I had long been interested in viral taxonomy (Fenner, 1953) and in 1966 I was elected a foundation member of the International Committee on the Nomenclature of Viruses, which was established at the International Congress for Virology in Moscow in September 1966. The driving forces were C. H. Andrewes and André Lwoff. Although I was booked to go to that Congress, I could not attend, since a few weeks earlier I had contracted appendicitis while in the United States, then flown to Glasgow where I was confined for two weeks in the Glasgow Infirmary before returning immediately to Australia. The International Committee operated through a number of Study Groups, each consisting of specialists in a particular group of viruses. I was a member of the Poxvirus Study Group from 1966 until 1990, when I resigned.

It was arranged that apart from correspondence, the Committee would meet every five years, at each International Congress of Microbiology. Because of commitments at ANU, I was unable to get to the next International Congress in Mexico City in 1970, but in my absence I was elected President of the Committee until the next Congress, which was in Madrid in 1975. As Chairman, I attended meetings of the Executive Committee in London in 1968 and 1973. At the latter meeting it was agreed that a number of changes should be recommended to the next meeting of the Committee, in 1975, including that its name should be changed to the International Committee for the Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). Two meetings of the Executive Committee were held in Madrid, at the first of which a plant virologist, R. E. F. Matthews, was elected President (because of concern that the plant virologists would decide not to operate through ICTV, I pushed hard for Matthews' election). A meeting of the full International Committee, spanning two days, passed a large numbers of amendments to the Rules of ICTV. As outgoing President, I was elected a life member of ICTV.

After each meeting, the outcomes in terms of rules and names and classification of vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, fungal and bacterial viruses were published in Archives of Virology. In addition, the outgoing president produced a book setting out descriptions of the currently agreed genera and species (Wildy, 1971; Fenner, 1976; Matthews, 1979). As an illustration of the enormous increase in knowledge of viruses in the 20 years since 1980, the seventh report (van Regenmortel et al., 2000), is 1,162 pages long.