Frank Fenner, 1914–2010

last updated 8 January 2015

Frank Fenner was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for having developed methods to control malaria, which had ravaged Australian troops fighting in the Pacific in World War II. His breakthrough, in fact, was deemed to be partly responsible for the Allied victory over Japan—and that was just the first achievement in a long scientific career.

It’s difficult to quantify Fenner’s contributions to world health, said the Los Angeles Times. Born in Ballarat, Australia, he originally set out to become a geologist, “but his father convinced him medicine would be a steadier source of income.” His studies in tropical medicine at the University of Adelaide were the basis of his WWII work in the South Pacific. After the war, he studied mouse pox, smallpox, and measles. Fenner applied his learning to the plague of 600 million rabbits that had, in the absence of natural predators, overrun Australia in the 1950s, said the London Telegraph. He and two colleagues killed off about 500 million of them by releasing rabbit pox into the population—and injecting themselves with the pox to prove it wouldn’t hurt humans.

In 1969, Fenner began advising the World Health Organization on its campaign to eradicate smallpox, which at that time killed 2 million people a year, said The New York Times. By focusing first on mass inoculations, and then on quarantining patients and vaccinating their close contacts, the WHO eradicated the disease from both human and animal populations within a decade. Fenner himself pronounced the disease’s “epitaph” in an official declaration in Geneva in 1980.