In May 1937, Fenner was a member of an Adelaide University anthropological expedition to
Nepabunna Mission in the northern
Flinders Ranges in
South Australia led by
J. B. Cleland, which also included
Charles P. Mountford as
ethnologist and photographer, as well as botanist
Thomas Harvey Johnston and others. From 1940 to 1946 he was a captain and Major in the
Australian Army Medical Corps with service in Australia,
Palestine,
Egypt,
New Guinea and
Borneo, as medical officer in field ambulance and
Casualty Clearing Station,
pathologist to general hospital and
malariologist. For his work in combating
malaria in Papua New Guinea he was made a Member of the
Order of the British Empire in 1945. Following his war-time service he was recruited by
Frank Macfarlane Burnet to work at the
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Initially they worked on
smallpox in mice, for which he coined the term "
mousepox", and later on the
genetics of
poxvirus. In 1949, he received a fellowship to study at the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, he worked on
mycobacterium Bairnsdale bacillus, which causes
Buruli ulcer, the third most important mycobacterial disease worldwide after
tuberculosis and
leprosy. Here he worked with and was influenced by
René Dubos, who is one of the claimed originators of the phrase "
Think Globally, Act Locally".
In Canberra, 1949–2010 Returning to Australia in 1949, he was appointed professor of
microbiology at the new
John Curtin School of Medical Research at the
Australian National University,
Canberra. Here he began studying viruses again, in particular the
myxoma virus. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Australia had severe
rabbit plagues. Fenner's work on the myxoma virus showed that initially it killed rabbits in 9 to 11 days and was 99.5% lethal. Under heavy selection pressure, the few rabbits that survived developed resistance, which meant that the pest was never completely eradicated, but their numbers were reduced. Prior to the release of the virus as a
biological control for the rabbits, Fenner,
Frank Macfarlane Burnet and
Ian Clunies Ross famously injected themselves with myxoma virus, to prove it was not dangerous for humans. From 1967 to 1973 Fenner was Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. In 1977, he was named the chairman of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication, the same year the last known case of naturally transmitted smallpox occurred in
Somalia. Fenner announced the
eradication of smallpox to the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980. He was a keen supporter of Australia having an ecologically, socially sustainable population. He was emeritus professor at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. In June 2010, he predicted in an interview with
The Australian the
extinction of the human race within a century, primarily as the result of
human overpopulation,
environmental degradation and
climate change. He died in Canberra on the morning of 22 November 2010 after a brief illness, and days after the birth of his first great-grandchild. ==Personal life==