembr-4-ene-15,19,20-triol. Aust. J. Chem. 30, 2723 – 2727 (1977).
43. Baker, E., Maslen, E.N., Watson, K.J. and White, A.H. Crystal and molecular structure of the ferrous ion complex of A23187. J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 106, 2860-2864 (1984).

General diffraction matters

44. Maslen, E.N. An X-ray collimator for single crystal goniometers. J. Sci. Instrum. 35, 110-111 (1958).
45. Abrahamsson, S. and Maslen, E.N. The use of diverging functions in the solution of three-dimensional Patterson syntheses. Z. Krist. 118, 1-32 (1963).
46. Rae, A.I.M. and Maslen, E.N. An analysis of possible methods for refining a non-centrosymmetric structure containing a partial centre of symmetry. Acta Cryst. 16, 703-704 (1963).
47. Paton, M.G. and Maslen, E.N. The scattering length of ytttrium for thermal neutrons. Acta Cryst. 19, 679-680 (1965).
48. Hall, S.R. and Maslen, E.N. An experimental determination of Df” for iodine. Acta Cryst. 20, 383-389. (1966).
49. Maslen, E.N. A method for allowing for thermal anisotropy in evaluating Wilson plots and normalised structure factors. Acta Cryst. 22, 945-946 (1967).
50. Maslen, E.N. An expression for the temperature factor of a librating atom. Acta Cryst. A24, 434-437 (1968).
51. Maslen, E.N. The refinement of structures with non-crystallographic molecular symmetry. Acta Cryst. B24, 1165-1170 (1968).
52. Maslen, E.N. A phase refinement of the crystal structure of benzotrifuroxan. Acta Cryst. B24, 1170-1172 (1968).
53. Maslen, E.N. On the accuracy of electron density distributions with particular reference to structures with non-crystallographic molecular symmetry. Acta Cryst. B24, 1172-1175 (1968).
54. Maslen, E.N. Higher order mechanistic models for thermal motion in crystal structures. Crystallographic Computing. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, pp. 227-242 (1970).
55. Maslen, E.N. The effect of models for thermal motion and two-centre scattering on charge density analysis. Acta Cryst. A28, S8 (1972).
56. Maslen, E.N. A procedure for the refinement of accurate diffraction data from molecular crystals. Acta Cryst. A25, S126 (1969).
57. Delaney, W.T., Furina, R., Maslen, E.N., Price, P.F. and Varghese, J.N. Population analysis of molecular crystals: – density function or error sponge? Conference 'Diffraction studies of real atoms and real crystals'. Abstract 45. I.U.Cr. and Australian Academy of Science (1974).
58. Davis, C.L., Maslen, E.N. and Varghese, J.N. Minimizing the variance in densities evaluated by Fourier synthesis. Acta Cryst. A34, 371-377 (1978).
59. Davis, C.L. and Maslen, E.N. Minimizing the variance in integrals and derivatives of the electron density. Acta Cryst. A34, 743-746 (1978).
60. Coppens, P., Dam, J., Harkema, S., Feil, R., Lehmann, M.S., Goddard, R., Kruger, C., Hellner, E., Johansen, H., Larsen, F.K., Koetzle, T.F., McMullan, R.K., Maslen, E.N. and Stevens, E.D.I.U.Cr. Commission on Charge, Spin and Momentum Densities. Project on comparison of structural parameters and electron density maps of
    oxalic acid dihydrate. Acta Cryst. A40, 184-195 (1984).
61. Maslen, E.N. Problems in high precision electron density studies. Methods and applications in crystallographic computing: Proceedings of the International Summer School on Crystallographic Computing, Kyoto. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 333-340 (1984).
62. Spadaccini, N. and Maslen, E.N. Extinction in the KMF₃ perovskites. Acta Cryst. A43, C-104 (1987).
63. Maslen, E.N. The statistical significance of difference densities. Acta Cryst. A44, 33-37 (1988).
64. Maslen, E.N., Fox, A.G. and O'Keefe, M.A. Section 6.1.1. X-ray scattering. In: International Tables for Crystallography. Volume C – Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Tables (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 476-516 (1992).
65. Maslen, E.N. Section 6.3 X-ray absorption. In: International Tables for Crystallography. Volume C – Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Tables (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 520-529 (1992).
66. Maslen, E.N. When automatic structure solution fails. Communicatedabstracts OCM-04.03.04. Acta Cryst. A49, 138-139 (1993).
67. Streltsov, V.A. and Maslen, E.N. On least squares estimation of extinction corrections. Acta Cryst. A48, 651-653 (1992).
68. Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. Corrections for extinction from equivalent reflection intensities. Asian Crystallographic Association Inaugural Meeting, Singapore. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract 15V-63 (1992).
69. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A., Ishizawa, N. and Satow, Y. Synchrotron x-ray study of the electron density in corundum a-Al₂O₃. Asian Crystallographic Association Inaugural meeting, Singapore. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract 15V-68 (1992).
70. Maslen, E.N. and Streltsova, N.R. On the reproducability of electron density maps for ideal perovskites. Asian Crystallographic Association Inaugural meeting, Singapore. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract 15V-76 (1992).
71. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A., Streltsova, N.R., Ishizawa, N. and Satow, Y. Synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in a-Al₂O₃. Acta Cryst. B49, 973-980 (1993).
72. Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Ito, T., Marumo, F., Tanaka, K. and Satow, Y. A synchrotron radiation study of potassium zinc fluoride perovskite. Acta Cryst. B49, 632-636 (1993).
73. Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. Extinction corrections from equivalent reflections. Acta Cryst. A49, 661-667 (1993).
74. du Boulay, D. and Maslen, E.N. Absorption, extinction and dead-time correction for high precision imaging with synchrotron sources. Acta Cryst. A49, 376, Abstract PS-14.01.12 (1993).

Electron density and bonding

75. Rae, A.I.M. and Maslen, E.N. The importance of the imaginary part of the scattering factor of bonded carbon. Acta Cryst. 19, 1061-1063 (1965).
76. Rietveld, E.G., Maslen, E.N. and Clews, C.J.B. An X-ray and neutron diffraction refinement of the structure of p-terphenyl. Acta Cryst. B26, 693-706 (1970).
77. O'Connell, A.M., Rae, A.I.M. and Maslen, E.N. A discussion of the distribution of bonded electron density. Acta Cryst. 21, 208-219 (1966).
78. O'Connor, B.H. and Maslen, E.N. The electron density distribution in 1,3,5-triacetylbenzene. Acta Cryst. B30, 383-389 (1973).
79. Allen-Williams, A.J., Delaney, W.T., Furina, R., Maslen, E.N., O'Connor, B.H., Varghese, J.N. and Yung Fook Hong. Charge density analyses for molecular crystals using Bragg diffraction data: the effects of error. Acta Cryst. A31, 101-115 (1975).
80. Price, P.F., Maslen, E.N. and Moore, F.H. Electron-density studies. I. A neutron diffraction powder study of diamond. Acta Cryst. A34, 171-172 (1978).
81. Price, P.F. and Maslen, E.N. Electron-density studies. II. Further comments on the electron density in diamond. Acta Cryst. A34, 173-183 (1978).
82. Price, P.F., Maslen, E.N. and Mair, S.L. Electron-density studies. III. A re-evaluation of the electron distribution in crystalline silicon. Acta Cryst. A34, 183-193 (1978).
    82a. Price, P.F., Maslen, E.N. and Mair, S.L. Detailed charge density studies of crystalline silicon. International Union of Crystallography Xth International Congress. Abstract 17.3.11, S225 (1975).
83. Price, P.F., Maslen, E.N. and Delaney, W.T. Electron densities. IV. A comparison of techniques for charge density analysis and their application to s-triazine. Acta Cryst. A34, 194-203 (1978).
84. Price, P.F., Varghese, J.N. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density studies. V. The electron density in melamine (2,4,6-triamino-s-triazine) with and without exponent refinement. Acta Cryst. A34, 203-216 (1978).
    84a. Varghese, J.N., O'Connell, A.M. and Maslen, E.N. The X-ray and neutron crystal structure of 2,4,6-triamino-1,3,5-triazine (melamine). Acta Cryst. B33, 2102-2108 (1977).
85. Maslen, E.N. Electron density, chemical bonding and solid state interactions. Acta Cryst. A34, S27 (1978).
86. Maslen, E.N., Ridout, S.C., Varghese, J.N., and White, A.H. Electron density distributions in transition metal complexes. Acta Cryst. A34, S21 (1978).
87. Maslen, E.N. Applications of electron density studies to complexes of the transition metals. In: Electron and magnetization densities in molecules and crystals, ed. P. Becker (NATO Advanced Study Institute Series B: Physics, Volume 48). New York: Plenum Press, pp.779-789 (1980).
88. Varghese, J.N. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density in non-ideal metal complexes. I. Copper sulphate pentahydrate. Acta Cryst. B41, 184-190 (1985).
89. Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Watson, K.J. and White, A.H. Electron density in non-ideal metal complexes. II. Sodium bis(carbonato)cuprate(II). Acta Cryst. B42, 430-436 (1986).
90. Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N. and Watson, K.J. Electron density distribution in potassium bis(carbonato)cuprate(II). Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. (Chem. Sci.) 92, 443-448 (1983).
91. Maslen, E.N. and Ridout, S.C. Electron density in non-ideal metal complexes. III. Bis(hydrazine)bis(hydrazinecarboxylato)cobalt(II). Acta Cryst. B43, 352-356 (1987).
    91a. Maslen, E.N., Ridout, S.C. and White, A.H. The electron distribution in bis(hydrazine)-bis(hydrazinecarboxylato)cobalt(II). International Union of Crystallography Xth International Congress. Abstract 17.3.10, S225 (1975).
92. Vaalsta, T.P. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density in chromium sulfate pentahydrate. Acta Cryst. B43, 448-454 (1987).
93. Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. Electron density in potassium bis(dithiooxalato-S,S')nickelate(II). Acta Cryst. B43, 461-465 (1987).
94. Hester, J.R., Maslen, E.N., Glazer, A.M. and Stadnicka, K. Jahn-Teller distortion of the electron density in a-nickel sulfate hexahydrate. Acta Cryst. B49, 641-646 (1993).
95. Maslen, E.N., Ridout, S.C., Watson, K.J. and Moore, F.H. The structure of Tutton's salts. I. Diammonium hexa-aquamagnesium (II) sulfate. Acta Cryst. C44, 409-412 (1988).
96. Maslen, E.N., Ridout, S.C. Watson, K.J. and Moore, F.H. The structure of Tutton's salts. II. Diammonium hexa-aquanickel(II) sulfate. Acta Cryst. C44, 412-415 (1988).
97. Maslen, E.N., Watson, K.J., Ridout, S.C. and Moore, F.H. Electron density in diammonium hexa-aquazinc(II) sulfate – an X-ray and neutron study. Acta Cryst. C44, 1510-1514 (1988).
98. Maslen, E.N., Watson, K.J. and Moore, F.H. Crystal structure and electron density of diammonium hexa-aquacopper (II) sulfate. Acta Cryst. B44, 102-107 (1988).
99. Maslen, E.N., Ridout, S.C. and Watson, K.J. Electron density in non-ideal metal complexes. IV. Hexa-aquametal(II) ammonium sulphates. Acta Cryst. B44, 96-101 (1988).
100. Chatterjee, A., Maslen, E.N. and Watson, K.J. The effect of the lanthanoid contraction on the nona-aqualanthanoid(III) tris(trifluoromethanesulfonates). Acta Cryst. B44, 381-386 (1988).
101. Chatterjee, A., Maslen, E.N. and Watson, K.J. Electron densities in crystals of nona-aqualanthanoid(III) tris(trifluoromethanesulphonates). Acta Cryst. B44, 386-395 (1988).
102. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Electron difference density in KZnF₃ perovskite. Z. Krist. 185, 656 (1988).
103. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Electron difference density in potassium zinc fluoride perovskite. Acta Cryst. C44, 1707-1709 (1988).
104. Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. Electron density, thermal motion and bonding interactions in the perovskite structures KMF₃ with M = Mn, Fe, Co and Ni. Acta Cryst. B45, 45-52 (1989).
105. Buttner, R.H., Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. Structure, electron density and thermal motion of KCuF₃. Acta Cryst. B46, 131-138 (1990).
106. Buttner, R.H., Maslen, E.N. and Spadaccini, N. A position-space model for superconductivity in YBa₂Cu₃O_7-x. Acta Cryst. B48, 21-30 (1992).
107. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Structural parameters and electron difference density in Y₂BaCuO₅. Acta Cryst. B49, 62-66 (1993).
108. Hsu, R.M., Maslen, E.N. and Ishizawa, N. A synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in Y₂BaCuO₅. Acta Cryst. B52, 569-575 (1996).
109. Hsu, R.M. and Maslen, E.N. A synchrotron X-ray study of Dr in Y₂BaCuO₅. Asian Crystallographic Association Inaugural meeting, Singapore. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract 15V-69 (1992).
110. Hester, J., Hsu, R. and Maslen, E.N. Second-nearest-neighbour interactions and the electron density in Y₂BaCuO₅. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract PS-14.02.13, 381-382 (1993).
111. Hsu, R. and Maslen, E.N. Effect of second-nearest-neighbour interactions on the electron density in Y₂BaCuO₅ and LiTaO₃. Crystal XIX: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Ballarat). Abstract P15 (1995).
112. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Electron difference density and vibration tensors in SrTiO₃. Acta Cryst. B48, 639-644 (1992).
113. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Electron difference density and structural parameters in CaTiO₃. Acta Cryst. B48, 644-649 (1992).
114. Buttner, R.H. and Maslen, E.N. Structural parameters and electron difference density in BaTiO₃. Acta Cryst. B48, 764-769 (1992).
115. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Streltsova, N.R. (I.) X-ray study of the electron density in calcite, CaCO₃. Acta Cryst. B49, 636-641 (1993).
116. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Streltsova, N.R. (II.) X-ray study of the electron density in magnesite, MgCO₃. Acta Cryst. B49, 980-984 (1993).
117. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A., Streltsova, N.R. and Ishizawa, N. Electron density and optical anisotropy in rhombohedral carbonates. III. Synchrotron X-ray studies of CaCO₃, MgCO₃ and MnCO₃. Acta Cryst. B51, 929-939 (1995).
118. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Streltsova, N.R. X-ray study of the electron density in rhombohedral carbonates, CaCO₃, MgCO₃, MnCO₃. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract PS-14.02.15, 382-383 (1993).
119. Ishizawa, N., Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Streltsova, N.R. Diffraction study of the electron density and optical anisotropy in rhombohedral carbonates. Photon Factory Activity Report 1993, Vol. 11, p. 305 (1994).
120. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Streltsova, N.R. Synchrotron X-ray study of electron density and optical anisotropy in rhombohedral carbonates. Crystal XVIII: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Medlow Bath). Abstract p. 33 (1994).
121. Hester, J.R., Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Ishizawa, N. and Satow, Y. Electron density in potassium tetrachloropalladate (K₂PdCl₄) from synchrotron radiation data. Acta Cryst. B49, 842-846 (1993).
122. Hester, J.R., Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Ishizawa, N. and Satow, Y. Accurate synchrotron radiation Dr maps for K₂SiF₆ and K₂PdCl₆. Acta Cryst. B49, 967-973 (1993).
123. Hester, J.R., Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Ishizawa, N. and Satow, Y. Synchrotron radiation vibration amplitudes and Dr maps for K₂SiF₆ and K₂PdCl₄. Asian Crystallographic Association Inaugural meeting (Singapore). Abstract 15V-67 (1992).
124. Hester, J.R. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density – structure relationships in some perovskite-type compounds. Acta Cryst. B51, 913-920 (1995).
125. Maslen, E.N. and Streltsov, V.A. Electron density imaging with synchrotron radiation. AsCA'95: 2nd Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association (Bangkok). Abstract 1A14 (1995).
126. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A., Streltsova, N.R. and Ishizawa, N. Synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in a-Fe₂O₃. Acta Cryst. B50, 435-441 (1994).
127. Maslen, E.N., Spadaccini, N., Ito,T., Marumo, F. and Satow, Y. A synchrotron radiation study of strontium titanate. Acta Cryst. B51, 939-942 (1995).
128. du Boulay, D., Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V. A. and Ishizawa, N. A synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in YFeO₃. Acta Cryst. B51, 921-929 (1995).
129. du Boulay, D., Maslen, E.N. and Streltsov, V.A. A synchrotron X-study of the electron densitry in YFe₂O₃. Proceedings of IC'94. (Roy. Aust. Chem. Inst.) D49 (1994).
130. du Boulay, D. and Maslen, E.N. The structural variation within the rare earth orthoferrites and aluminates. Proceedings of IC'94. (Roy. Aust. Chem. Inst.) D50 (1994).
131. du Boulay, D. and Maslen, E.N. Structure and electron density in rare earth aluminates and orthoferrites. Crystal XIX: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Ballarat). Abstract WPM2.3 (1995).
132. Hsu, R., Maslen, E.N., Streltsov,V.A. and Ishizawa, N. Synchrotron radiation imaging of the deformation electron density in LiNbO₃ and LiTaO₃. AsCA'95: 2nd Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association (Bangkok). Abstract 3P42 (1995).
133. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Ishizawa, N. A synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in C-type rare earth oxides. Acta Cryst. B52, 414-422 (1996).
134. Maslen, E.N. and Streltsov, V.A. Synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in C-type rare earth oxides. Crystal XIX: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Ballarat). Abstract P29 (1995).
135. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A. and Ishizawa, N. A synchrotron X-ray study of the electron density in SmFeO₃. Acta Cryst. B52, 406-413 (1996).
136. Etschmann, B.E., Maslen, E.N. and Streltsova, N.R. Deformation densities in simple rare earth compounds. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract PS-14.02.14, 382 (1993).
137. Streltsov, V.A. and Maslen, E.N. Synchrotron electron density-property relationship for metal oxides. IUCr synchrotron radiation satellite meeting, Argonne National Laboratory. Abstract, 111-03, p. 29 (1996).
138. Maslen, E.N., Streltsov, V.A., Streltsova, N.R. and Ishizawa, N. Synchrotron X-ray density in the layered LaOCl structure. Acta Cryst. B52, 576-579 (1996).
139. Milne, A.M. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density in the spin crossover complex trans-[N.N'-ethylenebis(salicylidenaminato)] bis(imidazole)iron(III) perchlorate. Acta Cryst. B44, 254-259 (1988).
140. Chantler, C.T. and Maslen, E.N. Charge transfer and three-centre bonding inmonoprotonated and diprotonated 2,2'-bipyridylium decahydro-closo-decaborate(2-). Acta Cryst. B45, 290-297 (1989).

