RACP Fellows in Focus: Professor Peter Doherty

It’s not every day one meets a Nobel Prize winner. Even just a quick Google search of RACP Honorary Fellow Professor Peter C Doherty and you're served an enormous wealth of results showcasing his achievements in basic biomedical research and as a public science communicator. Despite his accomplishments, Peter is exceptionally warm, funny and one is easily charmed with stories of his career and funny anecdotes about a life spent in science.

Peter earned his bachelor’s (1962) and master’s (1966) degrees in veterinary science from the University of Queensland. Focusing on neuropathology, he graduated PhD (1970) from Edinburgh University Medical School while working for a British government research institute as an experimental pathologist. Soon after that, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Canberra, Australia, he and Swiss scientist Rolf Zinkernagel made the revolutionary discovery that virus specific CD8+ ‘killer’ T cells recognise virally-modified transplantation antigens, a targeting mechanisms that both explains their capacity to find and destroy virus-producing ‘factory’ cells and explains the biological reason for the existence of the HLA system. That discovery has provided an important basis for vaccine development and cancer immunotherapy, and also changed our understanding of immune surveillance and autoimmunity. You can read more on the particulars of his research on the Doherty Institute website. The research was so groundbreaking that Doherty and Zinkernagel received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996. In addition, Peter’s long list of achievements go far beyond the academic. He is the author of six books, including Sentinel Chickens: What Birds Tell Us About Our Health and the World (2012), Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and The Knowledge Wars (2015). His 2005 book, The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science is part memoir and recounts his unlikely path to becoming a Nobel Laureate, revealing how his nonconformist upbringing, sense of being an outsider, and search for a different perspective have shaped his life and work.

After turning 80 in 2019, Peter had aspirations to slow his pace of life, but COVID-19 had other plans, “I think I thought I was finally going to retire” he mused. Having just completed his first non-science book, on “empire war and tennis, the definitive work on that subject because nobody else has ever been crazy enough to write that particular book”. He was all ready to start on another book and then COVID-19 hit. Peter, however, said that despite the obvious problems the pandemic has raised, it’s been galvanising for him professionally, “It's been a privilege really during the pandemic to see a lot more of my clinical colleagues than I would normally have done because we meet online twice or three times a week. It's been great to get more access to the types of problems they're dealing with. I've found that very helpful. I'm still learning a lot of stuff.” His book An Insider’s Plague Year that tells some of that story will be out in July 2021.

This idea of learning has been at the core of Peter’s life for many years and has worked hand-in-hand with challenges. It’s what drives him and what gets him out of bed in the morning. His career has been long and illustrious and has been inspired by numerous people along the way and his path to the Nobel prize wasn’t a clear one. When asked about his influences, Peter shared, “McFarland Burnett had been director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, a University of Melbourne medical graduate and a brilliant science investigator, like Ian Mackay, who worked on autoimmunity. His books were very much an influence on me, and they've influenced a lot of the direction and strength in immunology in this country.”

He went on to say that viral immunity had, “gone in and out of fashion” and when asked to unpack this a little he shared, “there are always ups and downs in a scientific career. At the moment, of course, viral immunity is very much in fashion and we all hope that in two years’ time, it's very much out of fashion because we've had enough of this haven't we?!” Peter’s movement between Australia and the United States of America has proven to be particularly helpful. Being able to work in top class medical research institutes without having the professional responsibilities that take a lot of the time of medically qualified colleagues, he was sometimes able to work, “a bit more flexibly and be a bit more innovatively”.

Peter’s work has, undoubtedly, had a huge influence on science and medicine. For those that would consider a similar path to his, he offered, “If you're interested in infectious disease, there are two paths. One is to be a science graduate and take a PhD degree in one other area. It could be anything from public health to basic molecular biology and then become involved in infectious disease. The other one is obviously to become a physician and become an infectious disease subspecialist.”

Peter also had an important grounding statement to add, “If you dedicate your life to infectious disease – which I think isn't a bad or an unreasonable thing to do – then you dedicate your life to a life of relative poverty compared with orthopaedics or dermatology. There's no big money for infectious disease physicians. They are a very dedicated bunch of people.”

For someone as accomplished as Peter, we were keen to know what he would like his lasting impression on the world to be, but always humble and modest, his parting words were particularly pertinent, “Your legacy in science is really in the ideas you leave. If the ideas you leave are powerful, they cease to be identified with you because and become incorporated in the thinking of science. Science is a continuum. Sometimes a few of us manage to stick our head up a bit above the parapet, but that's not what science is about. It's about a continuous activity that builds on what went before with occasional discoveries, which can lead to what you call a paradigm shift.”