Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award

Ms. Hunt, Mr. Fordyce, Dr. Goldstein, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a great honor to accept the Lasker Award, and a particular pleasure to share it with my colleague and friend of 20 years, Tiny Maini, with whom I have had a most enjoyable collaboration.

As a medical student in Melbourne, I realized we knew very little about disease mechanisms, and was eager to learn more. Gus Nossal offered me the opportunity to do a Ph.D. at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in the early days of immune cell culture, with Erwin Diener. My father queried why I no longer wanted to help patients, and I replied glibly that if research worked, instead of helping patients one by one, you could help thousands. Little did I know that this dream would one day come true.

Research was a wonderful experience, in a small Institute peopled by scientific giants Gus Nossal, Jacques Miller and Don Metcalf (a Lasker Awardee). All members, no matter how junior, were highly valued, and encouraged. Due to the persisting influence of another Lasker Awardee, MacFarlane Burnet, I acquired an interest in the paradox of autoimmunity, and in soluble mediators of immunity and inflammation. At the time these were not characterized, but progress led to their definition as pro-inflammatory proteins, cytokines.

In the early 1980s, I was working in London at the Tumour Immunology Unit, led by Avrion Mitchison. While anti-tumour immunity was evident in animals, it was not in humans, so I decided to explore autoimmune diseases, where there are unwanted immune responses to self, to learn how to induce desirable immune responses to human cancers. But as I developed testable ideas on how autoimmune disease might be generated, I left cancer research to concentrate on autoimmunity. The most accessible human autoimmune disease was rheumatoid arthritis, and the collaboration with Tiny began, which has brought us here today.

Receiving an award as prestigious as this prompts reflection, and gratitude to very many key people. First, to my many scientific collaborators, mentors and friends, and I am glad that some of them are here today. My family has given me enormous pleasure and support. My wife, Tania, has organized a thing called a cultural life and wonderful holidays for us, hiking all over the world. These absences have been invaluable for seeing my research in a much clearer light, and nearly all my new ideas have come while away from the lab. Having fun with my children helped, too.

I have found it an exhilarating adventure, working in science, yet with the opportunity to benefit patients. There is little to match the job satisfaction of seeing a patient treated with your new invention run down the stairs, a week after being barely able to manage them. But that is, if you are lucky, a once in a lifetime event, and persistence in the face of difficulties is more the norm.

My parents gave my brother and me a fine example of how to cope through tough times. After managing by great good fortune to survive the war in Poland, we moved to France, and then emigrated to Australia when I was eight, and arrived knowing no English. There they made a new start, and my father had to become an accountant all over again, in the late 1940s, as his French pre-war degree was not recognized. My parents valued education highly, and were proud that both their sons became doctors. I owe so much to them. They would have been so happy to be here today.