Professor Peter Doherty (b. 1940 )
1997 Award

Immunology Research

Professor Doherty's award follows his 1996 Nobel prize for medicine which he received for milestone research into cellular immunology carried out at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) in Canberra twenty years ago. Peter and his research colleague discovered how the body's immune system recognises virus-infected cells, and his work has had a major impact on the medical profession's understanding of transplants and vaccine production.

Peter is currently chairman of the Department of Immunology at St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee and an honorary professor at the University of Tennessee. He was born in Brisbane and educated at the University of Queensland where he qualified as a veterinarian. He worked for the Animal Research Institute in Brisbane before the first of his overseas positions, as a Senior Scientific Officer at the Moredun Research Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland. His abiding interest in infectious disease led him to postgraduate study in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, while collaborating on research into the way that louping-ill virus causes disease. He was granted a postdoctoral fellowship at the JCSMR and returned to Australia in 1971. AT JCSMR he worked with PhD student Rolf Zinkernagel. Together they developed a research partnership which culminated in their Nobel prize-winning work. They discovered how the body's immune system recognises the body cell and the foreign organism infecting the cell, thus enabling the body to eliminate the invading organism and infected cells but at the same time avoid damaging uninfected cells. The work had an immediate impact on organ transplantation success and has broad clinical relevance for the development of treatments for infectious diseases, cancer and inflammatory diseases. In 1975 Peter again went overseas to the Wistar Institute, Pennsylvania, where he was involved in influenza, rabies and multiple sclerosis research, returning to JCSMR as Head of the Department of Experimental Pathology in 1982.

Peter has a Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London, and has won several major awards, including the Paul Ehrlich Prize, Gairdner International Award for Medical Science and the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award. He has published over 250 articles and contributed editorially to virology and immunology journals.