Broadcast 6.30pm on 17/02/2003
Professor Frank Fennerís outstanding career as a scientist has been marked by two achievements of considerable magnitude, namely the eradication of smallpox, and the control of Australiaís rabbit plague.
He also undertook significant studies into Malaria for the Armed forces in WW2, which had a significant impact on the success of the New Guinea campaign, and for which he was awarded an MBE.
Although Professor Fenner has won numerous awards for his contribution to pure science, it is these two scientific innovations that have reduced human suffering and benefited human welfare in numerous ways. He was awarded the Prime Ministerís Science Prize in 2002.
GEORGE NEGUS: G'day. Good to be back with you. It's Monday night again and that's history night on New Dimensions. Tonight, a look back at some clever Australian ideas and the clever ideas people who had them. Over the years, a good number of Australian bright sparks have bobbed up as world-class innovators. One of those would have to be Professor Frank Fenner, who, along with a raft of other major science awards, picked up last year's Prime Minister's Prize for Science. Professor Fenner's a microbiologist acclaimed for his part in the eradication of smallpox globally back in 1979, arguably, one of the greatest achievements in the history of microbiology. Can't imagine where he gets the time, but the professor's also an active environmentalist and peace campaigner.
PROFESSOR RICHARD SMALLWOOD, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER: Frank Fenner has been a scientist of the very first rank and the outstanding event, I think, in his career was his work that led to the elimination of smallpox.
PROFESSOR FRANK FENNER: Well, I put my career down to three things... ..nature, which are the genes you get, nurture, which is the way you're brought up, especially early childhood and childhood upbringing, and chance, luck.
PROFESSOR RICHARD SMALLWOOD: Frank, during the war, was someone who was an expert malariologist who supported the programs that went on in the tropics and, particularly, in Papua New Guinea. There, at the beginning of the war or early on, many Australian soldiers fell ill and died from malaria.
PROFESSOR FRANK FENNER: One of the main jobs we had as malariologists was to convince the... all officers in all regiments in all parts of the army to see that their troops took one tablet a day with Sunday off, and that prevented malaria in most of the campaigns. It was hard to get the troops to accept this because anything that you have to take they don't like taking. It made you very yellow and the rumour went round that it made you impotent.
PROFESSOR RICHARD SMALLWOOD: His work on myxomatosis was, again, seminal. He was the one that led to the understanding of why the virus wasn't perfect in eliminating all rabbits, why there were some resistant ones that didn't die, and why the future strains of the myxoma virus became less virulent.
PROFESSOR FRANK FENNER: I wanted to get onto virus work and here was a disease that killed 99% of rabbits and had spread all over the Murray-Darling Basin in a matter of six weeks. I did the lab work and the CSIRO people did the field work.
PROFESSOR RICHARD SMALLWOOD: His major work was the work with smallpox and when WHO started its program in 1967 he was the chief adviser, and then when the Global Commission in the late '70s was put together, just at the death knock of smallpox, it needed not only his technical skill but his enormous diplomatic skill to get that commission going and to get the final certification that smallpox was, indeed, eradicated.
PROFESSOR FRANK FENNER: India's a very good example. The people that were engaged in the eradication went to villages with a little picture of smallpox and said, "Have you seen anything like this?" And they visited millions of houses in something like 620,000 different villages in India. The disease was getting very rare. A reward was offered for finding a case and that reward went from $100 up to $1,000. Naturally, there were a lot of people who said, "Ooh, we've seen a case." But they all turned out to be chickenpox or something else. And then, because smallpox is a human-to-human transmission, you couldn't go for even six months without it getting observed somewhere and we were very conservative and said it's got to be two years without a known case.
PROFESSOR RICHARD SMALLWOOD: Smallpox was, for previous generations, what HIV AIDS is to this generation - infecting millions of people and killing millions of people. I think Frank Fenner should be up with those Australian scientists who've achieved Nobel prizes. His work for humanity has been of that order.
GEORGE NEGUS: The quite remarkable Frank Fenner, definitely up there with the likes of Gus Nossal, Howard Florey, Mark Oliphant and Suzanne Corey. The man's a living legend but, curiously, not really well known.