The promolecule

141. Maslen, E.N. and Spackman, M.A. Atomic charges and electron density partitioning. Aust. J. Phys. 38, 273-287 (1985).
142. Spackman, M.A. and Maslen, E.N. Chemical properties from the promolecule. J. Phys. Chem. 90, 2020-2027 (1986).
143. Spackman, M.A. and Maslen, E.N. An empirical estimate of the correlation energy. Chem. Phys. Letters 126, 19-25 (1986).
144. Trefry, M.G., Maslen, E.N. and Spackman, M.A. Electrostatic, Madelung and cohesive energies for solids. J. Phys. C: Solid State Phys. 20, 19-28 (1987).
145. Henderson, J.A. and Maslen, E.N. Atom size and charge in alkali halides. Acta Cryst. A43, C-102 Abstract 06.2-1 (1987).
146. Maslen, E.N. and Trefry, M.G. 3d-transition metals: Electron promotion and the independent atom model. J. Phys. Chem. Solids 49, 753-759 (1988).
147. Spackman, M.A. and Maslen, E.N. Electron density and the chemical bond. A reappraisal of Berlin's theorem. Acta Cryst. A41, 347-353 (1985).
148. Etschmann, B.E. and Maslen, E.N. Atomic charge in diatomic promolecules and in promolecular solids. Proceedings of IC'94. Roy. Aust. Chem. Inst. 1, D5 (1994).
149. Etschmann, B.E. and Maslen, E.N. Atomic charges for promolecular solids. Crystal XVIII: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Medlow Bath, N.S.W.). Abstract, Vol. 1, WPM1.2 (1994).
150. Etschmann, B.E. and Maslen, E.N. Properties of the promolecule. IUCr XVII Congress, Seattle, USA. Acta Cryst. A53 Abstract PS.09.02.07, C-352 (1996).
     150a. Maslen, E.N. and Etschmann, B.E. Bonding without Ionisation. Aust. J. Phys. 53, 299-316 (2000).
151. Etschmann, B.E. and Maslen, E.N. Atomic radii from electron densities. Crystal XIX: Meeting of the Society of Crystallographers in Australia (Ballarat, Victoria). Abstract P5 (1995).
152. Maslen, E.N. and Etschmann, B.E. Atomic radii from electron densities. AsCA'95: 2nd Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association (Bangkok, Thailand). Abstract 3P46 (1995).
     152a. Etschmann, B.E. and Maslen, E.N.). Atomic Radii from Electron Densities. Aust. J. Phys. 53, 317-332 (2000).

Theoretical chemistry

153. Davis, C.L., Maslen, E.N. and Varghese, J.N. On exact analytical solutions for the few-particle Schrodinger equation. I. A perturbation study. Proc. Roy. Soc. A384, 57-88 (1982).
154. Davis, C.L. and Maslen, E.N. On exact analytical solutions for the few-particle Schrodinger equation. II. The ground state of helium. Proc. Roy. Soc. A384, 89-105 (1982).
155. Davis, C.L. and Maslen, E.N. On exact analytical solutions for the few-particle Schrodinger equation. III. Spatially symmetric S states of two identical particles in the field of a massive third partricle. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 16, 4237-4253 (1983).
156. Davis, C.L. and Maslen, E.N. On exact analytical solutions for the few-particle Schrodinger equation. IV. The asymptotic form and normalizability of the wavefunction. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 16, 4255-4264 (1983).
157. Davis, C.L. and Maslen, E.N. Series wave functions for the helium atom. Int. J. Quant. Chem. 17, 217-225 (1983).
158. Abbott, P.C. and Maslen, E.N. Expansion of two-body potentials in hyperspherical harmonics. J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Phys. 17, L489-492 (1984).
159. Gottschalk, J.N. and Maslen, E.N. Three-body S-state wavefunctions: symmetry and degrees of freedom associated withnormalisation of the exact wavefunction. J. Phys A: Math. Gen. 18, 1687-1696 (1985).
160. Abbott, P.C. and Maslen, E.N. A model wavefunction including electron correlation for the ground state of the helium isoelectronic sequence. J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Phys. 19, 1595-1605 (1986).
161. McIsaac, K., Gottschalk, J.E. and Maslen, E.N. Closed form expressions for an integral involving the Coulomb potential. J. Computational Physics, 67, 479-481 (1986).
162. McIsaac, K. and Maslen, E.N. Exact wavefunctions for few-particle systems: the choice of expansion for Coulomb potentials. Int. J. Quant. Chem. 31, 361-368 (1987).
163. Abbott, P.C. and Maslen, E.N. Coordinate systems and analytic expansions for 3-body atomic functions: I. Partial summation for the Fock expansion in hyperspherical coordinates. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 20, 2043-2075 (1987).
164. Gottschalk, J.E., Abbott, P.C. and Maslen, E.N. Coordinate systems and analytic expansions for three-body atomic wavefunctions: II. Closed form wavefunctions to second order in r. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 20, 2077-2104 (1987).
165. Gottschalk, J.E. and Maslen, E.N. Coordinate systems and analytic expansions for three-body atomic wavefunctions: III. Derivative continuity via solutions to Laplace's equation. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 20, 2781-2803 (1987).
166. Gottschalk, J.E. and Maslen, E.N. Reduction formulae for generalised hypergeometric functions of one variable. J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 21, 1983-1998 (1988).
167. Maslen, E.N. and Trefry, M.G. Two-center molecular repulsion integrals over Slater functions. Int. J. Quant. Chem. 37, 51-68 (1990). Erratum. 38, 871-872 (1990).

General

168. Maslen, E.N. X-ray physics in Western Australia. The Australian Physicist, February, 29-30 (1976).
169. Maslen, E.N. A systems approach to computing for charge density studies. Computing in Crystallography: Proceedings of the International Union of Crystallography Computing School, Bangalore. Indian Institute of Sciences Publication 15.01-15.14 (1980).
170. Allen, F.H., Bugg, C.E. and Maslen, E.N. Editorial, electronic submission and publication of structural results in Acta Crystallographica. Acta Cryst. A47, 637-639 (1991).
171. Maslen, E.N. Promises and pitfalls in electronic information. Acta Cryst. A49, Abstract DS-18.03.05. 414 (1993).

Written by I.M. Mackerras.

• Family and formative years 1898-1923
• In search of a curative climate 1924-1934
• The microbiological laboratory 1935-1947
• The Queensland Institute of Medical Research 1947-1966
• Final years, 1966-1976
• Conclusion
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes

Family and formative years 1898-1923

Edward Holbrook Derrick was born at Blackwood, Victoria, on 18 September 1898. He was a fourth-generation Australian, with a solidly Methodist lineage. Two paternal great-grandparents, Jehu Derrick and his wife, and their four children (Enoch, Elijah, Joseph, Mary) migrated to Victoria on three different ships between 1852 and 1855, and a maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Edward Sweetman, had settled in Melbourne as a Wesleyan minister in 1840. In addition to Methodism, or perhaps as an extension of it, was a strong family bent for teaching. Derrick's paternal grandfather (Joseph Holbrook Derrick), father (Clement Herbert Derrick, 1864-1945), mother (nee Elizabeth Mary Sweetman, 1871-1946), two uncles (one on each side), and a maternal aunt were all school teachers, and one of the uncles (Edward Sweetman, DLitt) became a lecturer in the University of Melbourne and wrote books on Australian history. Medicine was represented too, but more peripherally, by a great-great-grandfather, grandfather, and uncle, all on his mother's side. Derrick wrote of his lineage, but referring particularly to religion, 'Fortunate is the child with a goodly heritage'.(1)

In 1895 Clement Derrick brought his bride to Blackwood, a dying gold-mining town 65km from Melbourne, where he had been appointed head teacher. Their four children (Herbert, Edward, Edith, Kate) were born there and spent their early years surrounded by wild bush-clad hills, and in a more immediate environment of old mullock heaps, rusty machinery, poor sanitation, and general decay, and among people who suffered, directly and indirectly, from the effects of miners' phthisis. The school had about 100 pupils in 1895, but the numbers had declined considerably by the time the Derrick children finished their primary education. The young Edward's most vivid memories of Blackwood (and of Campbell's Creek, where he spent his holidays after his father was transferred there in 1911) were of the grandeur of the bush scenery; the brilliant stars at night; learning the constellations from his father; Halley's comet in 1910; an early fondness for poetry; fossicking for a few specks of gold; the Cornish miners ('How they could sing! How triumphantly they prayed!'); and an uncle convalescing from tuberculosis in their home. His own interest in medicine was excited at the age of ten or eleven, when he read The Family Physician (2 vols) from cover to cover while convalescing from typhoid fever, and his parents concurred in his choice of profession.

He gained an Education Department scholarship and entered Wesley College, Melbourne, as a day-boy, living with his grandparents. He was a reserved, rather shy lad who found the headmaster remote and unapproachable, but he did well at school, gaining four Distinctions in the Junior Public Examination in 1912 and a Government Exhibition in the Senior Public in the following year. He loved poetry, but his best subject was chemistry which he attacked with the same concentrated energy that he had given to The Family Physician at Blackwood.

His senior honours year in 1914 was sad and disturbing, for his brother, who had been a brilliant student two years senior to him at Wesley, died of tuberculosis in May and the Great War began in August. The school, in common with others of its kind, was caught up in a fervour of patriotism, and Derrick recorded later that, of 14 boys in Honour Sixth, 10 enlisted and 3 of them died in France. In spite of these distractions, he did very well in the Senior Public Honours Examination, sharing Honours and Exhibitions with two later fellows of the Academy, T.M. Cherry and E.J.G. Pitman. On the advice of the head-master, he repeated the Honours year as a boarder in 1915, but did not enjoy it, although he added to his honours list in the Senior.

He matriculated in April 1916 and entered the University of Melbourne as a resident student in Queen's College, a life he found much more to his taste than boarding at school. He availed himself of the wartime provision that those who had obtained Senior Public Honours in physics and chemistry could commence Medicine in second year by taking biology as an extra subject. He worked hard, gaining class honours in each year, and graduated MB, BS in 1920 with second class honours, fourth in the year to James Brown, Keith Fairley, and Ernest Chenoweth. He had been a member of the University Regiment.

Neither at the university, nor in his subsequent year at the Melbourne Hospital, then in Lonsdale Street, did he feel any attraction to pathology or microbiology. His basic concern was, and remained for the rest of his life, with sick people, and he vastly preferred out-patient clinics and ward rounds to any formal lectures and demonstrations. He was fortunate in his clinical teachers (especially Richard Stawell whom he revered), in having two periods of student residence in the hospital (another wartime emergency), and in helping to cope with the 1919 pandemic of influenza in an Army camp hospital with R.H. Fetherstone who was then Medical Officer of Health in Prahran. In spite of all this vicarious extra experience, he felt woefully inadequate and was horrified to discover how many diseases were incurable and how few of the drugs that doctors prescribed were of any real benefit to their patients. The inevitable course of lobar pneumonia to crisis or death particularly shocked him.

When the year ended, the Registrar appointments in the hospital fell to Brown and Fairley, so Derrick sought and obtained the Sir John Grice Scholarship in Cancer Research, tenable in the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and carrying a stipend of £250 per annum, residence in the hospital, and a share in carrying out the hospital autopsies. His main programme was a histological study of the tumours of the kidneys and suprarenal glands, from which he concluded that the common malignant tumour of the kidneys ('hypernephroma' or 'Grawitz tumour') developed from renal rather than suprarenal cells. His first scientific paper was a report of these findings published in The Medical Journal of Australia on 10 June 1922 (and his last a clinical account of his own experience with non-exertional angina pectoris, published posthumously in the same journal on 6 November 1976). He also visited the Austin Hospital for Incurables and carried out an experiment on pyrogenic treatment of inoperaable skin cancer, with some apparent benefit in a few cases. There is no doubt that the advice and guidance of the director of the Institute, Sydney Patterson, and successive deputy directors, Neil Hamilton Fairley and Harold Dew, during his tenure of the scholarship were significant factors in turning his mind towards a career in medical research.

At that time, the Orient and P & O lines offered three free passages to England each year through the university, and Derrick secured one of these at the end of July 1922. Arriving in England in the summer vacation, he and a friend (a classical scholar on his way to Oxford) took the opportunity to make a tour of Germany and Switzerland, which left him with a lasting impression that 'the similarities between people of different countries were much greater than the differences. A narrow nationalism could never return.' Back in London at the end of September, he found the employment he sought difficult to obtain. He made many contacts and Charles Kellaway, then at University College, was characteristically helpful, but nothing eventuated until Hugh Cairns, an Adelaide graduate, introduced him to Hubert Turnbull who was director of the Pathological Institute in the London Hospital. An appointment of pathological assistant in the Institute at a salary of £150 per annum followed. The duties included attending Turnbull's lectures, assisting in post-mortem examinations, which were carried out with a precision and attention to detail far surpassing anything he had seen in Melbourne, and preparing and studying histological sections, again using techniques of a standard he had not previously encountered. Turnbull became, with Stawell, one of the two great inspirations of his medical career.

Derrick became impressed with the frequency of deaths in children from miliary tuberculosis, due, it was believed, to rupture of tubercles in the intima of pulmonary veins flooding the body with tubercle bacilli. He resolved to test this hypothesis, so took every opportunity to dissect out the pulmonary veins of children who had died of the disease, search them for internal tubercles, and cut sections of any that he found. He successfully accomplished this task, but it was exacting work, and he failed to realize that snipping the small intimal tubercles off with scissors might charge the air before his face with live tubercle bacilli.

He had gone to England 'in search of knowledge' and it might be thought from the foregoing that he was preparing himself for a life in laboratory medicine. That was not so, for, on the one hand, he considered that morbid anatomy and experimental pathology lacked 'the close relation with patients...that gives medicine its satisfaction and its standing' and, on the other hand, he had a half-formed intention to become a medical missionary in China. This was his 'alternative career', and his inclination for it was no doubt strengthened by his association with Kingsley Hall, a Methodist mission in the East End to which he devoted much of his spare time. Proficiency in surgery was an obvious pre-requisite for a medical missionary, so he began to prepare himself by reducing his post-mortem work, and attending lectures and sitting for the primary FRCS examination which he passed in December 1923.

During the transition period, he visited Paris with Alan Lee (later a Brisbane surgeon) and one night, when alone in his hotel, he coughed up some blood, not much but of unequivocal diagnostic significance. He immediately returned to London, tubercle bacilli were found in his sputum, the physicians gave him a good prognosis, and an early passage to Australia was arranged. He arrived in Melbourne on 13 February 1924, and so, as he put it, 'all my plans came to a sudden and inglorious end.' He was later convinced that he had contracted the infection in the post-mortem room, but he had already had two intimate family contacts with tuberculosis in his youth, and the strenuous life he led could have activated a dormant infection.

In search of a curative climate 1924-1934

Thus did Derrick entitle the next ten years of his life. Rest in bed, which might have shortened his convalescence, was not then favoured in Victoria and he was treated, with his own full approval, in the Trudeau tradition of fresh air, sleeping out of doors, living in the country, and a special reliance on mountain air. He went to Kyneton, north of the Dividing Range, where he lived quietly for a few weeks and then took a relieving resident position in the local hospital. This set the pattern of an odyssey that was to lead him by devious paths to the far west of New South Wales and, ultimately, to northern Queensland. It was effective in that he recovered; but it is an interesting reflection on clinical attitudes in the twenties that it apparently did not occur, either to himself or to his advisers, that an itinerant phthisical doctor might spread the infection wherever he went.

