🌏 Available in: English | 한국어

Three Lasker Awards, One Address: The Institute That Keeps Producing Breakthroughs

Three scientists. Nearly seven decades of discovery. One remarkable biomedical research institute in Melbourne.

Three Lasker Award laureates associated with WEHI in Melbourne: Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Donald Metcalf and Jacques Miller

⏱ In 30 Seconds

✓ Three scientists closely associated with WEHI received Albert Lasker Awards for discoveries that transformed immunology and blood-cell biology.
✓ Frank Macfarlane Burnet reshaped modern immunology and later received the Nobel Prize for acquired immunological tolerance.
✓ Donald Metcalf helped discover colony-stimulating factors, leading to medicines used in cancer care and stem-cell transplantation.
✓ Jacques Miller revealed the function of the thymus and established T cells as a distinct branch of adaptive immunity.

Most medical research institutes would consider producing one Albert Lasker Award laureate an extraordinary achievement.

The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research—now known as WEHI—has produced three.

Walk down Flemington Road in Parkville, Melbourne, and you will pass the institute where I work.

For many years, I knew the Nobel Prize well but knew surprisingly little about the Lasker Awards. A few years ago, near the third-floor elevator at the institute, I noticed a photograph on the glass wall of a laboratory. It showed Jacques Miller holding his Lasker Award trophy.

I remember wondering what the Lasker Award actually was. That photograph first made me curious about the prize and, eventually, about the remarkable history of Lasker laureates at the institute where I work.

Inside this building is a scientific lineage that stretches across nearly seven decades: from Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s work in immunology and virology, through Donald Metcalf’s discovery of colony-stimulating factors, to Jacques Miller’s identification of T cells and the function of the thymus.

Their discoveries were very different, but all three emerged from the same institutional tradition of pursuing fundamental biological questions whose medical importance was not always obvious at the beginning.

The Albert Lasker Award trophy displayed at WEHI in Melbourne. Photograph by the author.

The Albert Lasker Awards are among the most respected honours in biomedical science.

They are sometimes described as “America’s Nobels” because they recognise discoveries that have fundamentally changed biological understanding or medical practice. If you are unfamiliar with the award, a separate article explains how the Lasker Award differs from the Nobel Prize.

Three WEHI-associated Lasker laureates therefore represent more than an impressive historical coincidence. Their stories show how a scientific culture can accumulate across generations.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet: A New Framework for Immunology

In 1952, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his contributions to virology and the genetics of virus infection.

Burnet was already one of Australia’s most influential medical scientists.

His research helped shape the modern understanding of viral disease, antibody production and immune recognition.

As director of WEHI, he also helped establish a scientific culture that valued ambitious biological questions and long-term intellectual independence.

Burnet later became best known for ideas surrounding immunological tolerance and clonal selection.

Clonal selection proposed that the immune system contains many pre-existing lymphocyte clones, each carrying receptors with different specificities.

When an antigen enters the body, it selects the lymphocyte clone capable of recognising it, causing that clone to expand.

This framework helped explain how the immune system could recognise an enormous range of threats while avoiding destructive reactions against the body itself.

In 1960, Burnet shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Peter Medawar for discoveries relating to acquired immunological tolerance.

Why Burnet’s Work Changed Medicine

Burnet’s ideas influenced nearly every major field of modern immunology.

They helped scientists understand immune memory, self-tolerance, vaccination, autoimmune disease and transplantation.

His contribution was not limited to an individual experiment. He supplied a conceptual framework through which later discoveries about lymphocytes, antibodies and immune specificity could be understood.

Read more about the 1952 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award .

Donald Metcalf: Discovering the Signals That Control Blood-Cell Production

In 1993, Donald Metcalf received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his work on colony-stimulating factors.

These signalling proteins regulate the survival, proliferation and maturation of blood-forming cells.

Metcalf and his colleagues spent decades identifying, purifying and characterising these molecules.

Among them was granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, or G-CSF, which promotes the production and release of neutrophils.

