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As mentioned in the previous chapter, The Australian National University had arranged with the Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, to provide me with two laboratories, on the same floor as his laboratory, for as long as it took to provide laboratories in Canberra. I worked in the room previously occupied by gifted research worker Dora Lush, who had died in 1943 from scrub typhus contracted during her work (Burnet, 1971).
Molecular biology was unknown in the early 1950s, and although I wanted to get back to virology, I thought that I had skimmed the cream from the study of ectromelia virus. Subsequently it was used by several groups in the John Curtin School as their model virus disease and they continue to use it in studies of molecular virology. At first, Burnet suggested that I might like to take over the field that he had been working on, the genetics of influenza virus. However, I did not want the work of my new department to be too closely associated with someone as distinguished as Burnet, so I did not take up his offer.