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Record W4416323369 · doi:10.1177/09677720251395368

<i>The Production of Antibodies</i> (1941) by F. M. Burnet or by Burnet, Freeman, Jackson and Lush: Collaboration in research

2025· article· en· W4416323369 on OpenAlexaff
Brian K. Hall

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Medical Biography · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAustralian Indigenous Culture and History
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNobel laureateConfusionSmallpoxCuriositySkepticismReignPhilosophy of scienceTyphus

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

was published 84 years ago, in 1941. The authorship is normally attributed to Francis MacFarlane Burnet (1889-1985), 1960 Noble Laureate for his research on acquired immune tolerance and acknowledged as the most famous Australian scientist. A revised edition in 1949 was co-authored with Frank Fenner (1914-2010), another distinguished Australian virologist, best remembered for the elimination of smallpox in Australia and for control of the rabbit population. The curiosity and the topic of this paper is that three collaborators are listed on the title page of the 1941 book - Mavis Freeman, A. V. (Alan Vaughan) Jackson and Dora Lush. All three worked with Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne between 1936 and 1939/1940 during which time they were co-authors on 25 research papers. Who were these collaborators, what did they contribute to the book and why the confusion over authorship? This journey takes us into research on influenza, poliomyelitis, smallpox, myxomatosis, herpes, Q fever and scrub typhus undertaken by brilliant scientists who contributed to important advances in virology and immunology with one tragic consequence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.997
Threshold uncertainty score0.050

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0030.008
Scholarly communication0.0060.006
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.008

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.409
Teacher spread0.375 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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