After the Burnet School at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne changed its focus from influenza to immunology, the influenza research program moved with Frank Fenner's group to ANU, where it was anchored by Stephan Fazekas de St. Groth. There the pioneering influenza work of Sir MacFarlane Burnet continued, with Graeme Laver as biochemist and Stephan Fazekas as the mathematical mod...

Z inder, a superb geneticist (who also embraced biochemistry), died on February 3, 2012, following a long illness. He was 83. Zinder came of age at the dawn of microbial genetics. A prodigy with an eidetic memory, he was only 15 when he graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, where he built his first incubator for growing bacteria (a 60-W light bulb in a box with a thermostat). After e...