Gwen Woodroofe came up to Canberra a few weeks before I did, and Ian Marshall a little later, and they had the laboratory equipment organized within the new temporary laboratories, in which I had arranged to have a large animal house for infected rabbits. I resumed work on myxomatosis as soon as Bobbie and I had settled into the house that I had rented from the ANU. Our studies had two components: Gwen and I worked on various aspects of the disease that could be studied in the laboratory; and Ian worked in the field with the CSIRO scientists and in the lab with me, our basic interest being the evolution of virulence of the virus and the genetic resistance of the rabbit. Each of them also did some independent work related to their PhD requirements.
In the laboratory, we studied the active immunity conferred by previous infection (in the rare rabbit that recovered) and following vaccination with fibroma virus, and passive immunity in kittens borne by immune does. Gwen collaborated in the later work done with Max Day on insect transmission and Ian and I wrote two long papers on the topics of major importance in considering the evolution of virus and host (Fenner and Marshall, 1957; Marshall and Fenner, 1960). There were also some important papers that involved close collaboration with us in the laboratory and the CSIRO scientists in the field (Myers et al., 1954, Fenner et al., 1957).
Another aspect of the work on myxomatosis followed my first study leave in 1953, when I met Harry Thompson and learnt more about myxomatosis in England. The virus that spread through Europe (the Lausanne strain) was more virulent than the one used in Australia, and in 1957 it was introduced in Australia. In 1961–62, during study leave as an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, I spent most of my time investigating myxomatosis in Europe.
Harry V. Thompson
Born in 1918, Harry Thompson graduated in zoology at the University of London in 1940 and then worked at the Bureau of Animal Population at the University of Oxford, where he came under the influence of the famous British ecologist, C. S. Elton, with whom Francis Ratcliffe also worked when on leave in England in 1948. In 1946, Thompson joined the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, where he became head of the department dealing with wild animals and birds affecting agriculture. Inevitably he became interested in rabbits, and he was at the forefront of work on myxomatosis in Britain. In 1959, he set up the Ministry's Worplesdon Laboratory at Guildford, Surrey, and remained its Director until retiring in 1982 to become a private consultant. Besides serving on most committees dealing with rabbits and myxomatosis and numerous national and international bodies concerned with wildlife and conservation, Thompson published numerous scientific papers and two important books on the European rabbit, in 1956 and 1994. Over the period 1952–65, I always tried to see him when I went to England, and after he retired I maintained a steady correspondence with him.
Deliberate spread of myxomatosis was made illegal in Britain in 1954. Nevertheless, the disease spread all over the country. A meeting with Paul Chapple, an English virologist who was working on myxomatosis, led to a study of the evolutionary changes in the Lausanne strain of the virus between 1954 and 1962 (Fenner and Chapple, 1965). I also visited scientists involved with myxomatosis in France, where the Lausanne strain was initially introduced by Dr P. F. Armand Delille, by inoculating two wild rabbits on his estate at Maillebois on 14 June 1952, whence it spread all over Europe.
It is impossible to cover the work on myxomatosis in this autobiography. As well as two substantial books, Fenner and Ratcliffe (1965) and Fenner and Fantini (1999), I wrote several review articles and book chapters on it and I used it as the topic for a Harvey Lecture in New York in 1957 and the Florey Lecture to The Royal Society in 1983.