Interview with Emeritus Professor Frank Fenner, microbiologist and environmentalist

Recorded 16 Apr 2008, at Professor Fenner's home, Red Hill, Canberra
Producer, Interviewer and Editor - Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction: This interview, with Emeritus Professor Frank Fenner, is part of the Emeritus Faculty's Oral History Program, involving retired staff members of ANU who were part of the university in the early decades of its life. The program was initiated and developed by ANU Emeritus Faculty as a contribution to university and community understanding of the origins and development of ANU over the past sixty years. Emeritus Faculty has a special interest in this era, since the Faculty's membership includes many of the people who helped shape ANU in its early days, to make it the pre-eminent university it is today.

Frank Fenner is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology in ANU. He was born in Adelaide in 1914, educated at the University of Adelaide, and served in the Australian Army Medical Corps in the Second World War.

In 1949 Frank was appointed founding professor of microbiology in the newly established John Curtin School of Medical Research at ANU. In 1967 he became director of that research school. In 1973 he was appointed founding director of ANU's Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies.

After retiring as Director of CRES in 1979, Frank became a Visiting Fellow in JCSMR, from where he has written many of his books - on myxomatosis; smallpox and its eradication; viruses and immunology; and histories of Australian microbiology, the Australian Academy of Science, and JCSMR. He has also written a joint biography with his father, Charles Fenner, an eminent geological scientist and educationalist in his own right.

Frank has been widely honoured internationally for his work. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Science.

Interview abstract: Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Frank enlisted in the Australian army and became a malariologist in New Guinea; he would be awarded an MBE for his work there. On discharge in February 1946 he was invited to work at the Walter and Eliza Hall Insitute, where the Director, F. Macfarlane Burnet, suggested that he should work on the experimental epidemiology of infectious ectromelia, a disease of mice, which Burnet had shown was related to vaccinia virus and thus to smallpox virus. He wrote 11 papers during the three and half years he was there, and showed for the first time that some infected mice developed a rash similar to that of smallpox in humans, suggesting that this virus might be a useful model in the study of this deadly disease.

In 1946 ANU was established by act of parliament, and Howard Florey and Mark Oliphant were enlisted to recruit eminent scientists who would help establish the four research schools which would become the Institute of Advanced Studies in ANU. In 1949, at the instigation of Macfarlane Burnet and Bill Keogh (who had been Director of Hygiene and Pathology during the war), Florey invited Frank to return from the Rockefeller Institute in New York to become the foundation professor of microbiology in JCSMR. Hugh Ennor, a biochemist, had been appointed founding director of JCSMR shortly before.

Frank's work in virology and immunology in JCSMR over the next 24 years focused (with collaborators including Ian Clunies-Ross, who was then Head of CSIRO) on two important virological problems: myxomatosis as a control agent for rabbits in Australia, and the global eradication of smallpox. The myxomatosis work involved experimental testing for specificity of virus strains in rabbits, the transmissibility of the virus between infected hosts, and the capacity of the virus to persist, and remain lethal, in rabbit populations. The virus was imported from South America, mass propagated, and released into the wild in the early 1950s. Frank and his colleagues then tracked populations of virus and host rabbits for many years, a study which revealed the co-evolution of virus and host - decreased virulence on the part of the virus, increased resistance in the host - a phenomenon hitherto only studied in laboratory experiments. The underlying genetic processes accounted for the steady loss of effectiveness of the virus as a control agent over subsequent decades. An understanding of these changes provided the first practical demonstration of co-evolution of host and parasite in the wild.

He was appointed Director of JCSMR in 1967, following which in 1973 he became founding director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies in ANU, and steered CRES through its early years, until his retirement in 1979. In recognition of this role, and his continuing support for CRES, ANU named the building the Fenner Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies in 2007. (A major off-campus student hall of residence had earlier been named Fenner Hall.)

In 1976 Frank was appointed Chair of the Global Commission for the Certification of the Eradication of Smallpox, and in 1980 he informed the World Health Assembly that this had been achieved.

In the early 1990s, Frank returned to JCSMR as a Visiting Fellow and began a new phase in his scientific life - as prolific author. Over the next 15 years Frank wrote or co-authored many of his 22 books, covering medical and veterinary virology, myxomatosis and biological control of rabbits, eradication of smallpox, virus biology and taxonomy generally, a history of microbiology in Australia, histories of the Australian Academy of Science and JCSMR, and a joint autobiography/biography with his father Charles Fenner who was an important Australian scientist (geologist and educationalist) in his own right. Frank has also published more than 300 scientific papers and book chapters.

Frank says he has now concluded his life as an active scientist. However, he is still sought after as a speaker and guest at scientific and other meetings. As key figures in his life he identifies Macfarlane Burnet and Bill Keogh, the human biologist Stephen Boyden, and his wife Bobbie, who died in 1995. Bobbie was a nurse when Frank met and married her towards the end of World War II. Bobbie became an activist for the International Red Cross later in her life.

Frank believes that the most significant challenge today to science, and to nations everywhere, is global climate change. He is pessimistic about a solution being found to this problem, partly because of a lack of will on the part of nations, individually or together, to do what is so obviously necessary - move to less carbon- and energy-intensive societies and economies - and partly because planet Earth can support only about two billion people, while the population is predicted to be about nine billion by 2050.