In the wake of the Japanese advance through South East Asia during World War II, the secretary of the Australian Department of Defence, F.G. Shedden, wrote to Macfarlane Burnet on 24 December 1946 and invited him to attend a meeting of top military officers to discuss biological warfare.
He completed his education in Hungary and moved to Australia in the 1950s where he researched with Frank Macfarlane Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, and later at the John Curtin School of Medical Research and CSIRO in Canberra.
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When he returned to Australia, he conducted research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research under director Frank Macfarlane Burnet and was involved in the establishment of the Biochemistry and Biophysics Research Unit with Henry Holden.
Jerne developed the "natural selection theory of immunology," proposed by Paul Ehrlich 50 years earlier, although he was missing the clonal selection element proposed by David Talmage and then by Frank Macfarlane Burnet.