Stimulated by a remark by my friend Professor Hugh Ward, I decided to make myxomatosis the main topic of my research. From Burnet’s diaries, I later found that the day I made this decision was 1 February, 1951. I promptly made contact with Ian Clunies Ross, who was delighted to have a virologist working on this topic, for at the time there were no virologists in CSIRO. I also met with Francis Ratcliffe, who was in charge of the new Wildlife Survey Section of CSIRO, and recruited Gwen Woodroofe, MSc, from the Department of Microbiology of the University of Adelaide and Ian Marshall, a new BAgSc graduate of the University of Melbourne, initially as research assistants. Gwen and Ian worked with me on myxomatosis until about 1960. Gwen finished up as a Fellow and Ian as a Senior Fellow, both working on arboviruses.
Gwendolyn Marion Woodroofe
Born in 1918, Gwen graduated BSc at the University of Adelaide in 1940 and gained an MSc degree in bacteriology for work on salmonellosis. In 1951, she joined my department as a research assistant, to work on myxomatosis. She later became a Research Fellow, graduated PhD and was promoted a Fellow until she retired in 1978. She and Ian Marshall were my collaborators in laboratory studies of myxomatosis between 1951 and 1966. She then went to work with Ian on arboviruses. On her retirement, she became very active in work for UNICEF, for which she was awarded a Medal in the Order of Australia in 1997. After my wife Bobbie died in 1995 and I moved into the extension to our house, Gwen became one of several friends who now come around for a drink and a chat on weekend afternoons.
Ian David Marshall
Born in 1922, Ian Marshall served in the Royal Australian Navy in the World War II. After discharge, he graduated BAgSc in the University of Melbourne in 1951 and immediately joined my department to work on myxomatosis. He participated in fieldwork carried out by our CSIRO colleagues and also in laboratory studies. He graduated PhD in 1956, later becoming a Research Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow, before formal retirement in 1987. He played a major role in virological investigations of myxomatosis between 1951 and 1959, when he went to work with arboviruses with Bill Reeves at the University of California at Berkeley for two years. While in California he also collaborated with David Regnery of Stanford University in classical studies of the epidemiology of myxomatosis in California, where the host is a different species of Sylvilagus (S. bachmani rather than S. brasiliensis) and the virus also differs significantly from that found in South America.
When he returned to the John Curtin School, he established an arbovirus laboratory, which became one of the major Australian centres of arbovirus research, on which he continued to work full-time long after his retirement.
The climatic conditions at the time of the outbreak of myxomatosis in the Murray-Darling Basin had been such that there was also an outbreak of encephalitis in that region, similar to X-disease, described by Cleland et al., (1918). As soon as this outbreak was reported, Burnet instructed two of his staff to investigate it, one (Gray Anderson) looking at the epidemiology and the other (Eric French) attempting to isolate the causative virus from the brains of fatal cases. French (1952) was successful in isolating the virus and showed that it was very similar to the one that caused Japanese encephalitis. Burnet made this information widely available to the Government and the press, but the claim that the encephalitis was due to myxoma virus was widely voiced and the Chairman of the Mildura Hospital Board challenged Burnet and R. G. Casey (Minister in charge of CSIRO) to test the harmlessness of myxoma virus on themselves. Burnet consulted me and we decided that it was absolutely safe. I prepared a suspension and injected Burnet subcutaneously with one, 10 and 100 rabbit-infectious doses; Burnet inoculated me. As soon as he heard of this, Clunies Ross said that, as Chairman of CSIRO, he was responsible for the use of the virus, and therefore he should be included in the tests, so I injected him. None of us showed lesions or an antibody response, Casey announced the results of the tests in Parliament and the public was reassured (Burnet, 1968).
Clunies Ross financed the building of a new animal house at the Hall Institute for holding the large numbers of rabbits that I expected to use. When I went to Canberra, the animal house was initially made available to Geoff Douglas, who was in charge of the myxoma virus inoculation campaigns in Victoria. Later, when Douglas had established the Keith Turnbull Research Institute in Frankston, where continuing research on changes in virus virulence and genetic resistance of rabbits was carried out, the Hall Institute animal house building was converted into laboratories. I also immediately made contact with Ratcliffe's team: Ken Myers, Bernard (Bunny) Fennessy, Alan Dyce, Roman Mykytowycz, Bill Poole and later Bill Sobey, with whom I continued to collaborate over the next 15 years. On one of my frequent trips to Canberra for meetings with the ANU administration, I made contact with Max Day, of the CSIRO Division of Entomology, who was working on insect transmission of plant viruses, and some of my first work, started in 1951, was to collaborate with him on insect transmission of myxomatosis. Other work carried out while I was still in Melbourne involved collaboration with a CSIRO electron microscopist on a comparison of the morphology of myxoma and vaccinia viruses and comparison of the pathogenesis of myxomatosis with that of mousepox.