What Burnet (1960) described as ‘the first example of what may be called genetic interaction between animal viruses’ was the reactivation of heat-inactivated myxoma virus by infection of the same cells with live rabbit fibroma virus (Berry and Dedrick, 1936). This was later found by Hanafusa et al., (1959) and workers in our laboratory (Fenner et al., 1959) to be a non-genetic reactivation and was a general phenomenon among the poxviruses. It is now thought to be due to the fact that promoter sequences of an early gene are conserved among poxviruses; they are destroyed by heat inactivation, but may be supplied by another poxvirus infecting the same cell (review: Fenner, 1962).
My Work Pattern at the Bench
From childhood, I have been an early riser, going to bed about 10 pm and getting up when I woke at about 5 am. During most of the time covered in this chapter, I would come in to work shortly after a breakfast of fruit and cereal. Since the distance between my home and the John Curtin School building was only 6 kilometres and there was very little traffic at that time of the day, I usually arrived at the School between 6 and 7 am.
Throughout the period that I did bench-work (1946–67) biological experimentation was much simpler than it became after the expansion of molecular virology in the 1960s. Most of my papers had only one or two authors, there were no such things as animal ethics committees and most of my research involving experimental animals were carried out with the outbred Walter and Eliza Hall strain of mice and with captured wild rabbits or domestic rabbits bred in the ANU Animal Breeding facilities under the supervision, in Canberra, of a veterinarian, Wes Whitten. In those days we all wore laboratory gowns, but did not use gloves, so I would put on my gown and then look at the experimental animals and do autopsies when they were needed and take down eggs that had been inoculated on the chorioallantoic membrane and count the pocks, or else look at the tissue culture plates that had been inoculated a couple of days earlier. All results were entered in exercise books, in which the relevant experiments had been recorded. I would then consult Ian Marshall and Gwen Woodroofe and hear what they had to say, and also my PhD students. I rarely had more than two students at any one time and after a few months in my lab to learn the basic techniques and decide on the topic on which they would work they would proceed on their own, but consult me whenever they wanted advice. At about 10.30 am we usually had morning coffee, on the lawn just outside our seminar room, and talk with my colleagues. I would then usually go up to the Library to look over all new periodicals dealing with viruses or infectious diseases.
I would often write drafts of papers as soon as I had an idea of what I wished to report, since this would give me a good idea of what additional experiments were needed. I read over all draft PhD theses and papers coming from members of the Department, usually in the evenings, and discussed them with the authors a few days later. I followed Burnet's practice of never putting my name on a paper unless I had carried out some of the bench work. Even from my earliest days in the laboratory, I produced review papers whenever I thought it appropriate, usually as sole author; on ectromelia in 1949, BCG in 1951, myxomatosis in 1954, 1959 and 1964 and the genetics of animal viruses in 1964 and 1970.
Of course, as head of a Department, on some days I would have to spend a good deal of time at meetings of the School Committee or the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies, but I always had a few hours early in the morning to keep up with the lab work.