Adrian Gibbs - Professor, virologist and evolutionary biologist

Abstract

This interview, with Professor Adrian Gibbs, 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 beginnings and evolution 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.

Born in London in 1934, Adrian Gibbs is a graduate of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London and also has a PhD from that university. Adrian first came to ANU in 1966, on a three-year research fellowship in the John Curtin School of Medical Research. After returning to England for 18 months, he was appointed as Senior Fellow then Professor in the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU. From 1997-2005 he was a Visiting Fellow in RSBS and JCSMR, and in the Division of Botany and Zoology in The Faculties. He now continues his research and writing from home and the Emeritus Faculty.

Adrian was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1993. He has been a member of editorial boards of international journals, committees overseeing databases for virus identification and taxonomy, and advisory boards for plant quarantine and protection.

Adrian has published extensively in virus systematics and evolution, extending through nine books and over 200 shorter publications, some online. The application of fundamental knowledge to understanding the origins and evolution of viruses and the diseases they cause, particularly those of plants, has been the basis of his work, but his most long lasting contribution will be that, for that work, he started the development of virus databases, notably Descriptions of Plant Viruses and the VIDEdB (Virus Identification Data Exchange database), which became the ICTVdB (the database of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses).