Person

Lush, Dora Mary (1910 - 1943)

Born
31 July 1910
Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia
Died
20 May 1943
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Bacteriologist

Summary

Dora Lush was a bacteriological research fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, where she worked closely with Macfarlane Burnet and Bill Keogh. Burnet considered her an exceptionally capable bacteriologist and their work played a vital role in advancing understanding of viruses. Lush's research focused on viruses, particularly myxomatosis, influenza and the herpes simplex virus. After a period of time in England Lush returned to the Institute in 1942. On 27 April 1943, while working on a vaccine for scrub typhus, Lush accidentally pricked her finger while inoculating a mouse. She died of the disease three weeks later. In 1993 the National Health and Medical Research Council named its Basic Science Postgraduate Scholarships in her honour.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1932
Education - Bachelor of Science (BSc), University of Melbourne
1934
Education - Master of Science (MSc), University of Melbourne
1934 - 1939
Career position - Bacteriological Research Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
1939 - 1942
Career position - Researcher at the National Institute for Medical Research, London
1942 - 1943
Career position - Bacteriological Research Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • McCarthy, Gavan; Morgan, Helen; Smith, Ailie; van den Bosch, Alan, Where are the Women in Australian Science?, Exhibition of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, First published 2003 with lists updated regularly edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, 2003, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/wisa/wisa.html. Details

Book Sections

Journal Articles

Resources

See also

  • Burnet, Macfarlane, Sir, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, 1915-1965 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1971), 193 pp. Details
  • Fenner, Frank, 'Frank Macfarlane Burnet, 1899-1985', Historical Records of Australian Science, 7 (1) (1987), 39-77. https://doi.org/10.1071/HR9870710039. Details

Ailie Smith and Helen Cohn

Created: 25 March 2003, Last modified: 18 August 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P004443b.htm

This Edition: 2026 August - Bibliographies
Larneuk - Gariwerd calendar - Pre-spring: late July to August - season of nesting birds
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-larneuk-season-of-nesting-birds

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P004443b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260