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Nowhere to run, rabbit: the cold-war calculus of disease ecology

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Abstract

During the cold war, Frank Fenner (protégé of Macfarlane Burnet and René Dubos) and Francis Ratcliffe (associate of A. J. Nicholson and student of Charles Elton) studied mathematically the coevolution of host resistance and parasite virulence when myxomatosis was unleashed on Australia’s rabbit population. Later, Robert May called Fenner the “real hero” of disease ecology for his mathematical modeling of the epidemic. While Ratcliffe came from a tradition of animal ecology, Fenner developed an ecological orientation in World War II through his work on malaria control (with Ratcliffe and Ian Mackerras, among others)—that is, through studies of tropical medicine. This makes Fenner at least a partial exception to other senior disease ecologists in the region, most of whom learned their ecology from examining responses to agricultural challenges and animal husbandry problems in settler colonial society. Here I consider the local ecologies of knowledge in southeastern Australia during this period, and describe the particular cold-war intellectual niche that Fenner and Ratcliffe inhabited.

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Notes

  1. Burnet to Fenner, 2 July 1945, folder 143/6/1, box 3, F. J. Fenner papers, MS 143, Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, Australia (Fenner papers).

  2. Greenwood was professor of epidemiology and vital statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

  3. Fenner to Burnet, 10 July 1945, folder 143/6/1, box 3, Fenner papers. See Fenner (1948). See also Fenner (2006) and Anderson (2013).

  4. Myxoma is a poxvirus, like ectromelia and smallpox, which causes skin tumors, blindness, fatigue and fever in European rabbits, usually resulting in death within twelve days. The virus was discovered in Uruguay in the late-nineteenth century.

  5. For challenges to this argument, see Mendelsohn (1998) and Farley (1992).

  6. This was anticipated in Grove (1995). See also Griffiths and Robin (1997) and Anker (2001).

  7. Ratcliffe to People [Family], 4 June 1929, box 8, Francis N. Ratcliffe papers, MS 2493, National Library of Australia, Canberra (Ratcliffe papers). A friend of Roy Campbell, the poet and fascist sympathiser, Ratcliffe’s father Samuel was a conservative journalist and freethinker who dedicated his life to explaining England to Americans. See Powell (2001) and Mulligan and Hill (2001).

  8. Ratcliffe to Mother, 4 October 1929, box 8, Ratcliffe papers.

  9. Keogh to Ted Ford, 29 October [1943], Edward Ford papers, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Sydney (Ford papers). A graduate in medicine and zoology from Sydney, and an expert in veterinary entomology and parasitology, Mackerras was appointed after the war as the first director of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. As a Melbourne medical researcher before the war, Keogh was a rival of Burnet, and later he dedicated himself—through the army, philanthropic foundations, and the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria—to promoting the research careers of the promising young men he befriended. Another Melbourne medical graduate, Ford became director of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and acting vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney.

  10. Keogh to Ted Ford, I October 1942, Ford papers.

  11. A compelling precedent was the introduction of the Cactoblastis cactorum moth from Argentina in the 1920s, which nearly eliminated prickly pear (Opuntia) from the brigalow country of Queensland and NSW. See Rolls (1969); Frawley and McCalman (2014); and Deveson (2016).

  12. For documentation of these early attempts, see folder 143/9/3, box 5, Fenner papers. On Breinl and the Institute of Tropical Medicine, see Anderson (2006). A conservative nationalist, Aragão became director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in the 1940s.

  13. Before becoming chief of the CSIR's division of animal nutrition in Adelaide (1930–33), Martin had taught physiology at the University of Melbourne and was director of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, London (1903-30), where Burnet obtained his Ph.D. Burnet and Dora Lush at the Hall Institute had also begun to experiment with myxoma virus before the war: see Lush (1937). Bull also obtained a virulent strain of the virus from Shope’s laboratory.

  14. Bull to Fenner, 13 December 1961, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers. The Commonwealth director-general of health, J.H.L. Cumpston, who had reluctantly approved the importation of the virus, constrained the choice of experimental site.

  15. Bull to Fenner, 3 August 1955, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers. See Bull & Mules (1944).

  16. Melbourne Herald (11 May 1949). Macnamara had worked in the 1920s and 1930s with Burnet, differentiating strains of poliomyelitis virus and studying psittacosis. See Zwar (1984).

  17. Ratcliffe to Douglas Stewart, 28 February 1968, folder 143/9/1, I 1-3, box 4, Fenner papers. Stewart published Rolls (1969), which was full of praise for Macnamara and criticism of Bull and Ratcliffe.

  18. Ratcliffe to Frederick White, 28 February 1968, folder 143/9/1, I 1-3, box 4, Fenner papers.

  19. Extracts from Burnet diary, 9 February 1951, folder 143/9/1B, box 4, Fenner papers. As a veterinary scientist with the CSIR in Sydney, Clunies Ross studied host-parasite relations, especially sheep and hydatids, before the war.

