The Nobel Committee in Stockholm recently announced that he and Dr Rolf Zinkernagel, from Switzerland, had won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for work that they did together 23 years ago in Canberra. Meet Professor Peter Doherty, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, who did just that and became Australia's eighth Nobel Laureate in science. Imagine going to a school where you're not allowed to do biology because you happen to be a boy and now imagine that, despite that restriction, you decide to study Veterinary Sciences at the University of Queensland because you reckon it's doing something useful and suppose that just eleven years after leaving University you make a more-or-less accidental discovery of such importance to medicine that you go on, years later, to receive the highest honour in all science – the Nobel Prize. The Australian Academy of Science interviews Nobel Laureate, Professor Peter Doherty Doherty currently splits his time between researching at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee and working in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. He made a breakthrough in discovering the role of T cells in the immune system, for which, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1996, and was named Australian of the Year in 1997. He took up a post-doctoral position with the John Curtin School of Medicine Research, where he researched how the body’s immune cells protect against viruses. He attended veterinary school at the University of Queensland, and went on to complete his PhD at Edinburgh University. Peter Doherty was born in 1940 in Brisbane.

Pete doherty wiki