Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2004

People

Honorary degree for Nobel Prize winner

Joint winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, Professor Rolf Zinkernagel, has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by La Trobe University in recognition of his contribution to immunology.

Professor Zinkernagel, who is Head of the Institute of Experimental Immunology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, also delivered La Trobe’s annual Science Lecture on the University’s main Melbourne campus at Bundoora. He spoke on the subject of natural and artificial vaccines.

A Swiss national, Professor Zinkernagel spent two and a half years in the early 1970s working with Professor Peter Doherty at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. The two men were named as joint winners of the Nobel Prize for their work which helped determine how the immune system recognises foreign invaders.

Their work has also guided attempts to use the immune system to hunt down and destroy microscopic cancer cells that have escaped from tumours and has helped scientists as they design ways to suppress harmful immune system attacks on the body's own tissue, as in multiple sclerosis and diabetes.

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