Frank Fenner - Early Life

Early Life

Frank Johannes Fenner was born in Ballarat in 1914, but the family moved to Adelaide, South Australia in November 1916. Frank attended Rose Park Primary School and Thebarton Technical School. He completed his undergraduate studies in Science (1938) and Medicine (1942) at the University of Adelaide. From 1940–1946 he was a Captain and Major in the Australian Army Medical Corps with service in Australia, Palestine, Egypt, New Guinea, and Borneo, as medical officer in field ambulance and casualty clearing station, pathologist to general hospital, and malariologist. For his work in combating malaria in Papua New Guinea he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1945. In 1938, uneasy about the rise of Adolf Hitler, he legally changed his middle name to John.

Following his war-time service he was recruited by Frank Macfarlane Burnet to work at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Initially they worked on smallpox in mice, mousepox, for which he coined the term 'mousepox' and later on poxvirus genetics.

In 1949 he received a fellowship to study at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, he worked on mycobacterium Bairnsdale bacillus, which causes Buruli ulcer, the third most important mycobacterial disease worldwide after tuberculosis and leprosy. Here he worked with and was influenced by René Dubos, who is one of the claimed originators of the phrase "Think Globally, Act Locally".