  20. Fenner to Dubos, 1 March 1951, folder 143/7, box 3, Fenner papers.

  21. Dubos to Fenner, 29 March 1951, folder 143/7, box 3, Fenner papers.

  22. Dubos to Fenner, 18 September 1951, folder 143/7/2A, box 3, Fenner papers.

  23. Fenner to Dubos, 17 November 1952, and Dubos to Fenner, 1 September 1954, folder 143/7, box 3, Fenner papers. In 1954, Dubos read Ratcliffe (1938), finding it “most interesting.” See also Dubos (1958).

  24. The Lamarckian anatomist and anthropologist Frederic Wood Jones was a strong influence. Wood Jones introduced Fenner to his friend Ford. Fenner’s family was loosely associated with the Jindyworobaks and the Australia First movement, though active in neither.

  25. Fenner to Everyone, 29 May 1941, folder 3C, box 4, Fenner papers.

  26. Keogh found Fenner frustrating at times: I “am worried about him [Noffie],” he wrote to Ford, “He is a pigheaded little bugger, fond and all as I am of him” (Keogh to Ford, February 1943, Ford papers). On connections between malaria research and disease ecology in this period, see Way (2015).

  27. Myers to Fenner, 8 May 1998, folder 143/9/9, box 7, Fenner papers.

  28. Ratcliffe’s team included biochemists John H. Calaby and M. Lazarus; agricultural scientist Bernard V. Fennessy; veterinary scientist Roman Mykytowycz; and zoologists Myers and R. Brereton. Myers was later professor of zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada, but returned after ten years there to work again at the CSIRO.

  29. Fenner to Myers, 14 March 1951, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers.

  30. Myers to Fenner, 9 November 1951, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers.

  31. Myers to Fenner, 6 December 1951, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers.

  32. Myers to Fenner, 6 December 1951, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers.

  33. Sobey to Fenner, 26 March 1998, folder 143/9/9, box 7, Fenner papers. A South African, Sobey completed his Ph.D. at Edinburgh before joining the CSIRO in 1953.

  34. Myers to Fenner, 6 December 1951, folder 143/9/1, box 5, Fenner papers.

  35. Kohler (2002) ambiguously describes the adjacency of laboratory and field in terms of both frontier (or boundary) and borderland (or contact zone), leaning toward the latter.

  36. Max Day interviewed by Max Blythe (1993), Australian Academy of Science, http://www.sciencearchive.org.au/scientists/interviews/d/day.html, accessed 7 March 2016. As a child, Day was a keen butterfly collector, encouraged by the lepidopterist G. A. Waterhouse. Later, he became the first chief of the division of forest research at the CSIRO.

  37. Max Day interviewed by Max Blythe (1993). Among other activities, Burnet was advising the US department of defense on preparedness for biological warfare.

  38. Day to Fenner, 15 December 1955, folder 143/9/1D, box 4, Fenner papers. See Fenner et al. (1956).

  39. A few years later, case mortality was 25%.

  40. On 16 August 1953, Ratcliffe wrote to Burnet: “I was most interested in your blueprint of how you thought strains of reduced virulence emerged in nature” (folder 143/9/1, I 1-3, box 4, Fenner papers). He continued, in reference to Lake Urana: “field studies of rabbit resistance are very laborious.”

  41. Fenner to Dubos, 28 September 1954, folder 143/7, box 3, Fenner papers.

  42. Francis N. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis—Dame Jean Macnamara and the CSIRO, 1969 [typescript], p. 2, box 8, Ratcliffe papers.

  43. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis, p. 2.

  44. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis, p. 3.

  45. Ratcliffe, Myxomatosis, p. 6.

  46. Smallpox eradication focused on “surveillance and containment,” whereas for myxomatosis it was all about inoculation, or spread, and surveillance.

  47. Fenner may have heard of Langmuir through mutual interests in wartime malaria research; certainly he knew his postwar advocacy of surveillance; and Fenner’s collaborator D. A. Henderson (a student of Langmuir) later introduced them. See the correspondence in folders 29 and 48, box 6, Langmuir papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, MD. See also Langmuir (1965, 1971); Susser (1985); Declich and Carter (1994); Dando (1999); Brown and Fee (2001); and Fearnley (2010). To this should be added the “medical snooping” of Joseph E. Smadel (friend of Burnet and Fenner) and his acolytes in the early 1950s at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research: see Anderson (2008): chapter 2.

  48. Fenner went on to write The Biology of Animal Viruses (1968). Later, he founded the Centre for Resources and Environmental Studies at the ANU and became an outspoken advocate of human population control. Ratcliffe was a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mark Honigsbaum and Pierre-Olivier Méthot for prompting me to write this essay. Frank Fenner clarified aspects of his involvement in an interview with me in Canberra, 20 July 2002. My analysis benefited from discussions with Lyle Fearnley, Emma Kowal, Robert Peckham, Joanna Radin, and Charles Rosenberg; and Mark Veitch provided some epidemiological intelligence. James Dunk gave valuable research assistance. Thanks to the officers and staff of the Australian Academy of Science and its Basser Library I was able to consult the Fenner papers. Also helpful were archivists from the National Library of Australia, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the University of Melbourne, and the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins University. My research was supported by a Grant from the Australian Research Council (FL110100243).

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    Warwick Anderson

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Anderson, W. Nowhere to run, rabbit: the cold-war calculus of disease ecology. HPLS 39, 13 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0140-7

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