On the advice of Ernest Chenoweth, by now practising in Queensland, Derrick's first venture further afield was to Brisbane, where he was well received, saw leprosy for the first time at the Peel Island lazarette, obtained registration from the Queensland Medical Board on 10 July 1924, and spent several enjoyable weeks at Bilinga on the south coast. He was greatly attracted by the northern State, but his health did not improve and he returned sadly to Melbourne in October.

He remained quietly in southern Victoria for several months, and then began again to seek relieving (locum tenens) appointments, moving progressively into drier and hotter country from Yea in Victoria (August-September 1925) to Curramukke in South Australia (September-October), Broken Hill in New South Wales (October-November), and finally Tibooburra in the northwestern corner of the State (November 1925 to March 1926). He adapted quickly to the arid environment, and his health remained good under the stresses of a busy lodge practice at Broken Hill, a long, tiring, two-day journey by mail-car to Tibooburra over a rough bush road with many gates to open on the way (a normal duty for a passenger), and life in an isolated village about 200m above sea level with an annual rainfall of about 200mm, annual evaporation of nearly 3m, and December temperatures up to 46.5°C. Medical work was light at Tibooburra, but he had cases of typhoid fever to worry him, a woman who died of puerperal septicaemia, and a patient with delirium tremens to control; he also made two long trips into South Australia, one to examine an old swagman who had died in the desert and the other to collect a surgical patient from an isolated station. One of his patients had a camel team and enlivened his convalescence by teaching Derrick to ride and manage the beasts.

When the time came to leave Tibooburra, he did not return south, but travelled north and east with the overseer of the rabbit-proof border fence on his tour of inspection and maintenance, crossed the Paroo River, and entered Queensland at Hungerford, where he saw his first cases of dengue fever, the 1926 epidemic being then in full spate. Another fortuitous car trip took him to Cunnamulla and so by train to Brisbane, where he arrived on 12 March.

A week as locum at Killarney in the border ranges brought him more experience of dengue fever (including a personal attack which provided useful serum antibodies for study 30 years later), but the turning point in his life came in April when he was called to a relieving appointment at Irvinebank in north Queensland. It was there that he finally regained his health, married, developed his great interest in the fevers of the north, and so was led, almost automatically, into the path that was later to prove so profitable. But it was still by no means all smooth going.

Irvinebank was a small tin-mining town about 760m above sea level on the main range 80km west of Innisfail, with an admirably dry mild winter climate and a monsoonal (summer) rainfall of about 850mm. The duties of the medical officer included regular visits to Stannary Hills 24km away, but were generally light and Derrick was able to enjoy the quiet life that he still needed. His health continued to improve rapidly, so that, when his appointment ended in June, he decided to spend the next few months visiting other places, including Ravenshoe, Innot Hot Springs, and Mount Garnet, in the same general area. Then followed another relieving appointment at Irvinebank from December 1926 to June 1927, followed by similar appointments at Mareeba on the tableland and Innisfail on the coast.

Believing that he was cured, he returned to Melbourne in January 1928 and was appointed resident pathologist at the Austin Hospital, but he soon relapsed with tubercle bacilli again in his sputum, a bitter disappointment. Further rest and a trial of private practice in the Riverina brought little improvement, and he returned to Melbourne a very worried man.

Relief from this distressing situation came in July 1929, in the form of a telegram inviting him to take over the position of medical officer at the Irvinebank Hospital on a permanent basis. He accepted gratefully and returned at once to the town which held all his hopes of survival and a productive life. By 1930 he 'pronounced himself perfectly fit', married Miss Margaret Gina Quadrio, matron of the hospital, on 11 March, and settled down to what appeared to promise a quiet life in general practice. But his troubles had not ended. Mining in the district declined, the Hospital Board found itself unable to pay his salary, and his appointment was terminated in May 1931. However, he was able to obtain a similar appointment at Mount Mulligan and remained there until early in 1934.

Throughout his wanderings, Derrick had been impressed, more than most, by the weight of responsibility that rests on a doctor who has to practise all branches of medicine in a remote place where he cannot discuss his problems with a colleague or call in the aid of a specialist. This feeling of inadequacy was sharply increased when he attended a postgraduate course in Brisbane before taking up the Mount Mulligan appointment, and an attempt to keep up-to-date thereafter by more intensive reading of the journals he received did not satisfy him. He believed his cure was complete, so resigned from Mount Mulligan to begin private practice in Brisbane.

That, indeed, was the end of his wanderings, for he and his wife remained in or near Brisbane for nearly 42 years, and their two sons grew up there. The way had been long, arduous, and often frustrating, but it had brought, too, a wide knowledge of the harsh interior and the tough north and of the people who lived in those remote places. Derrick quoted Trudeau's comment as applying very much to himself:

The struggle with tuberculosis has brought me experiences and left me recollections which I could not have known otherwise, and which I would not exchange for the wealth of the Indies.

The rest of this story belongs to his scientific work.

The microbiological laboratory 1935-1947

The practice at Kelvin Grove was short-lived, for Derrick was appointed director of the Laboratory of Microbiology and Pathology in the Queensland Health Department on 1 June 1935, a notable event in Australian medical history (as was J.B. Cleland's appointment to the equivalent laboratory in Sydney some 20 years earlier).

The laboratory had had a chequered career (Tonge, 1960). In 1893 a Stock Institute was established in Brisbane with C.J. Pound in charge for diagnosis and investigation of diseases in the livestock on which the colony was so dependent for survival and prosperity. It did good work, especially on the tick fevers of cattle. In 1899 its name was changed to the Bacteriological Institute, Pound became Government Bacteriologist, and the scope of the Institute was expanded to include human diseases; it became, in fact; the first public health laboratory in the colony. Its value in that capacity was soon demonstrated, notably in the plague epidemic of 1901-7, its tasks multiplied, and in 1910 it was split into the Laboratory of Microbiology and Pathology under Dr John Harris, attached to the Department of Health, and the Stock Institute under Pound, attached to the Department of Agriculture and Stock (now Primary Industries). The latter became the flourishing Animal Research Institute at Yeerongpilly, so the old Institute left two lusty descendents.

The Microbiological Laboratory had four changes in directorship (Harris, Burton-Bradley, Arnold Dean, and Harris again) between 1910 and 1923, but then remained without a medical officer for 12 years, during which it was managed, with remarkable efficiency, by Mr H.E. Brown and a small staff working in cramped, inadequate quarters. R.W. Cilento, a noted authority on tropical medicine, became Director-General of Health and Medical Services in 1934. He immediately perceived the inadequacy of the laboratory services, secured larger quarters for them in the new departmental building in William Street, and pressed strongly for the appointment of a medical director of the highest quality. This was finally approved by Cabinet on condition that the laboratory would take over all coronial autopsies from the private practitioners, thereby saving more in fees than they intended to pay the director in salary. Cilento's choice of Derrick proved a remarkably wise one.

It follows that his first task was to establish an efficient autopsy service, and this he did with his customary thoroughness and meticulous attention to detail. He based his procedures on the experience he had gained at the Pathological Institute in London 12 years earlier and recorded all his findings with such care and completeness that they now form a unique series for reference and research. He also published a guide to technique for medico-legal autopsies and a number of papers on suicide, alcoholism, lead poisoning, unusual pathological findings, and other subjects in general pathology. He was one of the first in the world to use blood alcohol estimations in court evidence.

In the meantime, in August 1935, Cilento was informed of the problem presented by the occurrence of 'abattoir fever' in the Brisbane Abattoir, and invited Derrick to investigate it. This was to him 'the opportunity of a lifetime' and he seized it with both hands, ably assisted by Hubert Brown and D.J.W. Smith whose appointment in 1937 was the first for full-time medical research in Queensland since the Commonwealth Institute for Tropical Medicine at Townsville closed in 1930. The resulting spate of publications has been reviewed several times, most vividly by Burnet (1967) and Derrick.

Derrick proceeded logically. His first step was to make a careful clinical study of all the cases available to him, but this revealed little more than that the disease had some typhoid-like or typhus-like features. He then used his laboratory resources to discover whether it was an aberrant form of some febrile disease already known in Queensland, again with negative results. A search of the veterinary literature failed to reveal any potential zoonosis derivable from cattle that would fit the picture. He then turned to the guinea-pig, the standard experimental animal in his laboratory, as in most others in Australia at the time. Guinea-pigs inoculated with blood from febrile patients developed a mild disease, characterized by fever and enlargement of the spleen, and ending in recovery. The disease could be passed serially from guinea-pig to guinea-pig by inoculation of spleen or liver errulsions, but guinea-pigs which had recovered from a previous attack were refractory to re-inoculation. Here then was a specific infectious disease caused by an organism which he could neither detect by microscopic examination of infected tissues nor grow in any of the culture media available to him. He thought it was probably a virus and sent infected spleens to F.M. Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, for further study.

Burnet's principal tools were not guinea-pigs but the chorioallantois of the developing chick and adult mice (the use of infant mice in rickettsial research came much later). The chorioallantois proved to be only marginally useful, but the inoculated mice developed enlarged spleens, sometimes with exudate on the surface. Searching a section of an infected spleen one day, Burnet came on what appeared to be a micro-colony of tiny, weakly stained rods, and study of Castenada-stained smears promptly confirmed their identity as rickettsiae; the mouse had proved a better animal than the guinea-pig for this investigation. The immediate problem was solved and Derrick named the disease Q (for Query) fever, later (January 1939) naming the organism Rickettsia burneti in honour of Burnet; still later it was removed from Rickettsia to a new genus Coxiella by C.B. Philip on account of its distinctive characteristics within the rickettsial family.

Derrick's guinea-pigs had given him a valuable tool for further research. Two guinea-pigs, one 'clean', the other recovered from previous infection, could be inoculated with any suspected material, and if the first guinea-pig reacted but the other not he was provided with both a diagnosis and a fresh strain of C. burneti to study. This method was used extensively, and the laboratory, a large gloomy room subdivided by island-benches, became congested with large glass battery jars, each occupied by two guinea-pigs. It was an awesome sight to the unprepared visitor! At the height of the work, rectal temperatures of more than 100 guinea-pigs were being taken daily, and more than 1000 were used in the whole investigation.

Meanwhile, Burnet and Mavis Freeman went on to provide another valuable diagnostic tool. 'By a little simple juggling with pH' (Burnet, 1967) Miss Freeman was able to prepare a stable rickettsial suspension from infected mouse spleens, which they used to develop a neat though somewhat tricky micro-agglutination test for specific antibodies in human and lower animal sera. For much of the work Derrick simply sent his sera to Melbourne and Burnet and Miss Freeman returned him prompt and reliable answers. The task was later transferred to Brisbane, using Freeman mouse spleen antigen, until Wilbur Smith discovered in 1940 that the abundant multiplication of rickettsiae in infected female Rhipicephalus sanguineus (dog ticks) made it possible for him to prepare much larger volumes of excellent suspensions. The tick antigen was employed until the complement-fixation test was introduced in 1950.

To return to the main story, recognition of a rickettsia pointed directly to an arthropod-mammal primary cycle of infection. Local bandicoots (Isoodon macrourus) were known to harbour a rich variety of blood-sucking ectoparasites, and here luck favoured the research, for it led the collectors to Moreton Island where there were no large mammals, other than a few goats, and abundant bandicoots carrying only one species of tick, Haemaphysalis humerosa. Using the guinea-pig technique described above, Smith soon isolated C. burneti from six batches of ticks and two bandicoots and a serological survey revealed a high incidence of infection in the bandicoot population. Bandicoots and their ticks are widely distributed in eastern Queensland, so an efficient reservoir cycle had clearly been revealed.

The question remained: how did the infection get from bandicoots into cattle, and from cattle into workers in widely scattered departments of the Abattoir, but not at all into the workers in Swift's and Borthwick's Meatworks which killed only for export ? And, as the work went on, how to account for the laboratory infections that occurred in both Brisbane and Melbourne? Most of this looked easy, but it proved most difficult.

Including experimental transmission, the four potential vectors of C. burneti then known (Haemaphysalis humerosa, H. bispinosa, Rhipicephalus sangineus, and Ixodes holocyclus) were also known to attack cattle, at least occasionally, so it was safe to assume that some transmission from bandicoots to cattle would occur in nature (another significant cycle involving sheep is noted later). It was known, too, that infected ticks had enormous concentrations of rickettsiae in their guts and that many of the cattle entering the Abattoir were infested with cattle ticks, Boophilus microplus. But this promising line drew a complete blank: not a single infection was found in the thousands of Boophilus and substantial numbers of cattle spleens from the Abattoir that were tested in guinea-pigs. There had to be some mechanism other than contamination from the bodies of infected ticks crushed in the slaughtering operation.

The answer came from the United States. In essence, 'nine-mile fever' of Montana proved to be a tick-transmitted rickettsiosis, a chance laboratory infection demonstrated its identity with Q fever, infection was found to be widespread in California, and detailed studies showed that rickettsiae were present in large numbers in the milk of infected dairy cows and in enormous numbers in the placentas of infected cows and sheep. Analysis of laboratory infections also supported the conclusion that infection could be acquired by inhalation of contaminated dust or droplets. C. burneti, in fact, had the remarkable ability to behave as a perfectly normal Rickettsia in its reservoir cycle and as a Brucella in infections of cattle, sheep, and man. These findings resolved all Derrick's difficulties, including the absence of Q fever from the export Meatworks which did not kill pregnant cows. By 1955 the disease had been recognized in 51 different countries.

Derrick's guinea-pigs served him well in another important study. In 1937, he was asked to investigate cases of fever in dairy farmers, so he inoculated guinea-pigs in the standard way and isolated a Leptospira, which he named L. pomona. D.W. Johnson, working in Derrick's laboratory, studied its distribution and epidemiology in Australia, and it was found later that it was also the cause of 'swineherd's disease' in Switzerland and mild leptospirosis in other parts of the world. It was of these two diseases, Q. fever and Pomona leptospirosis, that Burnet was thinking when he wrote in his citation for Derrick's election to fellowship in the Australian Postgraduate Federation in Medicine: 'To have defined and elucidated the aetiology of two world-wide infectious diseases is something no other living scientist can claim'.

Other investigations were going on at the same time, some new, others arising from the steadily increasing volume and range of routine work that was being undertaken by the laboratory, wedged, as it were, among the hordes of guinea-pigs in their battery jars. These included (Doherty, 1967): discovery of a second new leptospira (L. hyos) by D.W. Johnson; description of generalized amoebiasis, found at autopsy of a patient from New Guinea and thought at the time to have been due to Iodamoeba, but now considered to have been caused by Naegleria; isolation of the Karp strain of the scrub-typhus rickettsia (also from New Guinea); recognition of a variety of infections not previously recorded from Queensland, including classical Weil's disease (L. icterohaemorrhagiae), rat-bite fever (Spirillum minus), torula meningitis, chromoblastomycosis, and histoplasmosis; and surveys of filariasis (including a persistent focus at the Goodna mental hospital), tick-typhus, and human brucellosis. Finally, Derrick crowned his labours by developing and carrying through his plan for the establishment of an institute for medical research in Brisbane, making this unquestionably the most productive period in his whole life.

The Queensland Institute of Medical Research 1947-1966

Derrick has recorded the origin and birth of the Institute. During the later years of the 1939-45 war, the burden of routine forensic and public health work grew steadily heavier, shortage of staff was aggravated by enlistments (most notably of Wilbur Smith into the RAAF), Derrick himself was involved in considerable part-time teaching in the Medical School (he was a special lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine from 1939 to 1965), and research in the Microbiological Laboratory had to be almost completely abandoned. He became seriously concerned for the future, and therefore included a plea in his 1943-44 annual report for a return to a policy of active research as soon as the war situation permitted. This was noted by R.H. Robinson, under-secretary of the department, Derrick's initially modest proposals were expanded in further discussions and, on 18 April 1945, Cabinet appointed a Medical Research Advisory Committee of nine members, with Derrick as chairman, to plan an institute of medical research and advise on how the plan could best be implemented.

As is usual with such committees, the brunt of the work fell on the chairman (who would not have wished it otherwise), but all contributed and especially D.H.K. Lee, then Professor of Physiology in the university and the only member with previous experience of organized medical research on the scale contemplated. Their report and a draft Bill for establishment of the Institute were presented on 13 July, accepted almost in toto, the Bill was introduced into Parliament on 6 September, and The Queensland Institute of Medical Research Act was proclaimed on 19 January 1946. It provided for an institute to undertake 'research into any branch or branches of medical science . . . under the control and management' of a council of seven members with the director-general of Health and Medical Services as chairman.

