When some people are told what we did they say, 'well we already knew that', and over the years I have become so accustomed to it that I'd started to describe myself as part of the living fossil record of the subject. We've recently had a substantial increase in medical research funding through the PBS year, through the efforts of Republican Members of Congress and the Senate and the cooperation of the Democratic President and I think this is the way science should be supported. Science, and maintaining an active basic science community that will feed on technology and new developments, is absolutely essential for the future health and welfare of all countries. I think much of this is going to come from the biological-type areas. Rolf Zinkernagel and I were young guys, we worked in a small laboratory.
Science is often like that, it comes from chance encounters between individuals.
It comes from skills that one of us has and the other complements. We built on a base that had been built in this country over many years. The base we built on was really put in place in Victoria, back in the 1930s in the laboratories of Sir Macfarlane Burnett. Through those years it was fostered at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, I think with fairly small funding from Government. Frank Fenner will actually be coming to the Nobel Prize Ceremony in Stockholm in December as my guest, so there is a clear continuity between the two immunology Nobel Prize winners through his service.