Skip Navigation | CMBE | JCSMR | ANU | Search ANU

Professor Rolf Zinkernagel

Professor Rolf Zinkernagel acknowledges a standing ovation after receiving his Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine from King Carl XVI Gustav, Stockholm 10 December 1996. Photo: Peter Pockley

Professor Zinkernagel was awarded the Nobel Prize (which he shared with Professor Peter Doherty) for work done in the course of his PhD studies at the John Curtin School.

Rolf Zinkernagel was born in Switzerland in 1944, in Riehen, a village near Basel. He went through public school in Riehen, then in Basel, to the Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliches Gymnasium, the same school attended by both his father and father-in-law. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Basel in 1968 and married his wife Kathrin, also a graduate in medicine, two weeks later. Rolf worked initially in the surgery department of one of the Basel hospital where he realised he did not want to be a surgeon For a couple of years he did research in Basel before landing a research position with Gordon Ada and Bob Blanden in the Microbiology Department of the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra. Rolf and Kathrin arrived in Canberra in January 1973 with two small children.

Legend has it that Rolf was put in to share Peter Doherty's lab because Peter was the only one who could stand his singing, but it may have been because that was the only space available. The two started to cooperate on immune responses against the LCMV virus. Rolf enrolled for a PhD to help his finances and was awarded the ANU degree in 1975. Peter and Rolf's collaboration resulted in the discovery of MHC restriction for which the two received the Nobel Prize in 1996- not a bad PhD result!

During their studies of the response of mice to viruses, they found that white blood cells (lymphocytes) must recognize both the virus and certain self molecules - the so-called major histocompatibility (MHC) antigens - in order to kill the virus-infected cells. This principle of simultaneous recognition of both self and foreign molecules has since then constituted a foundation for the further understanding of the specificity of the cellular immune system and has many important clinical implications for organ transplantation and for the treatment of diseases involving the immune system.

Rolf Zinkernagel now works in Switzerland as Head, Institute of Experimental Immunology, Zurich. Like Peter Doherty he is a Companion of the Order of Australia.

• More photos of the Nobel Prize presentation ceremony