Jacques Miller

Jacques Francis Albert Pierre Miller FRS is a distinguished research scientist. He is famous for having discovered the function of the thymus and for the identification, in mammalian species of the two major subsets of lymphocytes (T cells and B cells) and their function.

Miller was born on April 2 1931, in Nice, France, as J.F.A.P. Meunier, and grew up in France, Switzerland and China, mostly in Shanghai. After the outbreak of World War II and Japan's entry into the war, his family moved in 1941 to Sydney, Australia, and changed their last name to “Miller”.

Following a distinguished undergraduate career in medicine at the University of Sydney, Miller began in the early 1960s his PhD studies at the Chester Beatty Research Institute in South Kensington, London, where he investigated the pathogenesis of lymphocytic leukaemia in mice and the role of the thymus in that disease. This was at a time when the thymus was believed to be a vestigial organ with no function. Miller discovered that the thymus is vital for development and function of the adaptive immune system, by showing that experimental animals without a thymus at birth were incapable of rejecting foreign tissues and resisting many infections.

In 1966, Miller returned to Australia to become a research group leader at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, at the invitation of its new director Sir Gustav Nossal, the successor of Sir Macfarlane Burnet. There, he discovered that mammalian lymphocytes can be separated into T cells and B cells, and that these interact to allow normal antibody production (T cell help). His work also showed that the thymus produces the T cells, that it removes autoreactive T cells (central T cell tolerance) and several other landmark findings in immunology. These are considered crucial to understanding diseases such as cancer, autoimmunity and AIDS, as well as processes such as transplant rejection, allergy and antiviral immunity. Miller is semi-retired since 1996 and still works several days each week at the WEHI.