Immunologist to give oration

NOBEL Prize winner and immunologist Professor Peter Doherty will present the annual Sir Albert Coates Oration at Federation University next week.

Professor Doherty’s free presentation will explore the theme of crisis, discussing Coates himself, war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change.

Having written about science throughout his life, Professor Doherty decided to shift focus and pen his latest book, Empire, War, Tennis and Me, at the age of 79, which led him to read about Coates.

“My book is about two of my uncles who went off to World War Two, and they had made their own tennis court earlier on in Brisbane,” he said.

“They experienced the worst situations Australian soldiers were in. One survived and one didn’t.

“My uncle that died was in Malaya. He was like Coates, at the Burma end of the Burma-Thai Railway as a prisoner of war.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Australia, Professor Doherty stepped right back into the science of infection and immunity, communicating public service information through his Setting it Straight blogs, and Twitter.

He published a book about the first 12 months of COVID-19, called An Insider’s Plague Year, and said he’s looking forward to delivering the Coates lecture which will tie all these different ideas together.

“The oration will cover how people confront crisis, the crises we’ve been confronting with COVID, and the coming crisis we confront with climate change,” he said.

“It’s about ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances, and rising to challenges. Interestingly, it’s also 80 years since Australia was threatened with invasion in 1942.”

Coates was no stranger to crises, having been a medical orderly in World War One, in Gallipoli and on the Western Front.

He lived through the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, was a senior surgeon in World War Two, and died in 1977, not long before the AIDS pandemic.

Professor Doherty is the patron of the Peter Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne.

The oration will be held on Wednesday, 16 November at 6pm in the Geoffrey Blainey Auditorium, via University Drive, Mount Helen, and is presented by FedUni in partnership with the Albert Coates Memorial Trust.

Guests are asked to be seated by 5.45pm for a prompt start. The presentation will also be streamed online. Register your in-person or virtual attendance at bit.ly/3Ucqdvc.