Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-12, Section: A, page: 4675.

Adviser: William C. Summers.

Frank Macfarlane was a Nobel Prize-winning Australian microbiologist who made seminal contributions to virology and immunology in the mid-20 th century. Burnet began his career by studying bacteriophages and made important contributions to the field between 1924 and 1937. Using a combination of Burnet's published papers and personal writings, primarily diaries and letters, this dissertation traces the development of his phage research and analyzes its influence on his later research in virology and immunology.

Burnet first encountered the phage while he was a medical resident in pathology at Melbourne. He pursued the subject further when he went to England for his Ph.D. degree, (1925-1927) for which he published a thesis and papers on the nature of bacterial resistance to phages. He also undertook inquiries into the biological nature of phages and pursued these questions further upon his return to Australia in 1927. From 1928-1931 he made important discoveries, notably about phage growth, which helped establish the identity of phages as bacterial viruses, a much-debated issue in the scientific community at that time. He returned to England for two years on a research fellowship and continued to expand the scope of these investigations on phages. Of particular historical significance is his work on the problem of lysogeny, a matter of considerable controversy among phage biologists, for which Burnet furnished an elegant solution. Returning to Australia in 1933 he continued his phage investigations for a brief period, publishing an authoritative review article and also the results of a new investigation on phage-induced mutations of bacteria, both of which went on to achieve the status of classics in the field. As phage research underwent a shift in focus from biological to molecular considerations in the late 1930s, Burnet ceased his work in this area and turned his to animal viruses. This dissertation discusses both Burnet's impact on phage research in the 1920s and 1930's and the influence of his phage studies on his later contributions to virology and immunology.