Gustav Nossal

Sir Gustav Joseph Victor Nossal (born 1931) is an Australian immunologist whose experimental confirmation of the clonal selection theory of antibody formation helped establish the modern understanding of how the body recognizes foreign substances. Born in Bad Ischl, Austria, he emigrated with his family to Sydney in 1939, attended St Aloysius' College, and graduated in medicine from the University of Sydney in 1954.

He moved to Melbourne in 1957 to work with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. With Joshua Lederberg in a 1958 paper, he demonstrated that a single antibody-producing cell makes antibodies of one specificity, providing direct laboratory support for Burnet's clonal selection theory and helping to win the field its 1960 Nobel Prize for Burnet and Peter Medawar.

He served as director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute from 1965 to 1996, building it into a leading center for immunological research, and held a personal chair in medical biology at the University of Melbourne. His own laboratory work moved through tolerance, antibody diversity, and the regulation of immune responses, summarized in books including Antibodies and Immunity and Reshaping Life.

From the late 1990s he chaired strategic advisory groups for the World Health Organization on vaccines and immunization, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative on global health. He was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia in 1989, knighted in 1977, and named Australian of the Year in 2000.

The given name Gustav is a Germanic form of an Old Swedish name combining Gautr, a Goth, with stafr, staff. He has carried it from interwar Austria into Australian science.