Wolfgang Joklik

Joklik was born in 1926 in Austria, the son of Helene Louise Adele (Giessl) and Karl Friedrich Joklik. He moved with his family to Sydney, Australia at age 11. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in biochemistry from Sydney University and received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University, where he worked on bacteriophage T1 and T2 (viruses that infect E. coli bacteria) under the supervision of Sir Paul Fildes. He spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in Copenhagen working with Herman Kalckar and Paul Berg. ==Career==

Joklik joined the microbiology department headed by Frank Fenner at the then-new Australian National University in Canberra in 1953 and remained there for nine years, working primarily on poxviruses. In 1959-60 he spent a year on sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health working with Harry Eagle, who subsequently relocated to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and recruited Joklik to join him there in 1962. Joklik's research group there continued to work on poxviruses as well as vaccinia viruses and reoviruses. In 1968 Joklik moved to Duke University to chair the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, which he played a major role in developing from a small faculty of six to a large and nationally ranked department as of his retirement in 1993. Following the announcement of a "war on cancer" by President Richard Nixon in 1971, Joklik co-founded the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. Smallpox eradication Joklik's research on vaccinia viruses led to his selection as one of two United States representatives to the World Health Organization's Smallpox Eradication Committee in the 1970s, whose efforts came to a close in 1980 when natural smallpox infections were declared to be eradicated and research stocks retained only by the United States Centers for Disease Control and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the then-Soviet Union. Joklik was a highly vocal opponent of efforts in the 1990s to destroy the remaining stocks, delivering talks and writing several papers on the topic. ==Legacy==

Joklik received the William G. Anlyan Lifetime Achievement Award from the Duke Medical Alumni Association in 2013. The Duke Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology (a successor to the department Joklik chaired) hosts an annual lectureship in his honor, the Joklik Distinguished Lectureship; the inaugural lecture was delivered in 2010 by fellow poxvirus specialist Bernard Moss. Joklik trained over 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows; among his notable trainees are Bernard N. Fields and John Skehel. He died on July 7, 2019. ==References==