How to Win and Lose a Nobel Prize

Consider Austria: a small land-locked nation of a mere eight million people, maintaining and managing borders with eight other countries. An area not much bigger than Tasmania, it’s much shrunken since its great days as the heart of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and before that the Austrian empire and even earlier as an important component of the Holy Roman Empire.

Yet it has produced the most astonishing crop of intellectuals, probably more for its size than any other country in the world. When I started to list them, I found they stretched across all regions of human endeavour and achievement. The musical heritage is obvious—Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg and Webern. Then writers Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig; artists Eugene von Guerard (who painted nineteenth-century Australian landscapes) and Gustav Klimt; psychologists Freud and Adler; philosophers Wittgenstein and Popper; Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics; Ludwig von Mises, the father of the Austrian School of laissez-faire economics and his followers Friedrich Hayek (free markets) and Joseph Schumpeter (business cycles). Austria also gave birth to outstanding scientists and engineers: Christian Doppler, whose name lives in the effect of frequency changes in sound waves apparent to an observer moving in the opposite direction; Ernst Mach, experimenter in supersonic velocity; Victor Hess, Nobel laureate in physics who measured ionising radiation and cosmic rays; and car maker Ferdinand Porsche, who built electric and hybrid cars as long ago as 1901.

After the Anschluss, Austria’s annexation by Hitler (also an Austrian), the country saw an immense exit by intellectuals, many of them Jews, to all corners of the free world. Australia benefited too; the Melbourne Museum estimates that more than 2000 Austrian refugees had reached Victoria by 1942, and the postwar migration surge took the total of Austrian settlers in that state alone to more than 8000. Australia gained great brains, strong motivations and high aspirations in these displaced persons, among them Fred Gruen, economist; architect Harry Seidler; violinist Richard Goldner, founder of the precursor of present-day Musica Viva; and Gustav Joseph Victor Nossal, the hero of this little story.

Gus Nossal’s contribution to the field of immunology, his prodigious energy and his enthusiastic promotion of what he calls “the virtuous circle that unites health, education and economic growth” are too well known to need repeating. Knighted in 1977, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1989, chosen Australian of the Year in 2000, Sir Gus has been showered with local and international awards, practically everything a scientist of his eminence could expect—except a Nobel Prize.

But in 1960, all that changed—temporarily. I was a young journalist working in Sydney on the sub-editor’s desk of the ABC’s still fledgling independent national news service. To grasp how intelligence-rich but asset-poor ABC News was then, I need only explain that the newsroom was a dingy former bakery on the floor above Woolworths’ convenience store in Kings Cross. The previous tenant’s gas pipes and ductwork still decorated the ceiling; the only access was via the goods lift, which we all (including the Editor-in-Chief, Wally Hamilton) often shared with the garbage, and which always stank of rotten cabbage. The device which we sub-editors used to record the BBC news carried the Edison trademark and used wax cylinders which had to be shaved to erase the previous recording.

Sources of overseas news were poor too. The Reuters wire service was denied to us because its local agent, Australian Associated Press, owned by the newspapers, refused to sell it to the ABC. (This was in retaliation for the Commission having the effrontery to set up its own news service, instead of continuing to buy its news from the newspapers.) To fill the gap, a team of British journalists was employed in London. They culled significant stories from the wire services which were available there and cabled condensed versions to Sydney. Frustratingly, these reports always arrived around 8 p.m., an hour after the main 7 p.m. bulletin. So it fell to the late-night chief sub-editor to knock them into shape for the 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. bulletins.

That particular night in 1960, the London cable clattered off the teleprinter with the sensational news that the Nobel Prize for Medicine had been awarded to an Australian, Gustav Nossal. In the previous two years he had made a major discovery which proved to be a cornerstone in the understanding of the body’s immune system: one cell can make only one antibody. All this was unknown to me, and to most people in Australia; the esoteric laboratory work of medical scientists made news only when they announced a “breakthrough”. Indeed, I might have been more sceptical had I known that Gus Nossal was only twenty-nine. My immediate concern was that here I had a dramatic lead story for the 9 p.m. bulletin. Leaving other stories to an assistant, I found Nossal’s number—I seem to remember he was in Canberra at the time—and phoned him with the good news. He rewarded me with a gracious few sentences about his work, which I wrote just in time for the bulletin to go to air with the Nobel story as first headline.

But hardly had the bulletin finished than the phone began ringing. First, the chief sub of the Sydney Morning Herald (the papers always monitored the ABC to make sure they hadn’t missed any breaking news); then his opposite number on the Telegraph. Both had the same uncomfortable message: their newswires were not saying Nossal for the Nobel, and suggested we had better check. Well, they didn’t know that was easier said than done. Nobody in Sydney had ever spoken to the London team; I didn’t even have their phone number. The two groups—we in Sydney, they in London—worked in parallel universes. None of the Londoners had ever been to Australia or even heard one of our bulletins. As far as I could tell, nobody had ever coached them about the news coverage we wanted, or explained how irrelevant most of their stories were for Australia.

So it was a very nervous half-hour wait until our only wire service feed, from United Press International, came in with the correct prize-winner, Macfarlane Burnet. So, late that night, I had the unenviable task of telephoning Nossal again to apologise, that having awarded him the Nobel Prize, we were now taking it back. He was most courteous and very understanding.

Sir Gus went on to develop the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute as a world-class research foundation and was its director for thirty-one years. He turned his attention to tropical diseases in the Third World as chairman of the WHO Vaccines and Biological Programme, and later with the Global Foundation funded by Bill Gates he worked to vaccinate children in developing countries. He still hopes immunology can be the answer to the world’s ills, from malaria to cancer. But he never did win a Nobel Prize again, with or without my help.

PS. In 1984 the Prize for Medicine went to Jerne, Kohler and Milstein for finding the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies, work that, twenty-five years later, depended on Gus Nossal’s pioneering discovery.

Geoffrey Luck was an ABC journalist and news editor for twenty-six years.