Burnet: A Life

Sir Macfarlane Burnet -- Nobel laureate, member of Order of Merit, Australia's most honored citizen at the time of his death -- was a giant of twentieth-century science.

Burnet: A Life, published to coincide with the centenary of his birth, tells the story of Burnets complex genius: his early life in Taralgon; his pioneering discoveries in the fields of virology and immunology; his original theorizing on the body immune system, which led to his Nobel prize for medicine (shared with Sir Peter Medawar) in 1960.

In his retirement, Burnet emerged as the elder statesman of Australian science. He wrote no fewer than sixteen books, mainly concerned with the relationship between science and society, and with his sometimes radical speculations about genetics, cancer, and aging.

On the public stage, he was equally outspoken on a range of sensitive medical and social issues, from conservation, uranium mining, and cigarette smoking to the population explosion and euthanasia.

Burnet: A Life was first published in 1991 as The Seeds of Time. The author, Christopher Sexton, a Melbourne writer and barrister, conducted many interviews with Burnet before his death in 1985.

The resulting biography, with a new chapter marking the centenary, illuminates the life and work of one of Australia's greatest heroes and most controversial thinkers.