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

🇰🇷 이 글의 한국어 버전 읽기 / 🇬🇧 Read this post in English

 

 

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

Walk down Flemington Road in Parkville, Melbourne, and you'll pass the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) — a building, my workplace, that has, remarkably, produced three Albert Lasker Award laureates across seven decades. The Lasker is often called "America's Nobels": of the roughly 90-plus scientists honored in its basic and clinical research categories, a striking number have gone on to win the Nobel Prize itself. When a Lasker is announced, the scientific community pays close attention, because history says a Nobel might not be far behind.

Three of those Lasker laureates trace back to the same Melbourne institute. It's a pattern worth pausing on — not just as a trivia fact, but as a case study in how scientific culture compounds across generations. It made me want to understand what, exactly, this place has been doing right for so long. Here's who they are, and what quietly connects their very different discoveries.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1952)

Burnet won the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his foundational work in immunology and virology, laying groundwork that would shape the entire field for decades. He went on to direct WEHI for years, and in doing so shaped the institute's research culture long before Metcalf or Miller ever set foot in its labs. In 1960, Burnet shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on acquired immunological tolerance — a reminder that a Lasker can arrive years, even a decade, before the Nobel Committee catches up.

Read more about the 1952 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award 

Donald Metcalf (1993)

Metcalf received the Lasker Award for discovering colony-stimulating factors — the proteins, including G-CSF, that control how blood stem cells grow and differentiate. That discovery underpins modern blood stem cell transplantation and donor registries, technology that now saves lives every day. Metcalf earned the nickname "the Father of Colony-Stimulating Factors," and in a career that stands out even among dedicated scientists, he never left WEHI — spending over 60 years there without moving to another institution.

Read more about the 1993 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award 

Jacques Miller (2019)

Miller shared the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Max Cooper of Emory University. Miller identified T cells and their origin in the thymus, while Cooper identified B cells — together establishing that lymphocytes exist as two distinct classes with separate roles, the organizing principle behind modern immunology, and the foundation for vaccine development, organ transplantation, autoimmune disease treatment, and modern cancer immunotherapy. When Miller first proposed the existence of T cells in the 1960s, the finding was met with skepticism and took years to gain acceptance — a story that echoes other slow-burn discoveries, like Katalin Karikó's decades-long pursuit of mRNA research before it reshaped vaccine science.

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

*Watch acceptance remarks by Jacques Miller and Max Cooper at the 2019 Lasker Awards Ceremony.*

 It Wasn't a Coincidence

What connects Burnet, Metcalf, and Miller isn't just an address. It's a continuity of purpose: Burnet shaped the institute's scientific culture, Metcalf spent his entire career building on it, and Miller's discovery of T cells and Metcalf's colony-stimulating factors both trace back to the same blood-forming stem cells — two different threads of the same broader hematopoiesis story. Three separate discoveries, separated by decades, turn out to be threads in the same larger story about how the immune system works.

It's a compelling case for what sustained institutional culture can do. A single Nobel or Lasker can happen almost anywhere, given the right person and the right moment. Three, from the same institute, spanning nearly 70 years, suggests something more durable — a place that has consistently attracted, trained, and retained scientists willing to pursue slow, difficult questions.

A note on scope: Sir Marc Feldmann, who shared the 2003 Lasker Award for discovering anti-TNF therapy for rheumatoid arthritis, trained in Melbourne — he earned his MBBS at the University of Melbourne and his PhD at WEHI — but his prize-winning research was carried out at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London, where he was based by the time of the discovery. He's a Melbourne-trained laureate rather than a Melbourne-based one, which is why he sits just outside this particular lineage.