The first meeting of the council, with Sir Raphael Cilento in the chair, was held on 8 February 1946, and Derrick was appointed acting deputy-director so that he could implement decisions about the Institute while continuing to control the Microbiological Laboratory. He became deputy-director on 27 March 1947, confirming his intention that someone else should be the first director. In the meantime, he and the council had done a great deal of work: gathering the nucleus of a library and essential basic equipment (including much that had been used by the LHQ Medical Research Unit at Cairns during the war); obtaining a temporary home for the Institute in a large, empty US Army hut in Victoria Park near the Medical School and Brisbane Hospital; providing enough sub-division and furnishing in the hut to accommodate initial research and ancillary staff; and securing the services of an experienced librarian (Mrs Margaret Macgregor, appointed 28 April 1947). When the building was occupied on 2 June 1947 by the director and the deputy-director, the librarian, and two ancillary staff (with three more to come in the following week), it was ready for at least the beginnings of some active work. It remained a centre of considerable activity for the next 30 years, for most of which Dr (later Sir) Abraham Fryberg was chairman of the council. Its successive directors have been Mackerras to 1961, Derrick to 1966, R.L. Doherty to 1977, and C.S. Kidson from 1978, with J.H. Pope as acting director in 1977-78.

Doherty (1967, 1978) has given well-balanced accounts of the next 14 years, the second paper bringing Derrick's activities into perspective with other work that was going on in the Institute in the same period.

Derrick was unquestionably glad to have a time of relative relaxation after his strenuous efforts in 1945-47, and he gave most of the next two years to the pleasant task of clearing up the backlog of uncompleted papers carried over from the Microbiological Laboratory. All 11 of his publications from 1948 to 1951 belong to this category. At the same time, he continued to help in the selection of staff, in planning the additional laboratories that would be needed within the building, and especially in establishing adequate stocks of laboratory animals, principally mice (derived originally from Hall Institute stock), but also rats, guinea-pigs, and rabbits. A large section of the area under the hut came to be occupied by the animal houses, which helped to sustain the rather flimsy structure of the laboratories above.

He also had two main research projects in mind, both fitting well into the broad research policy that had been accepted for the Institute. One was to continue the search for infectious agents in southern Queensland that had begun in the Microbiological Laboratory, but using mice rather than guinea-pigs as the primary tool; and the other was his old favourite, to investigate the many still undiagnosable fevers of north Queensland. He felt strongly that an efficient virological unit would be an indispensable component in the plans for both, so he spent several months in 1951 visiting relevant overseas laboratories to learn what he could of their organization and methods.

The first project began as soon as enough resources could be got together, and it proved (like the study of salmonellosis in infants that was going on in another section of the Institute at the same time) an admirable training ground for the young cadets who were later to become the backbone of the research staff. It went on, with intermissions, through the whole period, adding to general knowledge of infectious agents and their hosts, but leading to only two significant discoveries. One was that toxoplasmosis was common in Queensland rodents and small marsupials, and serological surveys showed that it was also common in man, usually in inapparent infections, but sometimes, as elsewhere, associated with a variety of syndromes, including congenital brain and eye damage. Its epidemiology remained obscure for we failed to recognize the domestic cat as the primary host in which the parasite behaves as an ordinary coccidian; that discovery came from studies overseas nearly 20 years later. The second discovery was the isolation of an obscure virus from a house mouse collected in Brisbane and its final identification by J.H. Pope as a mouse leukaemia virus, which led him directly into a productive career of research on the tumour viruses of man.

Derrick's second project began in 1951 after his return from abroad. A field station was set up in the Innisfail Hospital and manned successively by two medical research fellows (C.N. Sinnamon for a year, R.L. Doherty thereafter) and the most experienced of the available cadets. In essence, the plan was to make a careful clinical study of all febrile patients, to collect immediate and convalescent samples of sera for serological investigation, to make blood cultures for leptospirae, and to inoculate adult mice for isolation of rickettsiae and other agents. The mice were returned to the Institute, where they joined the search for infectious agents described above; sera and positive cultures were sent, by cooperative arrangement, to the Microbiological Laboratory, which was now directed by J.I. Tonge and had Hubert Brown and Wilbur Smith as experts in leptospiral identification. It was a return to valued old associations for Derrick.

The principal results of this study were the addition of eight 'new' serotypes of leptospirae to those already known in Australia and the demonstration that mouse-inoculation was much more reliable than the Weil-Felix serological reaction for the diagnosis of scrub-typhus. Serology and a broader approach to laboratory diagnosis in general also reduced the number of more ubiquitous infections that passed unrecognized, so that by the middle of 1955 it could fairly be said that the diagnostic problems, and consequently treatment, of the fevers of north Queensland had been substantially solved. Work at the field station was turned to a detailed study of the reservoir hosts, still in collaboration with the Microbiological Laboratory which had by then became a WHO Reference Centre for leptospirosis, but that story does not belong here.

Freed from his preoccupation with Innisfail, Derrick was able to gather in the loose ends and turn his attention to other problems. He published epidemiological analyses of dengue fever, leptospirosis, and scrub-typhus, in which he foreshadowed the special concern with climatic factors that was to influence much of his later work on asthma; he and Domrow organized a survey of the foci of scrub-typhus in north Queensland, which provided a basis for later studies by Domrow, Cook, and Campbell of the host distribution of Rickettsia tsutsu-gamushi and its transmission by Leptotrombidium deliense; he joined with Cook in the survey of human toxoplasmosis, with Pope in an investigation of murine-typhus during a mouse plague on the Darling Downs; and also with Pope in a final rewarding study of Q fever arising from an outbreak of the disease among shearers working on sheep stations in western Queensland. The investigation revealed a high incidence of infection in local kangaroos and kangaroo ticks (Amblyomma triguttatum, a three-host tick with a wide host range), which provided a major maintenance cycle in the west comparable to that provided by the bandicoot and its tick in the east. Many of the sheep brought in for shearing were infested with A. triguttatum, so it seemed probable that the workers in the shed were infected from the ticks macerated during the shearing operation, a hypothesis which was supported by the occurrence of Q fever in fellmongers in Brisbane who handled fleeces from the infected stations.

When Derrick became director on 29 July 1961, the Institute had teams able to work independently in such fields as arboviruses (Doherty, with the largest group), tumour viruses (Pope), Acarina (Domrow), rickettsiae (Pope, Carley, Campbell), bacteriology (Singer), and a capable deputy-director in R.L. Doherty, and he was therefore able to concentrate on a study of the epidemiology of asthma in Queensland, a problem to which he was attracted by the frequency of the disease, especially in children in the Brisbane area.

He had begun the study in 1960 with a survey of admissions for asthma in the Brisbane hospitals, which showed that there were normally two well-defined seasonal peaks, one in autumn and one in spring. Then he found that similar peaks in admissions occurred in other hospitals in southeastern Queensland but not in north Queensland, and that they were much more evident in young people than in older age groups. These findings suggested seasonally produced airborne allergens as the probable cause of the epidemics, so he arranged for the establishment of air-sampling facilities and secured the appointment of a botanist (J. Moss) and mycologist (R. Rees) to analyse the samples for plant pollens and fungal spores respectively. A great mass of quantitative and qualitative information was collected in the ensuing years, but no correlations with the frequency of asthmatic attacks were established either by statistical analysis of the data or by clinical testing of the potential allergens that had been isolated. Correlations with growth of grasses and density of smoke were also attempted without success. In the meantime, he pursued his statistical studies of weather and climate, still searching for correlations that might point to the operative allergens. He was able to correlate the monthly incidence of asthma with mean monthly temperatures up to 21 degrees C, but no higher, and the annual incidence of asthma with annual rainfall, but there the work ended. He published 19 papers on asthma, 13 of them after his retirement.

Final years, 1966-1976

When he retired on 28 July 1966, Derrick was appointed honorary research fellow in the Institute and, a little later, director of the Research Bureau of the Queensland Asthma Foundation, which post he held until 1973. He continued his studies much as he had before his retirement, published 21 papers on a variety of subjects, including those on asthma already referred to, and prepared a manuscript (published after his death) recording his own terminal illness with characteristic detachment and attention to detail. Though his physical capacity declined, his mental activity did not, and he was still making notes within a few hours of his death on 15 June 1976 (Tonge, 1976). It is sad that he did not survive long enough to enter the Institute's spacious new laboratories in the grounds of the Brisbane Hospital, which were opened in February 1977 and will remain his most enduring monument. His portrait by Graeme Inson hangs in the entrance hall.

Conclusion

This has been the story of an unusual man who came into research under two diverging influences. On the one side, his family background, early education, and temperament made him deeply religious, reserved, intolerant of levity on serious subjects, but still willing to suffer fools gladly if they were young and teachable. He came to medicine with the conviction that his task was to relieve human suffering – indeed, to seek it out for relief – and there is little doubt that he would have become a missionary among the heathen if tuberculosis had not intervened. On the other side, he was endowed with an analytical mind, a liberal share of scientific curiosity, an immense respect for the integrity of science, and an obsession (perhaps acquired in London) with detailed observation and precise recording. He had gone to England 'in search of knowledge' and the same tuberculosis that had deprived him of his missionary ambition led him in the end to the laboratory in Brisbane where he had ample opportunities to continue the search. This he did, with results that gave him great satisfaction and brought him world-wide recognition as a distinguished Australian scientist.

He received many honours. He was awarded a CBE in 1961, was elected to the Academy in 1955, received The Britannica Australia Award for Medicine in 1965, admitted DSc (honoris causa) by the University of Queensland in 1966, and awarded the ANZAAS Medal in 1969. He was elected a fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1940), fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (1947), foundation member (later fellow) of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia (1956), member of the International Society of Biometeorology (1966), fellow of the Australian Society of Allergists (1967), fellow of the Australian Medical Association (1968), fellow of the Australian Postgraduate Federation in Medicine (1971), and honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (1975). He also shared the Cilento Medal with F.M. Burnet in 1939, was Bancroft Orator of the British Medical Association (Queensland branch) in 1948, and Elkington Orator of the Queensland Society of Health in 1962. The Medical Journal of Australia published a Festschrift number in his honour on 9 December 1967.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, vol.4, no.1, 1978. It was written by I.M. Mackerras, DSc, former Director of The Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane (1947-1961). He was elected to the Academy in 1954 and served on Council 1955-7.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor R.L. Doherty, University of Queensland, to Dr J.H. Pope and other members of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, and to Dr J.I. Tonge and Mr D.J.W. Smith of the Queensland Laboratory of Microbiology and Pathology for information and suggestions, and to Dr Elizabeth N. Marks and Mrs E.R. Bailey for help in the preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

(1) Quotations without citation of reference are from a manuscript autobiography which was completed only to the end of 1933, now in the Academy's Basser Library.

Written by R. Hanbury Brown, Harry C. Minnett and Frederick W.G. White

• Introduction
• Early years
• The war years
• The Tizard mission
• The Australian years
• Sport
• Personal
• Honours and awards
• About this memoir
  • References

Introduction

Edward George Bowen was one of the most dynamic and influential of the wartime generation of British physicists. Having completed his doctorate under Professor E.V. Appleton at King's College, London, he was recruited by Robert Watson-Watt in 1935 and played an important part in the early development of radar in Britain. He went to the United States with the Tizard Mission in 1940 and helped to initiate the tremendous enterprise that marked the evolution of microwave radar as a fighting weapon in the war. He was invited to join the CSIR(O) in Australia in 1943 and became the Chief of the Division of Radiophysics in Sydney. There he encouraged the greatest research effort that emerged from the war – the new science of radioastronomy – and brought about the construction of the 210 ft radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Following the initiation of cloud and rain physics by Langmuir and Schaefer in the United States, he mounted a remarkable effort to improve the rainfall in dry Australia which began in 1947 and continued after he retired in 1971. Throughout his Australian career, he remained a devoted Welshman, rejoicing in the name of 'Taffy'. He had a strong and independent view of his science which occasionally involved conflicting views with others, but this was balanced by an enthusiastic and engaging manner which won him many friends.

Early years

Edward George Bowen was born on 14 January 1911 in the village of Cockett near Swansea, Wales, to George Bowen and Ellen Ann (née Owen). He was the youngest of four children: Gwladys, Richard, Olwen and Edward George. Both their grandfathers had served apprenticeships on clipper ships sailing around the Horn to Pacific ports in Chile and Peru, there to load ore for the busy refineries of Swansea. George Bowen himself was a steelworker in a Swansea tinplate works, where he folded and flattened red-hot plates into the thin sheet steel needed, a task which required considerable skill and strength. He satisfied a love of music as the organist in the Congregational Chapel in nearby Sketty.

Edward Bowen had a keen mind and, at an early age, developed a lively interest in radio and also in sport, particularly cricket. At the primary school in Sketty, he won a scholarship in 1922 to the Municipal Secondary School in central Swansea. His senior years there coincided with the onset of bleak economic times in South Wales, but fortunately he was successful in again winning a scholarship which enabled him to enter Swansea University College. At first Edward's intention was to concentrate on chemistry, his top subject, but he soon changed to physics and related subjects, a decision he never regretted. He graduated with a First-Class Honours degree in 1930 and went on to post-graduate research on X-rays and the structure of alloys under the direction of the Senior Lecturer, Dr W. Morris Jones, and Professor J.V. Evans, an excellent teacher and physicist. This work earned him an MSc in 1931.

At the University he had met his future wife Enid Vesta Williams from nearby Neath, who graduated in geology and became a science teacher. They were later to marry (in 1938) and bring up a family of three sons: Edward, David and John.

The war years

Ground radar

It was Professor E.J. Evans who, recognising Bowen's intense interest in radio, arranged for him to take a PhD in the Physics Department of King's College (London University) under the direction of Professor E.V. Appleton. As part of his research, Bowen spent a large part of 1933 and 1934 working with a cathode-ray direction finder at the Radio Research Station at Slough and it was there that he was noticed by R.A. Watson-Watt and so came to play an important part in the early history of radar.

The first significant event in that early history was the proposal by H.E. Wimperis, then Director of Research at the Air Ministry, that a Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence should be established under the chairmanship of H.T. Tizard. Prior to the first meeting of that committee on 28 January 1935, Wimperis enquired from the Superintendent of the Radio Research Station (Watson-Watt) whether it would be possible to incapacitate an enemy aircraft or its crew by an intense beam of radio waves, or in more popular language by a 'death ray'. In two memoranda Watson-Watt showed that such a 'death ray' was impracticable, but made the immensely valuable suggestion that radio waves might be used to detect, rather than destroy, enemy aircraft.

Following a successful demonstration in February 1935 of the reflection of radio waves by an aircraft, the development of radar went ahead, and on 13 May 1935 a team of five people set out from Slough for Orfordness. Their ostensible purpose was to do ionospheric research but their real purpose was kept secret: it was to set up an experimental ground radar.

Bowen, now aged 24, was one of that team; he had been recruited by Watson-Watt as a Junior Scientific Officer. While the two senior members (A.F. Wilkins and L.H. Bainbridge-Bell) took care of the antennas and the receiver, Bowen's job was to assemble a transmitter from a miscellaneous collection of parts collected together in a hurry at Slough. Before the end of May he had the transmitter working, and by using 5,000 volts on the anodes of a pair of NT46 valves he persuaded them to produce a power output of about 20 kilowatts at 6MHz with a pulse width of 25 microseconds. In the course of the next few months he increased the anode voltage to over 10,000 volts, well beyond the rated limits, and managed to raise the pulse power to over 100 kilowatts.

The first detection of an aircraft, so Bowen (1987) claims, was made on 17 June 1935 when a clear radar echo was detected from a Scapa flying boat at a range of 17 miles. This was only the beginning; many improvements, such as shorter working wavelengths, larger antennas, greater transmitter power, and systems for measuring the height and direction of the target were soon introduced, and by early 1936 aircraft were being detected at ranges of up to 100 miles.

The success of this work prompted the decision to start work on a chain of radar stations (CH) to give warning of enemy aircraft approaching the coast, and in December 1935 the funds were made available for five stations covering the approaches to London. This ambitious project made it urgently necessary to enlarge the small team at Orfordness and to establish the programme on a more suitable site. The Air Ministry bought a large and isolated country house, Bawdsey Manor, into which the original team, including Bowen, moved in March 1936.

Towards the end of 1935 Watson-Watt decided that when the move to Bawdsey Manor took place Wilkins would take responsibility for the chain of radar stations and that Bowen, at his own request, would tackle the highly speculative – and at that time unique – venture of putting radar in an aircraft. As part of the deal, Bowen was to remain responsible for his original transmitter which would be left at Orfordness, unused but untouched, while a new transmitter was constructed at Bawdsey Manor.

In the event it proved a wise decision to leave Bowen's old transmitter untouched. The first major Air Exercise to demonstrate the use of radar in air defence was held in September 1936 using large numbers of aircraft and the new radar station at Bawdsey Manor. It was watched not only by members of Tizard's committee but also by important members of the Air Ministry and the RAF notably the Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding. The first day of the Exercise was an absolute shambles; the incoming aircraft were not detected until they were so close to the coast that their engines could be heard – a sound locator would have done just as well. Urgent enquiries showed that the new transmitter at the Manor was not putting out enough power.