Recombinant G-CSF later became an important medicine for patients whose infection-fighting white blood cells are depleted by chemotherapy.

It also became central to modern peripheral blood stem-cell donation because it can mobilise blood-forming stem and progenitor cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream.

Those cells can then be collected through apheresis and used for transplantation.

Metcalf became known as the “father of colony-stimulating factors.”

His career was also remarkable for its continuity. He remained at WEHI for more than six decades, pursuing a difficult biological problem long before its full clinical importance became clear.

Why Metcalf’s Work Changed Medicine

Colony-stimulating factors changed supportive cancer care.

They helped reduce the duration of severe neutropenia, enabled some patients to continue treatment and provided a practical method for mobilising stem cells for transplantation.

Metcalf’s work demonstrated how a fundamental question about blood-cell growth could eventually lead to medicines used around the world.

Read more about the 1993 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award .

Jacques Miller: Revealing the Function of the Thymus

In 2019, Jacques Miller shared the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Max Cooper.

Together, their work established one of the central organising principles of adaptive immunity: lymphocytes exist as distinct T-cell and B-cell populations with specialised but cooperating functions.

Miller’s discovery began with an unexpected experiment.

While studying virus-induced leukaemia in mice, he removed the thymus from newborn animals.

The result was profound immune deficiency.

The mice became vulnerable to infection, had severe lymphocyte defects and failed to reject foreign tissue normally.

These observations revealed that the thymus—long considered biologically unimportant—was essential for the development of a distinct immune-cell lineage.

Those cells became known as T cells.

Cooper’s work helped establish the separate B-cell lineage responsible for antibody production.

Together, the discoveries showed that adaptive immunity depends on two distinct cellular systems that communicate and cooperate.

Why Miller’s Work Changed Medicine

T-cell biology now underpins vaccination, organ transplantation, autoimmune disease research and modern cancer immunotherapy.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors, engineered T-cell receptors and CAR-T-cell therapies all depend on principles that emerged from the discovery of T cells and the function of the thymus.

Miller’s work transformed an overlooked organ into one of the central structures of immunology.

Read more about the 2019 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award .

Watch the 2019 acceptance remarks by Jacques Miller and Max Cooper .

Why This Institute Kept Producing Breakthroughs

What connects Burnet, Metcalf and Miller is not simply a shared address.

Burnet helped build a culture that placed fundamental biological questions at the centre of medical research. Metcalf spent decades pursuing the molecular signals that regulate blood-cell formation. Miller overturned assumptions about the thymus and revealed a new cellular structure for adaptive immunity.

Their discoveries also intersect scientifically.

Burnet developed a framework for understanding lymphocyte selection and immune tolerance. Miller revealed where T cells develop and how they cooperate with B cells. Metcalf helped explain how blood and immune-cell populations are regulated by growth factors.

Together, their work contributed to a broader understanding of how immune cells are generated, selected, activated and controlled—a scientific lineage that later included Peter Doherty and MHC-restricted immune recognition.

The time scale matters too.

These discoveries did not emerge from short projects designed to deliver immediate results. They came from years—and often decades—of pursuing difficult biological questions.

A single major award can result from one exceptional scientist working at the right moment. Three Lasker Awards spanning nearly seventy years suggest something more enduring.

They suggest a research culture capable of giving important questions enough time to be answered.

That may be the part of this story I appreciate most. I pass through the same institute where these discoveries were made, and the Lasker trophy I once barely recognised now means something very different to me.

Continue Reading

A note on scope: Sir Marc Feldmann, who shared the 2003 Lasker Award for the development of anti-TNF therapy for rheumatoid arthritis, completed medical and research training in Melbourne, including doctoral research at WEHI. His prize-recognised work, however, was conducted at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London. He is therefore best described as a Melbourne-trained rather than a Melbourne-based member of this particular scientific lineage.

thebiostories

WEHI's Three Lasker Award Winners: Burnet, Metcalf & Miller