Sir Gustav Nossal was born on the 4th of January, 1931 in Bad Ischl, Austria. He was the youngest of three children. Nossal spent his early childhood in Vienna, Austria. Nossal was also baptised as a Roman Catholic. Nossal had always been inspired to contribute to Medical Science since his childhood by a local doctor called Professor Knopfelmacher.
In 1938, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis seized Hitler’s home country of Austria as their first step into making a German empire. This turned Austria into a dictatorship to Hitler and a hazardous zone for Jewish people as Hitler was exterminating the ethnic Jews as he blamed Germany’s financial problems on the affluent Jews.
Following the siege of Austria, the Nossal family was forced to flee Vienna in 1939 because there was a high risk of the Nazis considering the Nossal family as Jews and sending them to concentration camps despite being a Catholic family. This was the case as Gustav Nossal’s father was born to Jewish grandparents.
The Nossal family immigrated to Sydney, Australia and lost everything despite coming from rich …show more content…
In 1948 Nossal started studying Virology, the study of Viruses, at Sydney Medical School and was successful in this course. During his course, Pat de Burgh, Nossal’s main lecturer, took Nossal and some of his classmates to Melbourne to hear a lecture on Polio by Sir Macfarlane Burnet. Burnet was a Virologist and the director of The Walta and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia’s oldest Institute set up for Medical research. This visit inspired Nossal to become a student of Burnet and a researcher in The Walta and Eliza Hall Institute in the future. Nossal graduated from Sydney Medical School with High Honours and obtained a Bachelor of Medical Science in 1954. He received his Medical training at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and completed it in