Bowen helped to save the day in two ways. Before a disgruntled Sir Hugh Dowding returned to London, Bowen gave him an impromptu demonstration of an experimental radar, built as part of the airborne radar programme, which was detecting the aircraft engaged in the Exercise at ranges of up to 50 miles. This, so Bowen (1987) tells us cheered Dowding up immensely. Bowen then travelled to Orford with one assistant (A.G. Touch) and, working all night, made his original transmitter work satisfactorily in time for the Air Exercise on the morning of the second day. The old transmitter at Orford held the fort until the new transmitter at Bawdsey was put right.

The rest of the Exercise went reasonably well and the plans for the construction of a chain of coastal stations survived; which was just as well, otherwise they might not have been ready to play a vital part in the Battle of Britain four years later.

Airborne radar

The problems of installing a radar in an aircraft which Bowen faced in the spring of 1936 were, to put it mildly, challenging. The principal application envisaged for airborne radar was night interception and at that stage the principal problems were not operational but technical; it is easy to underestimate how difficult they looked in 1936. The most obvious difficulty was to reduce the size and weight of the equipment; the existing ground radars would fill a small house, weighed several tons and took many kilowatts of power. Bowen decided that a viable airborne radar should not exceed 200 lbs in weight, 8 cubic feet in volume and 500 watts in power consumption and that, to reduce the aerodynamic drag of the antenna, the operating wavelength would have to be about one metre – a very short wavelength in those days.

These targets were very difficult to meet. In those days most radio components were large, heavy and unsuitable for use in the extremes of vibration, temperature and atmospheric pressure met with in military aircraft. The aircraft power supply was DC, variable in voltage and very limited in capacity. There were a number of other troublesome problems; for example, there were no solid dielectric cables to connect the radar equipment to the antennas. But the greatest difficulty of all was to generate enough power at short wavelengths in a transmitter that could be carried in an aircraft.

Over the next few years, Bowen and his group tackled and solved most of these problems. To take two important examples, in 1938, with the help of Metropolitan Vickers, he solved the problem of the power supply in aircraft by introducing an engine-driven alternator which gave an 80 volt, 1,000 Hz, voltage-stabilized supply. In 1939 he encouraged ICI to produce the first radio-frequency cables with solid polythene dielectric, a most important advance.

Faced with the difficulty of fitting a sufficiently powerful transmitter into an aircraft, Bowen's first move was to leave it on the ground and carry only the receiver and indicator in the air. He erected a powerful (30 Kw) 6.7 metre transmitter on the roof of Bawdsey Manor and installed a receiver and cathode-ray indicator in a Heyford aircraft with a simple half-wave dipole strung between the wheels. Flying from Martlesham Heath in the autumn of 1936, he detected aircraft at ranges of up to 12 miles.

This hybrid system had the advantages that the transmitter could be large and powerful and that, unlike later metre-wave airborne radars, its maximum range was not limited to the height of the aircraft above the ground; nevertheless it had the obvious limitation that the range of the target aircraft, as seen by the fighter, was only correct when the fighter was in a direct line between the transmitter and the target. Although Bowen argued hard for its further development, he failed to persuade Watson-Watt; so he dropped it and pressed on with the construction of a complete airborne radar.

In early 1937 he acquired some Western Electric 316A valves that were capable of delivering a pulse power of a few hundred watts at a wavelength of about one metre. A complete radar system, using these valves, was built at a wavelength of 1.25m and installed in an Anson. On 17 August 1937 it was tested in the air by two of Bowen's group, A.G. Touch and K.A. Wood; although they detected no aircraft, they obtained clear echoes from ships off the coast at Felixstowe at ranges of two to three miles. Following this flight the performance was greatly improved by increasing the wavelength to 1.5m, which subsequently became the standard wavelength for metre-wave airborne radar.

In September 1937, hearing that an exercise was planned during which Coastal Command would search for the Fleet, Bowen gave a dramatic, uninvited, demonstration of the application of radar to aerial reconnaissance. Together with KA. Wood he used the experimental 1.5m radar to search for the Fleet in the North Sea under conditions of low visibility and, much to the astonishment of the Navy and Coastal Command, he found the aircraft carrier Courageous, the battleship Rodney and the cruiser Southampton. It was during this flight that they detected radar echoes from the aircraft of Courageous – the first detection of an aircraft by a complete airborne radar. This demonstration was, so Bowen (1987) tells us, 'a landmark in the history of airborne radar'; it was followed by many demonstrations to senior officers of the RAF.

The airborne radar group now had two major projects, the detection of ships (ASV – Air to Surface Vessels) and the interception of aircraft (AI – Aircraft Interception). Although there were many other applications in Bowen's lively and fertile mind, there was never enough time to explore them properly. He did, however, manage to experiment briefly with the use of airborne radar to detect features on the ground such as towns and coastlines, to detect falling bombs in a scheme to attack bomber aircraft from above, and as an aid to navigation in which the contours of the ground beneath an aircraft were compared with a map.

ASV (Air to Surface Vessels)

During 1938, most of the work of Bowen's small group was devoted to the development of improved components for both AI and ASV, and to the design of a practical system of ASV. The principal question was whether the radar should scan the sea for ships by looking forward, sideways or all round. The three modes required different antennas and displays.

The design of the forward-looking mode was technically the simplest and was fairly well established by mid-1938; as we shall see later, this was the first form of ASV to be adopted by the RAF.

To test the sideways mode, Bowen had two six-element Yagi antennas fitted to an Anson so as to project a beam at right angles to the direction of flight. Using a photographic recorder to record the returns from objects scanned by this beam, he demonstrated the system to the Services by showing them 'radar pictures' of ships of the Home Fleet as they passed from Spithead to Portland in May 1938.

To test the all-round-looking mode, Bowen arranged to fit a rotating dipole to an Anson and to display the signals on a cathode-ray tube using what is now called a B-scan. Although one of his group (P.L. Waters) made this system work, its maximum range was unsatisfactory, probably due to losses in the rotating joint.

Following extensive tests and demonstrations, in which Bowen played a major part, it was eventually decided that the first ASV system in service would be forward-looking. In this system the power from the aircraft transmitter was radiated in a wide beam forward, and the returns from the target were received on two simple antennas mounted on each side of the aircraft to give overlapping beams in the forward direction. The receiver was connected in rapid sequence to these two antennas by a fast rotating switch, and the signals were displayed as deflections to the right and left of a vertical timebase on a single cathode-ray tube.

The first installation of ASV MkI was made in a Hudson aircraft in December 1939. It could detect a 10,000 tonne ship at a range of about 20 miles and coastlines at 30 to 40 miles. About 300 sets were made and were fitted in Hudsons and Sunderlands of Coastal Command. In practice its main use was to aid navigation, not to find enemy shipping; it helped patrols to rendezvous with convoys (The Battle of the Atlantic [1946]), provided navigational assistance by detecting coastlines and, more popularly, helped aircraft to return to base using transponder beacons.

When war was declared in September 1939, Bawdsey Research Station, now called the Air Ministry Research Establishment (AMRE) was 'evacuated' to Dundee and the airborne group to Perth aerodrome. Bowen was then faced with the extremely awkward problem of carrying on the development of airborne radar at an aerodrome which had neither laboratory space nor adequate hangars. That did not last long; in late October his group was moved to 32 Maintenance Unit at St Athan which, although it had adequate hangars, was too far from Dundee and a most unsuitable place in which to do laboratory work. However the main task of Bowen's group at St Athan was to help the RAF to fit radars to their aircraft, and in doing this they were entirely successful; within a few months, aircraft were being fitted with AI or ASV at the rate of about one per day. It is very much to Bowen's credit that this was achieved in such difficult circumstances.

One of the first things that Bowen did at St Athan, in response to an urgent enquiry from Admiral Somerville, was to try to detect a submarine by radar. In the first week of December 1939, Bowen and I (RHB) carried out flight trials using ASV MkI in a Hudson to look for submarine L27 in the Solent. On the first flight at 1,000 feet we detected the submarine in a fairly rough sea at a range of 3 miles; on a subsequent flight at 6,000 feet, with a calmer sea, we detected it at a range of up to 6 miles. In our report on these trials we pointed out that although these ranges were short, they had been obtained with simple dipole antennas and could be doubled by using high gain directional antennas in a sideways-looking system.

Following these results it was agreed to introduce a sideways-looking system (Long Range ASV, LRASV) for anti-submarine patrol and, as a start, Bowen arranged that a Whitley should be fitted with high gain directional antennas. The first Whitleys with LRASV went into service at Aldergrove in December 1940. At a height of 2,000 feet they could detect coastlines at about 60 miles, a 10,000 tonne ship at 40 miles, a destroyer at 20 miles and a submarine at 8 miles; at 5,000 feet their range on a submarine increased to between 10 and 15 miles.

The engineering of the equipment, to make it more rugged and reliable, was carried out at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) under the supervision of a senior member of Bowen's original group (A.G. Touch). The set which they developed (ASV MkII) was produced in far greater numbers than MkI; in the UK alone, 6,000 sets were made, and many thousands were produced in the USA and Canada. It was fitted to patrol and reconnaissance aircraft all over the world and used in anti-submarine patrols, anti-shipping strikes, convoy escort and many other duties. Its principal value was in the first phase of the Battle of the Atlantic when the Germans were using the captured French ports to give their U-boats easy access to the Atlantic. In April 1941 Coastal Command was operating anti-submarine patrols with about 110 aircraft fitted with ASV MkII, and the use of radar by these aircraft increased the daylight sightings of submarines significantly. More importantly, it made it possible to attack submarines at night as they travelled on the surface; in 1941-1942 over 90 per cent of night attacks were made as the result of ASV contact. However very few of these attacks were lethal until the introduction in mid-1942 of a powerful searchlight (Leigh Light) that illuminated the submarine. The combination of this light with ASV MkII was so effective that the submarines tended to submerge by night and surface by day, thereby increasing their destruction by daytime patrols. This satisfactory state of affairs lasted for a few months until the Germans introduced a listening receiver – Metox – which warned the submarine of the approach of an ASV-equipped aircraft so that it could dive. As far as metre-wave ASV was concerned the introduction of this listening device marked the end of the first phase of he Battle of the Atlantic; the second phase was taken up by centimetre-wave radar.

AI (Air Interception)

Most of the early development of AI and ASV was done in parallel and they were able to share many of the same components. Nevertheless AI had its own peculiar problems; for example, the components had to work at higher altitudes, making it, among other things, more difficult to design a transmitter. Also AI is more complicated than ASV because it must guide the fighter to its target in three dimensions, and the range and relative direction of a fast moving target must be presented to the operator immediately and simply. Furthermore it must bring the night fighter so close to the target that the pilot can identify it visually before opening fire.

In early 1939 Bowen, together with his group, decided that the first AI radar would measure the relative direction of the target by four antennas mounted on the fighter; two 'azimuth antennas' would give overlapping lobes in the azimuth plane and two 'elevation antennas' would give overlapping lobes in elevation. Failing to devise a simple display on a single cathode-ray tube, Bowen had to accept that there must be two tubes and a separate radar operator. One tube would display the signals from the elevation antennas and the other the signals from the azimuth antennas. As in ASV, the signals would be distributed by a fast rotating switch. Following some tests on night vision made at the RAE Bowen decided that AI must have a minimum range of 1,000 feet.

The first complete installation of AI was flown in a Fairey Battle on 9 June 1939. It gave a maximum range of 12,000 feet with a Harrow as a target; the minimum range was about 1,000 feet and in mock interceptions the display seemed easy to use. A week or so later Bowen gave the Commander in Chief of Fighter Command (Sir Hugh Dowding) a successful demonstration; within a few weeks the airborne group was committed to fitting AI into 30 Blenheims for trials by 25 Squadron at Northolt.

This programme at Northolt was premature; not only was the AI equipment inadequately engineered, no proper provision was made for training and maintenance. Nevertheless the trials did expose one important fact; they showed that in order to make a successful interception with AI, it was essential to control the path of the fighter with a precision that could not be achieved by the existing system of fighter control. In November 1939 I pointed this out in a memorandum written to Bowen from Northolt and suggested that a special radar should be developed for fighter control. Bowen immediately forwarded my memorandum to the Superintendent of AMRE at Dundee, adding the excellent suggestion that the solution to the problem was to build a radar with a narrow rotating beam, a 'Radio Lighthouse'. Bowen had in fact suggested such a radar in July 1938, but not specifically for the control of night fighters. Unhappily that suggestion was turned down and Sir Robert Watson-Watt (1957) tells us that the failure to follow it up may have been one of his greatest mistakes in the development of radar. However, this time it was followed up; a radar with a narrow rotating beam and plan-position-indicator was developed by AMRE and the first Ground Control Radar (GCI) was delivered to the RAF in October 1940.

While at St Athan, Bowen's group developed an improved version of AI (MkIII) and helped to fit it into the Blenheims of various night-fighter squadrons. Although the maximum range of AI MkIII was regarded as adequate, its minimum range was about 1,000 feet and this became the subject of considerable friction between Bowen and the main establishment at Dundee. AI was not proving successful in the hands of the RAF and the Superintendent (A.P. Rowe) and his Deputy (W.B. Lewis) had been persuaded that this was largely due to the minimum range being too great; it must, they insisted, be reduced as a matter of urgency. Bowen disagreed profoundly; he was convinced that the minimum range had nothing to do with the shortcomings of AI in service and that the 1,000 feet achieved by AI MkIII was adequate operationally. To Bowen's intense annoyance Lewis, acting on a request from Rowe, started a programme of experimental work on AI MkIII at Dundee (Lovell 1988). Fortunately one of the things Lewis did was to enlist the help of EMI; in due course A.D. Blumlein and his colleagues at EMI produced an excellent transmitter modulator that reduced the minimum range to 500 feet and was subsequently incorporated in AI MkIV.

Nevertheless it is likely that in this controversy Bowen was right. The principal technical defect in AI MkIII was later shown by tests at Fighter Interception Unit to be a squint in the antenna system of the Blenheim which was cured by changing from horizontal to vertical polarization (Hanbury Brown 1991). The minimum range was probably not a serious defect; in an assessment of the combat reports of fighter pilots in 1940 and 1941, Bowen found that the median range at which enemy aircraft were tracked by A1 and then seen visually was between 1,200 and 1,500 feet (Lovell 1988). Furthermore the subsequent success of AI in 1941 suggests that two operational factors contributed to the failure of AI MkIII, the inadequate speed and armament of the Blenheim and the absence of GCI (Ground Control Radar).

This controversy about minimum range is only worth mentioning because it greatly exacerbated the strained relations between Bowen and A.P. Rowe, which had never been good ever since Rowe had succeeded Watson-Watt as Superintendent at Bawdsey in 1938 and appointed Lewis as his Deputy. As his senior staff Rowe had inherited Wilkins and Bowen, old colleagues of Watson-Watt who had pioneered radar, and as Bowen (1987) tells us, Rowe 'never came to terms with them'. The separation between Dundee and St Athan was a further strain and the friction with Lewis over the question of minimum range was, from Bowen's point of view, the last straw. When in May 1940 the main radar establishment (AMRE) moved from Dundee to Worth Matravers and the airborne group left St Athan to rejoin them, Bowen ceased to take an active part in their work and, as we shall see, he was soon to leave for the USA. [AMRE became TRE (Telecommunications Research Establishment) in November 1940.]

The final engineering of AI MkIII was undertaken at the RAE and introduced into service as AI MkIV in Blenheims and Beaufighters in the autumn of 1940. AI MkIV did everything which Bowen had originally visualized for a metre-wave AI set. It was the last and vital link in an elaborate and successful system of hunting enemy bombers that involved the coastal CH stations, inland GCI radars, radar beacons and transponders, VHF radio and AI-equipped Beaufighters with their Hispano cannons. In the hands of a skilled crew, AI MkIV was remarkably effective, and in the heavy night raids of 1941 the AI-equipped fighter proved to be the principal weapon of air defence at night (Douglas 1948); thus in May 1941 over 100 enemy aircraft were definitely shot down at night using AI compared with 30 by anti-aircraft guns.

The Tizard mission

In August 1940 Bowen left the UK as one of seven members of a Mission, led by Sir Henry Tizard, to disclose recent British technical advances to the USA and Canada. Bowen's job was to tell them all about British radar. He took with him not only information on all existing and projected equipment, but also an early sample of the cavity magnetron, the essential and highly secret key to the development of centimetre-wave radar that had just been invented by J.T. Randall and H.A.H. Boot at Birmingham University.

Following discussions with the Tizard Mission, the US made the important decision that the development of metre-wavelength radar should be the responsibility of the Armed Services, and that the development at centimetre wavelengths should be the responsibility of a special Microwave Committee of which Dr Alfred Loomis was appointed Chairman.

As far as metre-wave radar was concerned, Bowen, together with other members of the Mission, visited the various laboratories of the Armed Services telling them about developments in the UK; in particular he told them about airborne radar and arranged for demonstrations of ASV MkII, AI Mk IV and IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) equipment in the air. However most of his considerable energy and enthusiasm was devoted to helping them develop centimetre-wave radar. Ever since the days of Bawdsey Manor he had urged that work should be done on shorter and shorter wavelengths so that radars could use narrow beams; an airborne radar, for example, might use a narrow beam to eliminate the returns from the ground that limited the maximum range of AI at metre-waves.

With remarkable speed the Microwave Committee set up a special laboratory, the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, for the development of centimetre-wave radar, and Bowen collaborated closely with them on their programme. His advice was particularly valuable in the early stages; for example, he wrote the first draft specification for the development of their 10cm AI.

So successful was the programme at the Radiation Laboratory that the first experimental airborne 10cm radar was tested in a Douglas B18, with Bowen on board, on 27 March 1941, only seven months after the Tizard Mission had arrived in the USA. Their first 10cm AI (SCR720), accompanied by Bowen, was demonstrated in the UK in August 1941 and later became known as AI Mk IX.

In the course of the next year the Radiation Laboratory grew in size and soon became the most important and productive radar laboratory in the USA; by the end of the war the staff numbered about 4,000.

The Tizard Mission, in which Bowen played such a large part, was highly successful. It drew the attention of the Americans to the importance of radar as a weapon of war, introduced them to airborne radar, accelerated the development of centimetre-wave radar by giving them the cavity magnetron and, owing much to Bowen, helped them to set up the highly successful Radiation Laboratory.

The Australian years

The radiophysics laboratory, Sydney

In the closing months of 1943 one of us (White) was in the USA and, when visiting the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, met Bowen again for the first time since King's College, London. Bowen seemed to be at a loose end. His work in the USA was virtually finished and the invasion of Europe by the Allies was imminent. In Australia, the Radiophysics Laboratory was still hard at work helping the Australian and American forces in the Pacific. It was proposed to Sir David Rivett Chief Executive Officer of CSIR, that an offer be made to Bowen to come to Australia to join the Radiophysics Laboratory. Rivett agreed and Bowen arrived in Sydney on 1 January 1944. In his book Radar Days Bowen tells how he consulted Tizard and received the reply: 'They seem to need help in Australia. Go there my man.' He flew by US Air Force through Hawaii, Canton Island and Noumea to Sydney, a route well known to many Australians.

When Bowen arrived in Sydney, security conditions on radar information were gradually being lifted. CSIR was planning the return to peacetime work and within a year Fred White, who had been Chief of the Radiophysics Laboratory, had joined the Executive Committee in Melbourne. This was a period of great change; the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 after the atomic bombs had been dropped, and all hostilities in the Pacific ceased. In May 1946, when John Briton who had succeeded White returned to industry, Bowen was appointed Chief of the Division of Radiophysics. One of his first actions was to organise and edit A Text Book of Radar, a collective work by the staff of the Laboratory.

Radar was still unknown to most Australians and Bowen could now talk freely about the exciting secret effort that had helped to win the war for Britain and her allies. His first paper in Australia was a general account of 'Radar in War' (Aust. Jour. of Science, 1945, 8, 33-37) in which he spoke with personal authority of the way the Royal Navy had frustrated the U-boat attack on civilian shipping. He drew a moral from the extraordinary assimilation of civilian scientists, 'in grey bags and green jackets', by the fighting forces of England, in contrast to the rigid military control of scientific warfare by the Germans and the Japanese. The 'boffin' was everywhere in evidence and accepted amongst the military men. Bowen addressed the Institution of Radio Engineers on the historical development of radar, its military uses and its potential peacetime applications to civil aviation, marine navigation and surveying.

Post war research

With the cessation of the war, the skilled staff of the Division began to look around for work of interest to themselves and of importance to Australia. The professional staff of Radiophysics had grown to 66 by 1945, with several important newcomers recruited from the British and Australian services and Bowen was conscious of his responsibility to them. Two lines of research grew up naturally and became the predominant interests of the Division: radioastronomy and cloud and rain physics. The first grew out of the curiosity of J.L. Pawsey who repeated the observations of J.S. Hey in England on the jamming of radar receivers by radiation from the sun. Research on cloud and rain physics was started by Bowen in 1946 when I. Langmuir and V. Schaefer in the USA reported that rain could be induced by seeding clouds with dry ice. These two programmes absorbed the attention of a considerable proportion of the staff until Bowen himself retired from CSIRO in 1971.

Navigational aids

Bowen had also undertaken two other research activities. These were the pulse method of acceleration of elementary particles, with Pulley and Gooden, and more extensive work on air navigation with V.D. Burgmann. The latter resulted in the Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) that was ultimately adopted for all civil aircraft flying in Australia on internal routes.

Cloud seeding and rainfall

While many reacted cautiously to the 1946 claims by Langmuir and Schaefer that clouds could be made to rain by creating ice crystals in them, Bowen immediately saw the potential importance of the technique for dry Australia. Within months, two members of his staff had investigated the work and, on their return, had carried out a trial in eastern New South Wales using RAAF aircraft. Success was immediate. When seeded with dry ice the selected cloud reacted with spectacular changes of shape and heavy rainfall. This striking result held such promise that a systematic programme of cloud seeding was set up in February 1947 and continued for the next twenty-four years.

As little was known about the properties of clouds in Australia or the mechanisms of rainfall, Bowen initiated a vigorous research programme of cloud studies. This included not only the effects of adding ice crystals to cold clouds, but also the effect of spraying water into warm clouds which are responsible for much of the rainfall in the warmer parts of Australia. Bowen took part in the latter work himself and during 1950-1955 published papers on the theory of coalescent rainfall and directed experimental trials.

The difficulty with both these methods of stimulating rainfall was that only a few clouds could be treated on any one day and large amounts of dry ice or water were required. This limitation was overcome by the discovery, again in the USA, that tiny quantities of silver iodide smoke could be used as a seeding agent. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bowen saw the potential for seeding large areas from the air using silver iodide burners mounted on an aircraft.

The first experiments with this method were made in 1955 over the Snowy Mountains in south-eastern Australia. The first two years were so successful, with an estimated rainfall increase of 25%, that several more regions were quickly selected. There the early indications were also successful, but in many subsequent years all areas showed a gradual decay of the induced rainfall with time. Most people would have become discouraged by such a result and given up. Bowen, however, proposed a simple explanation, based on the idea that a persistence phenomenon in the seeding process had confused the statistical analysis. Although this concept failed to win much support at the time, Bowen insisted that the next experiment (in Tasmania) should use target and control areas rather than two randomly-seeded areas, which was the method most susceptible to persistence effects. Moreover there was to be a gap of one year between seeded years.

This experiment was a success but, Bowen having retired (1971), the result was not immediately attributed to the correctness of his persistence hypothesis. Some years later Bowen reopened the question and the outcome of the ensuing debate established the persistence phenomenon as a vital factor that must be taken into account when designing and analysing a seeding experiment. Subsequent work by E.K. Bigg has done much to explain the detailed mechanism of the phenomenon. With the continuing success of cloud seeding work by the Australian states of Tasmania and Victoria and the recognition of the role of persistence, there appears now to be a promising future for the rain making techniques that Bowen did so much to pioneer.

Bowen's remarkable energy and enthusiasm were evident also in other programmes. He was not afraid to speculate and presented his intuitive ideas with a persuasive and engaging optimism that was either inspiring or alarming to his colleagues, depending on their views of science. Two of his well known theories about periodic rainfall variations illustrate this.

The influence of meteor showers

From the daily rainfall records for Sydney over the period 1859 to 1952 and for stations elsewhere in New South Wales and in other countries, Bowen found well defined peaks of rainfall in January and February. These anomalies he correlated with the passage of the Earth, 30 days earlier, through specific meteor streams that orbit the sun. He suggested that the smaller particles fell through the atmosphere to cloud level in 30 days, where they induced the observed rainfall.

The apparent physical implausibility of this hypothesis attracted a wave of criticism: the number of particles was insufficient, the fall time would not be fixed, and the particles would not form ice crystals. Even the reality of the anomalies was vigorously questioned, but independent analysis showed that they were statistically significant. But Bowen was not impressed by purely statistical arguments and insisted that his staff probe crucial aspects of his hypothesis by empirical tests in clouds. Whether he was right to invoke meteor showers to explain the rainfall anomalies and if so, how they influenced clouds after a fixed time interval, has yet to be demonstrated.

Lunar effects

In 1962, following a paper published in the USA, Bowen and Adderley showed that there were similar lunar effects in the monthly rainfall records for fifty New Zealand stations with comparable magnitude and closely related phase. The reality of the effect was beyond doubt. Independent frequency analysis revealed an amplitude variation of 20% and a periodicity of 29.5307 days. The mean period between full moons is 29.5306 days.

Bowen suggested that the Moon, revolving about the Earth, could modulate the amount of meteor dust reaching the Earth, and later showed that meteor rates in both the northern and southern hemispheres varied similarly with lunar phase. He argued that the Moon could intercept the particles or alternatively could deflect them because of electrostatic charges on the Moon and particles. Modern studies by his colleague, E.K. Bigg, however, suggest that the Moon's influence on rainfall is more likely to be caused by the lunar tides in the Earth's atmosphere.

The cloud and rain physics group, under Bowen's leadership, worked in a most stimulating environment. Even his more speculative ideas sometimes drove his critics to discover truths that would otherwise have remained hidden. Over twenty-four years, the group established a high international reputation with its achievements and an impressive number of sound scientific publications.

The radiotelescope at Parkes

In the first decade following the end of the war Radiophysics established an enviable reputation in the new science of radioastronomy. It was a time of exciting discoveries and innovative ideas, a time when a new observing system could be quickly tried out. The outstanding Australian successes in this period were recognised when URSI elected to hold its 10th General Assembly in Sydney in August 1952, the first meeting of an international scientific union ever held outside Europe or the USA. But by then the era of improvised equipment was drawing to a close and the era of big science was soon to begin.

Radioastronomy now needed aerial systems with much higher resolution and able to collect more of the extremely weak signals arriving at the Earth. One approach was to develop a very large parabolic-reflector aerial and as early as 1948 Bowen had been convinced that this was the best solution. Bernard Lovell at Manchester University in 1952 was the first to set off down this path. Bowen was very conscious that the British government had funded the project at a cost far beyond the resources of Radiophysics. Nevertheless he persisted and tried to find more economical designs, but none were quite satisfactory.

During visits to the USA, where he had made many influential contacts during the war, Dr Vannevar Bush (President, Carnegie Corporation) and Dr Alfred Loomis (Trustee, Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation) revealed that it might be possible for Bowen to build a large radio telescope in Australia with financial help from the USA. In April 1954 the Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced a grant of $250,000 to Australia for this purpose. This generosity was returned by Bowen, in part, over the next year by his help in establishing US radio astronomy: in January 1955, he arranged for John Bolton and Gordon Stanley to be seconded to the California Institute of Technology, a move that marked the beginning of the science in California.

Bowen organised a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) in 1955 to advise on and specify the proposed design study for the Australian telescope. The committee included two structural experts, H.A. Wills of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories, Melbourne, and J.W. Roderick, head of the Civil Engineering School of the University of Sydney.

A highly significant development occurred in mid-year when Bowen had discussions with Barnes Wallis (later Sir Barnes Wallis FRS), the famous airship and aircraft designer at Vickers Armstrong, Weybridge. Wallis revealed some innovative ideas including a 'master equatorial' for controlling the movements in equatorial coordinates of the mounting, a concept which was to become a key feature of the Parkes Telescope. The outcome was that Freeman Fox and Partners (FF&P), London, the designers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, were selected for the studies with advice from Barnes Wallis. Harry Minnett, from the Telescope Planning Committee, was appointed as CSIRO liaison officer and radio consultant to FF&P.

Bowen was forced to turn to a number of US funding organizations in the hope of supplementing the available funds. These overtures were successful for in December 1955 the Rockefeller Foundation contributed $250,000, with an important condition that the Australian government should match this sum as well as the amounts previously received. When approached by Sir Ian Clunies Ross, Chairman of CSIRO, the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, agreed to this proposal and also to pay for the running costs of the complete installation.

In London the senior partner of FF&P was Ralph Freeman but the telescope project was directed by Gilbert Roberts, a brilliant if somewhat idiosyncratic engineer. Later both men were knighted and Roberts was also elected to the Royal Society. Roberts' first assistant in charge of the telescope team was Michael Jeffery, an outstanding structural engineer.

The three basic questions that Bowen had posed for the consultants were: compensated or rigid reflector structure; altazimuth or equatorial mounting; telescope cost as a function of reflector size for both mountings. As Wallis had remarked, the design of a giant radio telescope to the precision required was a venture into the unknown. It was not expected that Bowen's questions would be easily settled.

The structural aspects of the study proceeded satisfactorily. A small, very rigid central hub supporting the reflector structure was adopted to encourage symmetrical deflection patterns. For a rigid steel reflector, these were found to be so promising that the investigation of complicated servo-compensated aluminium structures was ultimately abandoned as unnecessary. Roberts and Wallis intuitively preferred an altazimuth mounting because of its structural simplicity compared with an equatorial, and a compact and extremely rigid design was evolved. However, a thorough study of the feasibility and cost of the Wallis master equatorial concept and the altazimuth servo drive system would clearly be crucial to the mounting decision. Unfortunately it proved very difficult initially to interest competent firms in this task.

In October 1956, however, Grubb Parsons Ltd. agreed to develop and cost a master equatorial system. They also suggested an important innovation for sensing the error between the pointing directions of the master unit and the slave reflector axis. This idea was based on proven auto-guidance technology and was a significant advance on the untried mechanical and hydraulic system in the Wallis proposal. By that time also Minnett had proposed a servo system that avoided the stability problems arising from structural resonances, and had shown that it could accurately track astronomical sources under dynamic wind loads. These ideas were adopted by Metropolitan Vickers, who had agreed to develop and cost the drive system. FF&P were confident by early 1957 that an altazimuth mounting was the best solution.

The design study report was completed by November and Bowen asked the TAC to critically review its recommendations. After discussions with Minnett and Roberts in Sydney, the Committee agreed that the feasibility of the telescope had been established and that the design was an excellent one. From the cost-size data, a diameter of 210 ft. (64 m) was chosen early in 1958 to match the available funds. Bowen's foresight in setting up and carefully organizing the design study was a major factor in this result and avoided many pitfalls.

Following completion of the detailed design, Bowen insisted on international tenders. MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsberg Nürnberg AG) in West Germany was successful, with Metropolitan Vickers as contractor for the servo drive systems. The offer by Askania Werke of West Berlin was accepted as sub-contractor for the master equatorial control system. The MAN contract was finalized in July 1959. By his vigorous participation in the tendering process and contract negotiations, Bowen achieved a significant improvement in earlier estimates of the completion date and cost. Some additional funding was still needed, however, and he approached the Rockefeller Foundation again. Early in December it generously approved a further $130,000 which was matched by the Australian government.

MAN proceeded with great vigour. The construction of the base tower at Parkes started in September 1959 and a trial assembly in Germany of the mounting and servo drives took place in May 1960. On-site construction of the telescope commenced in September 1960, with Jeffery as resident engineer for FF&P. That it was completed closely to schedule was a tribute not only to MAN and to FF&P's careful design work and supervision, but also to Bowen's energetic efforts throughout the project.

On 31 October 1961 the Governor General, Lord de Lisle, was invited by the CSIRO Chairman, Dr F.W.G. White, to perform the opening ceremony; Bowen followed with a speech of thanks. The occasion was a grand affair in spite of the unusually high wind. The ceremony was attended by a large assembly of Radiophysics staff, Chiefs of CSIRO Divisions, academics, industrialists and local people.

Bowen was delighted with the performance of the new instrument. In 1963 he wrote 'It is clear from the figures that the telescope is one of superlative performance and provides both surface and pointing accuracy which is approximately double that called for in the original specifications'. The Parkes Telescope also proved timely for the US space programme. Bowen received a NASA grant for Minnett to participate in studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for the design of a 210 ft. instrument for communicating with very distant space probes. Many of the Parkes features, including the drive and control concepts, were adopted.

John Bolton, the first Director of Parkes, initiated an intensive survey to detect radio sources and eventually listed many thousands, including many quasars. Detailed studies of hydrogen line emissions at 21cm wavelength helped to reveal for the first time the spiral structure of our galaxy. The versatility of the instrument made possible a variety of other investigations including: ionized interstellar hydrogen, supernova remnants, polarization and magnetic fields, the discovery of new pulsars, the study of the Magellanic Clouds and remote galaxies. During the first twenty-five years of operation, over 1,000 research papers were published.

The telescope played a vital role in NASA's Apollo moon landing programme and through it the world's television audiences saw Man's first steps on the Moon. For the European Space Agency's Giotto mission to Halley's Comet, Parkes was the prime receiving centre. The telescope was linked to the NASA station at Tidbinbilla to boost the signal during the successful flight of Voyager II past Jupiter, Uranus and finally Neptune, then the most distant planet of the solar system.

Over more than a quarter century, the achievements of the Parkes Telescope have more than justified the very great efforts necessary to bring it into being. Now the major element in the Australia Telescope National Facility, it is destined to continue its scientific contributions well into the next century. There could be no more enduring monument to the vision, tenacity and energy of 'Taffy' Bowen.

