Sir Gustav Nossal
| Sir Gustav Nossal | |
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Nossal at the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists, 2007
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| Born |
Gustav Victor Joseph Nossal 4 June 1931 Bad Ischl, Austria |
| Nationality | Australian, formerly Austrian |
| Citizenship | Australia |
| Alma mater | The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne |
| Known for | His contributions to the fields of antibody formation and immunological tolerance |
| Awards | Albert Einstein World Award of Science (1990) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Immunology |
| Institutions | The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne |
| Influences | Macfarlane Burnet |
| Influenced | Jacques Miller |
| Signature | |
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Sir Gustav Victor Joseph Nossal, AC, CBE, FRS (born 4 June 1931) is a distinguished Australian research biologist. He is famous for his contributions to the fields of antibody formation and immunological tolerance.
Nossal's family was from Vienna, Austria. He was born four weeks prematurely in Bad Ischl while his mother was on holiday. His family left their home town of Vienna for Australia in 1939 following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria. As his father's grandparents were Jewish, he was also considered Jewish and at risk of being sent to concentration camps. In an interview with Adam Spencer, Nossal noted that his father was not a professing Jew but of Jewish ethnicity as he had been baptised a Roman Catholic as a child. Nossal remarked that his father "therefore thought that he would be somewhat protected from the Holocaust-type situations. Of course, he hadn't properly read Mein Kampf. It was all spelt out there: if your four grandparents were Jewish, then you were Jewish." He was baptised and remains a practising Roman Catholic.
When he first attended school in Australia, Nossal spoke no English but he graduated from St Aloysius' College in 1947 as the dux of the College. In 1948, he entered the Sydney Medical School, graduating later with first-class honours. At the age of 26, he left his job in Sydney and moved to Melbourne to work with Macfarlane Burnet in medical science at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and gained his Ph.D. degree in 1960.
On describing his views on religion Nossal said:
Science deals with fundamentally repeatable, objective, verifiable observations. It deals with hypotheses of which you can at least say "this is not patently false." But the human experience, on the other hand, does not just deal with verifiable facts. The human experience has Shakespeare. It has Beethoven. It has Thomas Aquinas. There is no scientist alive who can tell me how the brain of Shakespeare differs from the brain of the worst scribbler for the tabloid press. This is not yet and may never be in the realm of science... We have to access this huge other area of human experience through other means. Call them the humanities. Theology, of course, is one of the great humanities. A human being struggling to understand the cosmos and to understand his or her own consciousness is not at all antipathetic or opposed to me struggling to understand how cells make antibody molecules.
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