1 - Eureka Street

ins tance a t least, are always highlyparticular and specialised.Burnet took real joy from scientificdiscovery. While on e's own findingsn ecessarily have a special emotionalGestalt, Burnet could also get a real thrillfr om som eon e else's breakthrough,always believing that it might help himto see the big picture. In a sense, thewhole world was his laboratory. But hewas also a gifted and industrious experimentalist spending endless hours at thelaboratory ben ch, fr equently performingrepetitive and routine manipulations. Hisoscillation from the particular to thegeneral was, in my experience, almostunique. It served him well in his role asa director of an institute. Burnet was nota natural administrator. I am sure thatover the 21 years of his reign at the HallInstitu t e all the st aff, visitors andstu den ts thought of him primarily as ascientist an d only incidentally as theperson who controlled the purse-stringsor bired and fired the staff. Burnet speltout the Institute's main research them e,bu t it was left to the individual scientiststo position t hem selves within th a tumbrella. Each scien tist was given greatfreedom in research and also total andsole credit for any discoveries madeBurnet was never at his best in opendebate. Man y scientists sh arpen theirwits during the thrust and parry of avigorou s discu ssion with a giftedcolleague. Burnet always preferred toattack ideas in the quiet of his study withpencil and paper, returning the next daywith some new insight. He played littlepart in the open discussion sections ofmajor international m eetings . He statesin his autobiography: 'I have spent myworking life on the periphery of the worldof science. I have always retrea ted to thesmaller cou n try where I could be lesssubject to the two pressures of competitionand co nformity.' I fa ncy that Burnetrather enjoyed his role as a sligh tou tsider. This solitary way of workingallowed his originality to fl ower, untram ­melled by passing scientific fas hion .Burnet and GotterdammerungD id th is scientific paragon have n oAchilles heel, no fla ws in his scientificmakeup? There are a couple which wemust record . Burnet had a mistrust,almost a fear, of technology. The mostcom plex scientific apparatus he ever usedwas a microscope. H e gravely overestimatedthe difficulties in twotechniques essential to virology, namelytissue culture and molecular biology.I believe his switch from virology toimmunology arose at least in part becausehe saw virology coming to requiretechnically more demanding approaches.Towards the end of his reign, the HallInstitute, by international standards, wasridiculously short of space, equipment,facilities and finances . As m edicalresearch became more complex and as itscentre of gravity therefore shifted intodom ains that Burnet could not understand,much less control, he entered intoa Gbtterdammem ng phase which, givenhis great prestige, could have been quitedamaging to his successor. Pared clownto its essentials, this claim ed that all thegrea t discoveries capable of h elpinghumanity had been made, that the timeof grea t elucidation had com e and gone.Thus he stated: 'The likelihood that newknowledge will be applicable to an ymatter of human significance or broadintellectual interest is becomingprogressively sm aller ... It is becomingmore evident in biology that beyond acertain level of theoretical know ledgethere is no useful applica tion to m edicineor any other practical m atter.' Thispessimism led to some extraordinarycomments about molecular biology:'Molecular biology as now practised is ...very largely a laboratory artefact that hasnever been brought into useful relationwith biological realities.' So much for theDNA industry and the wonderfulproducts, including vaccines, m ade bygenetic engineering! 'The human geneticequipment in every cell is of a complexity-~~,··~ ··/ .Portrait by Clifton Pugh, 1966and order which is completely beyond anapproach at the chemical level.' So m uchfor the human genome project, destinedto complete that very task over the nextfiv e years.Of the m an y books written postretiremen t, on e of the m ost though t­provoking is the las t, Credo andComment, publish ed in 1979 w henBurnet was 80. In it he re hearses the 'bigbang' theory of the origin and evolutionof the universe, asserts the cen trality ofthe life process, considers the key tenetsof sociobiology, and speculates on the'strange urgency on the part of nature thatevery possible combina tion should betried lest som e desira ble combinationshould never find opportunity to emerge'.~.26 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1999