The Anglo-Australian telescope

In the first decades after the War, there was much discussion about the need for a large optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. The matter was taken up formally by the Royal Society of London and the Australian Academy of Science on a joint basis towards the end of 1963. Their discussions were lengthy, and at the end of June 1965 submissions for the construction of a 150-inch (3.8m) Anglo-Australian telescope were presented to both governments. A long delay then ensued.

In the months that followed, the Australian government was non-committal on the Anglo-Australian proposal despite British pressure. A firm commitment had been delivered by W.L. Francis, the Secretary of the Science Research Council, that Britain would fund half the cost of designing and building a 3.8 m telescope.

The Australian Academy of Science asked L.G.H. Huxley and Bowen to seek an interview with the responsible Minister, Senator Gorton. Once a few matters had been clarified, they found the Minister was very much in favour of the Anglo-Australian proposal. In May he announced the agreement of the two governments to build a 3.8m optical telescope on Siding Spring Mountain near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, the site of an Australian National University observatory.

The two governments set up a Joint Policy Committee (JPC), pending the legal creation of a Board, to direct the design, construction and operation of the new telescope. Bowen with Professor O.J. Eggen and Mr K.A. Jones represented Australia and Sir Richard Woolley, Professor Hermann Bondi and Mr J.F. Hosie represented the United Kingdom. Shortly after the first meeting, Bondi accepted another post and was replaced by Professor F. Hoyle.

At the first JPC meeting in August 1967 in Canberra, it was decided to follow broadly the design of the 150-inch polar axis telescope then being planned for the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona. Many of the new post-war technologies had been applied to radio telescopes and the time was ripe for changing some traditional optical telescope practices. R.O. Redman of the University of Cambridge and S.C.B. Gascoigne of Mount Stromlo Observatory had been appointed as permanent astronomical advisers to the project, as a link with potential users and with special responsibilities for the optics.

Redman and Gascoigne recommended that the prime focal length adopted by KPNO should be increased to f/3.3 and that a simplification should be made to the arrangements at the prime focus cage. The primary mirror blank, to be cast in a new material with a zero coefficient of temperature expansion, was ordered at once from the US supplier to take advantage of the discount offered by adding to the KPNO order. The nucleus of the Project Office was established by appointing Hermann Wehner (Mount Stromlo Observatory) and John Pope (Greenwich Observatory) with particular responsibilities for instrumentation design.

After the first meeting of the JPC, Bowen set out to implement a number of his proposals which had been agreed. He organized the secondment as Project Manager of M.H. Jeffery, chief assistant to Sir Gilbert Roberts at Freeman Fox and Partners, London, during the design of the Parkes Telescope and resident engineer during its construction. H.C. Minnett from Bowen's Radiophysics Division, together with a British counterpart, R.L. Ford of the Royal Radar Establishment, were appointed as consultants on drive and control. Bowen also recruited D. Cunliffe from the CSIRO Division of Mechanical Engineering as the Executive Officer of the Project Office.

As a result of Bowen's initiatives, Jeffery was able to attend the next JPC meeting in London in March 1968. Minnett and Ford, after investigations in the UK and USA at the end of 1967, had produced a drive and control report for the JPC recommending that the setting accuracy target should be 10 arcsec; that the telescope should be controlled by a computer system operating through servo drives; and that a modern auto-guidance device should be developed to relieve the astronomer of this chore. Bowen later proposed that Maston Beard should be seconded from Radiophysics for a major role in this work. He also supported a proposal by Minnett and Jeffery that traditional worm drives should be replaced by high-precision spur gearing with symmetrical anti-backlash drives as in radio telescope technology.

When Jeffrey died suddenly from a heart attack early in September 1969, Bowen's reaction was typically swift. Within days he had arranged for Minnett to be seconded to Canberra as Acting Project Manager and had obtained the agreement of Freeman Fox to make a study of a serious problem in the design of the declination bearings. The engineer selected was Colin R. Blackwell who had worked on the design studies for the Parkes Telescope.

At the August 1970 meeting of the JPC in London, Blackwell was able to recommend a satisfactory solution to the bearing problem. By then Freeman Fox's role had been expanded by Bowen and the Board to include responsibility for the supervision of the complete mounting contract on behalf of the Project Office. The AAT inter-government agreement specified that tenders had to be called on an international basis and Bowen was insistent on the observance of this proviso. In October 1970 the contracts for both the mounting and the drive and control system were awarded to a Japanese company that offered specially favourable terms designed to win the work.

In February 1971, following the passage of the necessary legislation through the Australian Parliament, the JPC was dissolved and its members were appointed to the AAT Board, with Bowen as Chairman and Hoyle as Deputy. The management and operation of the telescope now became a critical and divisive issue. It was not settled until April 1972 when Bowen supported the British stand for a Scientific Director responsible only to the Board. Within a year Bowen was appointed to the post of Science Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and he therefore had to resign as Chairman of the Board. Hoyle took his place and Paul Wild was appointed as a new Australian representative.

Bowen had successfully guided the project through the complex years when the design of the telescope was evolving and had overcome other problems of great difficulty to arrive at last at a highly satisfactory result. In the words of Hoyle: 'there is no doubt that a large share of it (the credit) must go to Taffy Bowen. Without him the telescope would have been only a shadow of what it was eventually to become'.

The telescope was officially inaugurated on 16 October 1974 in the presence of H.R.H. Prince Charles. When operations commenced in 1975, the telescope was accepted as a technological tour de force. In the words of Gascoigne: 'The mounting and the optics were clearly of the highest standard, but what created the real impression was the computer control system, which was comprehensive, versatile and efficient to a degree beyond anything previously contemplated'.

Sport

Bowen had an enduring love of cricket, which he began playing while he was a youth in Wales. After playing for the South Wales League at Gormorton, he continued at King's College, London, and later at Felixstowe and Martlesham. He continued his passion for cricket when he joined the Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney.

He was also a keen sailor having started in England, but his main opportunity was in Sydney, where he became devoted to VJ's and Moths. He later bought a Yachting World boat that he raced in the Middle Harbour Yacht Club. About 1968 he was elected Rear Commodore of the Club. Later, as Science Counsellor in Washington, he lived at West River on Chesapeake Bay. There he sailed a 32 ft yacht named 'Sosie' about the Bay and with some success in local races.

Personal

Bowen's Division of Radiophysics was quite unlike others in CSIRO. It had been founded in 1939, in the utmost secrecy, to work on wartime radar for the fighting services. Several scientists spent the war in the fighting services and when demobilised came to Australia and joined in the remarkable post-war researches that Bowen headed. Two such men were John Paul Wild and John Bolton. The former, who succeeded Bowen as Chief of Division, has this interesting analysis of Bowen as his predecessor:

I was one of several young research scientists who joined the CSIR Radiophysics Laboratory in the early post-war years. The Chief, Taffy Bowen, was firmly in command: young, confident, cheerful and breezy, always optimistic and giving the impression that he knew exactly where he was going. He had supervised the transition of the laboratory from its wartime programme of military radar to its new peacetime policy.

By the mid 50's the Laboratory's activities had narrowed down to two large programmes – cloud physics under Taffy's direction and radio astronomy under Joe Pawsey's. Both programmes stood high in international repute.

Taffy then decided to enter the radio astronomy arena himself and set his mind on the construction of a giant radio telescope. Such was our reputation at the time, combined with Taffy's influence and diplomacy in the USA, that half the cost needed to fund this project came from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. The major credit for the existence and success of this instrument must go to him.

The other major work which owes much to Taffy is the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). As Chairman of the AAT Board he steered the 3.8m optical telescope to fruition, again showing his great skill in choosing and supervising the contractors.

The world will remember Taffy firstly as a member of the three-man team that developed radar to help save the day for Britain in 1940; secondly as the dynamic post-war leader of the Radiophysics Laboratory; and thirdly as the engineer who brought to successful completion two major astronomical instruments of his era.

John Bolton, clearly an admirer, goes further with this sympathetic summary of Bowen's contribution:

There can be no question that Taffy's most important contribution to science was his wartime work in airborne radar and there may be millions of people in the world today who are quite unaware of their debt to him.

His second contribution was the holding together of the wartime Radiophysics Lab and the conversion into one of Australia's most effective research centres. It is perhaps noteworthy that no less than five staff members were elected to the Royal Society before he himself was similarly and belatedly honoured.

Bowen's election to the Royal Society in 1975 was supported by posthumous letters from Sir John Cockcroft FRS and by Sir Harold Hartley FRS. His personal wartime work on radar, his telescope at Parkes for radioastronomy and his contribution to the understanding of cloud seeding were sufficient. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1957 and was awarded a Fellowship of his University College in Swansea.

Bowen's personality was complex. In the relaxed first interview with Robert Watson-Watt and Jimmy Herd, as he tells it in his book, he was challenged to sing the Welsh national anthem. This brought a response from Bowen that he would do so if they would sing the Scottish anthem. He remained a firm friend and admirer of Watson-Watt from then on.

Throughout his life he remained an ardent Welshman and in Australia rejoiced in the name of 'Taffy'. He refused the opportunity of taking Australian citizenship and thus sacrificed the possibility of Australian honours. In December 1987, he suffered a stroke at his home in Sydney. In spite of dedicated medical attention and the care of his family and friends, his condition gradually deteriorated. He died on 12 August 1991 at the age of 80.

Honours and awards

• 1941: OBE
• 1947: Medal of Freedom USA – for contributions to the US war effort
• 1950: Thurlow Award of the American Institute of Navigation – 'for the most outstanding contribution to the science of navigation during 1950'
• 1951: Royal Commission Award to Inventors in the United Kingdom
• 1957: Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
• 1957: DSc (Honorary) University of Sydney
• 1962: Vice-President of the Australian Academy of Science
• 1962: CBE in recognition of contributions to the development of science in Australia
• 1967-1971: Chairman of Joint Policy Committee of the Anglo-Australian Telescope
• 1971-1973: Chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope Board
• 1975: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London
• Fellow and first President, Australian Institute of Navigation
• Fellow, Royal Astronomical Society
• Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Foreign Member, US National Academy of Engineering
• Honorary Fellow, King's College, London
• Honorary Fellow, University College, Swansea

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the generous and invaluable assistance received throughout from Miss Sally Atkinson BEM, secretary to E.G. Bowen from 1946 to 1971 and now Honorary Archivist in the Division of Radiophysics. For material on Bowen's family and early years in Wales, we are indebted to his sons Edward and David and to W.S. Evans now living in Nelson, New Zealand. Thanks are due also to Dr E.K. Bigg, who contributed materially to the account of Bowen's work on cloud seeding and rainfall.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.9, no.2, 1992. It also appeared in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 1992. It was written by:

• R. Hanbury Brown, AC, FRS, FAA, (wrote the section entitled 'The war years'), Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Sydney
• Harry C. Minnett, OBE, FAA, FTS, former Chief of the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics, 1978-1981; and
• Frederick W.G. White, KBE, FRS, FAA, former Chairman of CSIRO, 1959-1970

References

• Bowen, E.G., Radar Days (Adam Hilger, 1987).
• Hanbury Brown, R., Boffin (Adam Hilger 1991).
• Douglas, S., Supplement to the London Gazette No. 38404, 1948.
• Lovell, A.C.B., Biogr. Mem. Fell. Roy. Soc., 34 (1988), 472-474.
• Watson-Watt, R.A., Three Steps to Victory (Odhams Press, 1957).
• Watson-Watt, R.A., The Battle of the Atlantic (H.M.S.O., 1946).

Written by Stephen J. Redman.

• Introduction
• School years
• University of Sydney
• CSIRO and Cambridge
• University of New South Wales
• Monash University
• Recreational activities: Hot jazz, perfumery and analytical chemistry
• Family life
• Epilogue
• About this memoir
  • Acknowledgments
  • Degrees, awards and appointments

Introduction

Douglas Geoffrey Lampard was born in Sydney on 4 May 1927 at the Royal Women's Hospital, Paddington. He was the only child of Edward Geoffrey Lampard and Violet Evangeline Lampard, née Moxon. Both of Doug's parents were the children of Anglican clergy, his father being the son of Archdeacon Lampard, of Lismore, and his mother the daughter of Archdeacon Moxon, of Grafton. Doug's father graduated in engineering from the University of Sydney in 1928 after serving in the Australian Flying Corps during the First World War. He became Chief Airbrake Engineer with the New South Wales Railways. Doug's mother had trained as a kindergarten teacher.

Doug's early years were spent in Sydney's northern suburbs, initially in Chatswood and then in Gordon. He grew up in a home with modest but comfortable living standards, under the guidance of well educated and caring parents. As he grew older, he showed an absorbing interest in mechanical and electrical equipment, and great skills in the use of workshop tools.

School years

Doug attended Chatswood and Gordon Primary Schools and he was selected to attend Artarmon Opportunity School in its second intake of pupils. From there he attended North Sydney Boys' High School, a selective and high-achieving school, from 1940 to 1944. At high school, Doug showed exceptional ability in physics and chemistry, especially in practical work. He was a nonconformist and concentrated on those activities of school life that took his interest. These did not include the Army Cadet Corps, which had a high profile during the war years. Nor was he interested in sport. The school was ruled by Robert Harvey, a famous headmaster at the time, who provided for his students a liberal curriculum including Latin, Greek, French, German, History, Music and Economics, as well as English, Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. Doug always appreciated and respected this broad education. Harvey was a strict disciplinarian and all school days were prefaced by assembly, sometimes with a homily from the headmaster about any perceived slackening of effort. The assembled students then marched off to classes to the stirring strains of 'Colonel Bogey' or a similar marching tune. Doug was responsible for the sound amplification system and one of his hobbies was tinkering with this system to improve the quality of the sound. On his final day of school before sitting for the Leaving Certificate examinations, Doug substituted his own music and played 'When the saints go marching in'. This caused a minor riot and brought on the wrath of the headmaster.

At home, Doug built and repaired audio systems, power supplies and radios. Carpentry was another hobby. He became a projectionist at Gordon Cinema and an enthusiastic follower of traditional jazz, although he refused to learn to play any musical instruments. Sydney Harbour was a great attraction and he regularly sailed in VJ races on Middle Harbour.

University of Sydney

Doug began his university education at the University of Sydney in March 1945, enrolling in the Faculty of Engineering. In those days, the first two years of an engineering degree were the same for all branches of engineering. After two years as an engineering student, Doug decided to work for a year and he joined CSIR (now CSIRO), in the Electrotechnology Division of the National Standards Laboratory. He was employed as a Technical Assistant, working on microwave measurement techniques. (He had previously worked in this Division as a summer student while enrolled in Engineering). The exposure he had to research during this period convinced him that his scientific interests were in mathematics and physics, and on returning to the University of Sydney in 1948 he transferred to the Faculty of Science. He graduated with first-class honours in physics in May 1951.

Doug enjoyed his undergraduate years. He had a wide circle of friends studying engineering, medicine and science. He became interested in physiology and attended lectures given to medical students. He developed his interest in traditional jazz music, learning to play the washboard and then the banjo. He became an enthusiastic member of the Sydney University Film Society. His interests in electrical equipment and jazz music led to his involvement as a projectionist, and as a presenter of recorded jazz music.

CSIRO and Cambridge

Doug returned to the National Standards Laboratory, after graduation in February 1951, as a Research Officer. He worked in Dr David Hollway's group on K-band microwave spectroscopy. This work was written up for an MSc degree with the University of Sydney in a thesis entitled 'The development of a microwave spectroscope and some problems connected with its sensitivity', and the degree was awarded in May 1952. In June 1952 Doug was awarded a CSIRO overseas studentship for two years, to attend the University of Cambridge. He studied in the Electrical Engineering Department under the supervision of Professor E.B. Moullin, his PhD thesis being entitled 'Some theoretical and experimental investigations of random electrical fluctuations'. Random electrical fluctuations (or electrical noise) were of central interest to the research staff in the National Standards Laboratory, as they often limited the accuracy of electrical measurements. He was awarded the PhD degree by the University of Cambridge in November 1954.

Doug's two years in Cambridge were remarkably productive and busy ones. It was very unusual (and still is) for anyone to complete a PhD in two years. His research led to several seminal publications on electrical noise and stochastic process. His college was Corpus Christi which he chose because of a family association, his paternal grandfather, Archdeacon Lampard, having studied Greek and mathematics there in the latter part of the nineteenth century. While at Cambridge, Doug served as a member of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) Committee on Atmospheric Noise at the request of the chairman, J.A. Ratcliffe of the Cavendish Laboratory. He also taught mathematics at Cambridge Technical College in the evenings, to help finance his studies. The interest he had shown in physiology at the University of Sydney developed further when he attended lecture courses on 'The Electrical Activity of the Nervous System', given in the Physiology Department at Cambridge by Professor Alan Hodgkin and Dr William Rushton.

