Frank Macfarlane Burnet

Frank Macfarlane Burnet was an Australian virologist and immunologist who developed the clonal selection theory of antibody production, one of the central organizing ideas of modern immunology. The theory proposed that the body already contains, before any infection occurs, a huge diverse population of immune cells each capable of recognizing one particular foreign substance, and that encountering that substance simply triggers the matching cells to multiply rapidly and mount a response, rather than the immune system somehow manufacturing a newly designed antibody to order each time, as earlier theories had suggested. Building on this framework, Burnet predicted that an organism's immune system could, in principle, be made to treat a genuinely foreign tissue as if it were its own, a state called acquired immune tolerance, a prediction later confirmed experimentally by Peter Medawar and colleagues and one that became the essential scientific basis making organ and tissue transplantation medically possible. Burnet shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Medawar for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance, and he spent much of his career directing the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, where he also carried out extensive earlier research on influenza and other viruses.