We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
'I'm an Experimentalist, I'm a Pragmatist': Interview with Peter C. Doherty.
- Authors
Anderson, Warwick
- Abstract
I arranged to interview Professor Peter C. Doherty, AC, FRS, on February 25, 2014, in his offi ce. But where, I asked his secretary, or 'executive assistant' as we say these days, is his offi ce? 'Why, in the Doherty Institute, of course', she responded. Of course. Awarded (with Professor Rolf M. Zinkernagel) the 1996 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, Professor Doherty (born 1940) has been named Australian of the Year (1997), an Australian Living Treasure, and a Queensland Icon. Born in Brisbane in 1940, he attended Indooroopilly State High School before training in veterinary science at the University of Queensland and Edinburgh University. In 1973, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) in the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, he and Zinkernagel discovered that T lymphocytes, a large part of the immune system's repertoire, recognise foreign matter, or their target antigens, necessarily in association with molecules of the body's major histocompatibility complex (MHC), previously thought to be responsible only for the rejection of incompatible transplants. That is, 'foreignness' is effectively recognised by the immune system as 'altered self'. Doherty later worked at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, the ANU again, and St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, before returning to Australia as patron (and guide) of the eponymous research institute at the University of Melbourne. Aside from his continuing medical research, he has written six 'lay' books on science and trenchant manifestos in recent years.1
- Subjects
DOHERTY, P. C. (Peter C.), 1940-; MAJOR histocompatibility complex; WISTAR Institute of Anatomy &; Biology; CONTINUING medical education; INTELLECTUAL development; VETERINARY colleges; IMMUNOLOGY
- Publication
Health & History: Journal of the Australian & New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine, 2018, Vol 20, Issue 1, p120
- ISSN
1442-1771
- Publication type
Interview
- DOI
10.5401/healthhist.20.1.0120