Doug was then invited to spend three months (October 1954 – January 1955) as a visiting lecturer in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University, New York, where he taught a postgraduate course in 'Stochastic Processes and Noise Theory'. He was offered a position in this department, which he declined because of his commitments to CSIRO. He returned to Australia and to the National Standards Laboratory in March 1955. On being reappointed as a Research Officer, his supervisor (Dr Fred Lehany) noted that 'Lampard has made excellent use of his studentship and has established himself widely as a successful research worker in the general field of information theory and the statistical treatment of signals in the presence of noise'.

Following Doug's return to the National Standards Laboratory, he became involved in calculating the capacitance of a succession of geometrical shapes that Dr Mel Thompson believed could be accurately constructed and defined so that their physical dimensions could be measured with sufficient accuracy. The results of some of these calculations on quite different cross-sectional profiles agreed with each other so closely that the suspicion arose that a general expression for their capacitance existed that was independent of cross-sectional profile. Doug discovered this identity, and it appeared in a paper entitled 'A new theorem in electrostatics with applications to calculable standards of capacitance', published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1957. This paper described what was probably Doug's most important single scientific work. It ultimately led to the development of a capacitance standard with an accuracy of about 1 part in 100 million, which was more than 100 times more accurate than the best capacitance standard at that time. This allowed the standard ohm to be redefined. In the field of electrical measurements, it was a major advance. The theorem (which is usually referred to in texts on electrostatics as the Lampard Capacitance Theorem) became the mainstay for establishing the absolute SI unit of resistance in every national standards laboratory for many decades. Doug was awarded the Heaviside Premium by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, in 1957 for this work. In 1965, Doug and Mel Thompson were jointly awarded the Albert F. Sperry Medal by the Instrument Society of America for their work on calculable standards of capacitance.

In the midst of this activity, Doug and Dr Ian Harvey were building a 'probability distribution analyser'. This device was to be used for investigations on random electrical noise. Nowadays electronic measurements of the probability density of amplitudes or of time intervals are commonplace, but at that time it was completely novel. Its key component was an electrostatic memory constructed on the screen of a normal cathode-ray tube so as to provide 64 channels, each of 15-bit capacity. Doug teamed up with Peter Bishop and Bill Levick in the Physiology Department at the University of Sydney to use this machine for the measurement of the probability density of the time intervals between successive nerve impulses in the firing pattern of retinal ganglion cells. At the time, it was believed that sensory information was encoded in the fine temporal structure of neuronal discharge. This first measurement of such temporal detail, reported in Nature in 1961, caused much excitement and stimulated many overseas laboratories to attempt similar measurements.

University of New South Wales

In August 1960, Doug was appointed to a newly created Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of New South Wales, specifically in the field of communications engineering. It was to be a short appointment as he resigned in August 1961. Doug believed that he was not given the freedom and independence appropriate for a professorial appointment to develop teaching and research in his area of responsibility. When the issue could not be resolved to his satisfaction with senior university officers, he returned to the Division of Electrotechnology in CSIRO, from which he had been on long-term leave, as a Principal Research Officer. This experience was a painful one for Doug but it was not without rewards. He attracted around him some recent graduates in engineering and mathematics (Nhan Levan, Tony Stuart, David Montgomery, David Robinson and Stephen Redman) who were enrolled for Master's degrees. They all responded positively to Doug's enthusiasm and research guidance, and formed a lively research group. Two of them, Levan and Redman, were to follow Doug to Monash University and become his first PhD students. Doug also enjoyed his interactions with these research students very much, and this experience convinced him that his future research should be conducted in a university environment.

Monash University

Doug was appointed to the foundation Chair of Electrical Engineering at Monash University in August 1962. Prior to taking up this appointment, he spent three months in the Engineering School at Purdue University, Indiana. This was one of the largest engineering schools in the USA and his experience there, as well as at the University of New South Wales, were important in developing his ideas on how to create a modern department of electrical engineering. When he arrived at Monash at the end of 1962, the university had been in existence for only a short time, and the most advanced engineering undergraduates were in their second year. This was a splendid opportunity for Doug to work in a new university that had to grow rapidly and establish its own ethos. From the outset, and mindful of his previous experience at the University of New South Wales, Doug insisted upon having complete independence in developing the electrical engineering department. It was an exciting and frantic time. A new building had to be equipped, new courses developed, new laboratories commissioned, new staff appointed and research activities commenced. Only a few months' lead time was available to establish the third-year courses.

Doug attacked this challenge with great enthusiasm and energy. His leadership was outstanding. He recruited excellent academic staff and encouraged them quickly to establish strong research programmes. Doug's approach to undergraduate course design and tuition was to place great emphasis on the fundamentals of engineering science. The technology of the day was only of passing interest. All students, regardless of the field in which they wished to specialize, had to study across the whole field of electrical engineering, including power engineering, electronics, communications and control systems. The core subjects in each year were always presented in conjunction with a solid laboratory component. Doug could often be found among the undergraduates while they were engaged in laboratory work, asking questions, encouraging them, and helping them to put their work into a wider context. He taught a generation of electrical engineers and all were touched by his enthusiasm for his discipline. While he was intellectually formidable, he was an excellent lecturer, patient and helpful and with a genuine concern for the welfare of his students.

Events moved quickly on the research front in the early days of Doug's appointment. Within two years of his arrival at Monash, Doug was supervising eight PhD students, all of whom had done their undergraduate studies at other universities, at a time when it was relatively new for engineering graduates to be interested in research careers. His research interests at that time were concentrated on circuit theory and stochastic processes applied to communication systems. Doug was one of the first to study problems in circuit theory and signal theory using the time-domain approach. This was due to his interest in the response of systems to stochastic signals. He developed the first electrical circuit realization of a discrete shift operator and this became the central idea in the analysis and synthesis of a class of N-port networks. Other contributions that he made to circuit theory included active network synthesis, filter and amplifier design, networks with randomly varying parameters and inhomogeneous ladder networks. Doug sought analytical solutions, and he had uncanny insights into how problems should be formulated such that they led to analytical solutions. He was not very interested in numerical solutions. He encouraged others with interests in the design of electronic equipment, and he ensured that the new department was well provided with mechanical and electronics workshops staffed by excellent technicians. Doug's research reputation quickly became legendary within the academic and scientific community associated with electrical engineering, both nationally and internationally. The department attracted many international visitors and many PhD students. Research seminars were weekly events, with Doug giving many of them himself. His research influence was theoretically and scientifically orientated, rather than the more usual technological research activities of most engineering departments.

Another important research and teaching activity that Doug initiated in those early days was biomedical engineering. As a student, Doug had shown a keen interest in neurophysiology. Later, as we have seen, he had collaborated with Peter Bishop and Bill Levick on characterizing the temporal discharge patterns of retinal ganglion cells. One of Doug's students from his period at the University of New South Wales, Stephen Redman, followed him to Monash as a lecturer and joined him in this enterprise. They established a neurophysiology laboratory for studying spinal reflexes and were given much encouragement by the Professor of Physiology, Archie McIntyre, an eminent neurophysiologist. They also benefited from the advice of Jack Coombs, who spent a year's study leave with them in 1964-65. Jack had worked for many years with Sir John Eccles, in Dunedin and then at the ANU, on spinal cord neurophysiology. It was a very novel activity for engineers to undertake, and it was not without its sceptics. Doug's laboratory skills and his interest in surgical procedures were important in the success of this project. This research led to papers in Nature and the Journal of Neurophysiology describing the discharge response of motorneurones when they were activated by electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves in a more physiological manner than had been used hitherto.

Following this work, Doug became interested in neuropharmacology, muscle mechanics, and then anaesthesia. His interest in various aspects of anaesthesia became his major research activity for the remainder of his academic career. The initial project was to use a computer for the multivariable control of respiration and anaesthesia based on the measured levels of signals such as end-tidal CO₂, blood pressure and inspired oxygen concentration. The ideas were extended to the computer control of neuro-muscular block using the integrated electromyogram (IEMG) as a measure of muscle relaxation. An IEMG monitor was developed into a commercial device and used for clinical purposes. There followed many years of work in muscle relaxation and the effects of hypothermia on cerebral blood flow, all based on the computer control work, At one stage full cardiopulmonary bypass and deep hypothermia procedures were being carried out on dogs in the department's laboratories, using expertise Doug had learnt from anaesthetists and surgeons. His main collaborators were two Melbourne anaesthetists, Drs Noel Cass and Kester Brown, and two electrical engineering colleagues from his own department, Drs Bill Brown and Kim Ng. Doug became a widely respected researcher amongst the anaesthetic research community. In November 1972 he became an Honorary Member of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists and in 1976 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Anaesthetists of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons for 'distinguished research contributions to anaesthesia'.

For twenty-one of his twenty-eight years at Monash, Doug was chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department. He was a strong voice on the Engineering Faculty Board, on the Professorial Board, and at other forums within the university. He was a staunch defender of the ideals of outstanding scholarship and intellectual integrity, and he was highly critical of the trend towards allowing managerial issues to determine outcomes. He had little respect for university policy makers whose positions were not based on solid academic achievements, and he had no interest in university politics. He disliked petty administrative work and he could be relied on not to do it. He always fought strongly for a good deal for his own department, and he was intensely loyal to his staff. He was a very direct person to deal with, and no one could be in any doubt about where they stood with him.

Doug retired from Monash University in 1990. The event was marked by a gathering of most of his former research students, many of whom travelled from overseas. All gave seminars on their research work. The common thread throughout two days of talks was the outstanding research training and example that Doug had provided his students at a formative stage of their careers, and how grateful they all were for his guidance. Subsequently a group composed mostly of the PhD and MEngSc graduates of the department banded together to fund the establishment of the Douglas Lampard Electrical Engineering Research Prize and Medal. This is now awarded annually to the department's top PhD candidate for the year.

Doug was to receive many honours and awards throughout his academic career. Some have already been mentioned, The most important was his election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1977. He was elected to Fellowships in the main professional bodies for electrical engineering, including the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London; the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; the Institution of Radio and Electrical Engineers, Australia; the Institution of Engineers, Australia; and the Australian Institute of Physics. He was on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1970-71 and received a Centennial Medal from this Institute in 1984 'in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the profession of Electrical Engineering'.

Recreational activities: Hot jazz, perfumery and analytical chemistry

Doug listed his recreational activities (in Who's Who, 1994) as hot jazz, perfumery and analytical chemistry. He was passionately fond of jazz music. His parents were very musical but he resisted all their suggestions that he learn to play a musical instrument. At high school, he developed an interest in traditional jazz and began to collect recordings. This interest continued to develop while he was an undergraduate at the University of Sydney. He started to participate in jazz groups, first by playing the washboard, then the banjo. He found the conventional fingering arrangements for chords on the banjo to be very awkward, so he designed his own tuning system to provide a fingering arrangement to suit himself. This gave a distinctive sound to his banjo. He played in a Sydney group called the Ross Street Ramblers. He would regularly leave Sydney on Boxing Day for the Australian Jazz Festival, wherever it was held. Playing with jazz groups was a great relaxation for him. While on leave at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, he played in Chicago with a well known group called 'The Salty Dogs'. In Melbourne, he belonged to a group called 'Drs Jazz', so named because most of its members had either PhD's or medical degrees. This group played at Doug's memorial service in the Monash University Chapel in September 1994.

As a schoolboy, Doug's favourite subject was chemistry. His decision to enrol in engineering rather than in chemistry had been a difficult one, made at the last minute. In later life he was to return to his enjoyment of chemistry. He built a large analytical chemistry laboratory beneath his house. It was superbly equipped. Doug would attend auctions (or tender a bid) for equipment and chemicals when commercial laboratories were being closed down. He was able to obtain some amazing bargains. At first Doug started making cosmetics and perfumes. This occurred at the time when his two daughters had reached the age when they needed these items. It was not uncommon for Doug to bring some of his perfumes into work to test their popularity. He formulated a large number of floral perfumes that met family approval and were most acceptable as Christmas presents for friends and colleagues. This interest led to his being consulted by several small manufacturing businesses that did not employ trained chemists. His curiosity about the constituents of wine that were responsible for their different flavours led him to study wine chemistry. He lived close to the Yarra Valley vineyards where a large number of small hobby vineyards, together with large commercial operations, had been established. Doug became the wine chemist consultant to many of the wine makers in the region and he interacted personally with them. Many of the small boutique wineries were managed by people with no scientific training, and Doug was able to give them crash courses in wine chemistry. He enjoyed his interactions with the vignerons and he also enjoyed tasting the end-products of his advice and analysis. From these local contacts, his reputation spread, and by the time he retired from Monash, he had built up a consulting practice with more than sixty wineries in Australia and New Zealand. During a short period he spent on study leave in Cambridge in 1988, he visited wineries in both England and France, and spent some time in the laboratory of one of the major champagne makers in France.

Doug's consulting activities also extended to the veterinary profession, where he gave advice on the design of veterinary equipment for field work and for the operating theatre.

Family life

Doug married Roslyn Crane on 18 April 1956. Roslyn was the only daughter of Ernest George Ekins Crane and Frances Elsie Crane (née Dutton) of Epping, New South Wales. They met at the University of Sydney in the late '40s, where Roslyn completed a Science degree in 1950, majoring in chemistry and biochemistry. Roslyn became Medical Librarian at Royal North Shore Hospital. They lived in Gordon, and had two daughters, Deborah Ann (born 1 May 1957) and Amanda Frances (born 7 November 1959). After the move to Melbourne in 1962, they lived at Croydon, in a house perched on the side of a hill with an easterly aspect. This arrangement gave Doug the opportunity to excavate under the house and build workshops, his analytical chemistry laboratory and a spacious office. These facilities allowed him to pursue many of his scientific interests at home. Both daughters attended Monash University and graduated in Science with honours, Deborah in mathematics and Amanda in immunology. Thus they became the fourth generation of Lampards to graduate in either science or engineering. Roslyn returned to medical library work, first at Dandenong Hospital and later at Lilydale Bush Nursing Hospital.

Doug's hobbies were largely home-based. This meant that he spent much of his leisure time at home – building, extending, making perfumes and cosmetics, and doing chemical assays for local wineries. He was very attentive to his daughters and gave them lots of encouragement and assistance with their school and university studies. Deborah became interested in horse riding as a teenager, and while Doug had no interest in riding, he regularly accompanied Deborah to wherever the horses were agisted. His interests in physiology and pharmacology often came into play whenever veterinary attention was needed. Both daughters married, and Doug found much pleasure in the company of his two grandchildren, Timothy and Melissa.

Epilogue

Doug was only a few years into retirement, and enjoying his new business venture assaying wines, when he was diagnosed to have mesothelioma. In typical style, Doug researched all aspects of this illness and treatment and explained it in detail to all his friends and colleagues. The end came quickly and he died at Croydon on 1 September 1994. Doug was full of courage and determination during this illness, even though he suffered greatly at times. His life was ended much too early, as he had much more to give.

In 1995 his department commissioned Jane Majkut to paint his portrait in oils from photographs. The portrait hangs at the entrance to the building where Doug had spent the longest period of his professional career and where the comings and goings of the staff and students of the active and vibrant department he had established in 1962 can still be observed.

There are many memories Doug's friends and colleagues will have of him. The overwhelming one must be of an enormously talented man, who was creative in many diverse fields and activities. Another must be the infectious enthusiasm and excitement he conveyed about scientific investigation and discovery. His scholarly style did not fit well within today's research environment, with its emphasis on publications, grantsmanship and citation indices. As a major contributor in fields as diverse as electrostatics, circuit theory, stochastic processes, medical science and anaesthetics, he would have felt comfortable in the scientific milieu of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he would have been able to stand tall among the great scientists of that era. He lives on in the memory of many of us who were fortunate to have been associated with him, and he has left a wonderful legacy through the students he inspired to do creative work.

About this memoir

This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.11, no.2, 1996. It was written by Stephen J. Redman, Division of Neuroscience, John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.

Acknowledgments

I am enormously grateful to Roslyn Lampard and to her daughters Debbie and Amanda for their help in writing this article. I have also received valuable assistance from some of Doug's friends and colleagues. These include Mr Greg Johnson, Dr Ian Harvey, Mr John Muir, and Professors Bill Levick, Bill Brown and Nhan Levan. I am very grateful to all of them for their assistance.

Degrees, awards and appointments

Degrees

• BSc in Physics (1st Class Honours), University of Sydney, 1951
• MSc in Physics, University of Sydney, 1952
• PhD in Mechanical Sciences, University of Cambridge, 1954

Fellowships

• Fellow, Australian Academy of Science, 1977
• Honorary Fellow, Faculty of Anaesthetists, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, 1975
• Fellow, Institution of Electrical Engineers, London
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, USA
• Fellow, Institution of Engineers, Australia
• Fellow, Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers, Australia
• Fellow, Australian Institute of Physics
• Fellow, Cambridge Philosophical Society

Awards and Medals

• Heaviside Premium, Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, 1957
• Albert F. Sperry Award, Instrument Society of America, 1965
• Centennial Medal, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (USA), 1984

Appointments

• 1951-1960 Member, Research Staff, CSIRO Division of Electrotechnology
• 1960-1961 Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales
• 1961-1962 Principal Research Officer, CSIRO Division of Electrotechnology
• 1962-1990 Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering, Monash University