Peter C Doherty

Peter Charles Doherty (15 October 1940) is an Australian veterinarian and researcher who was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

He was born in 1940 in Brisbane, Queensland, where he attended Indooroopilly State High School. He graduated with a veterinary degree from the University of Queensland, and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. At the time of receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996, he was a professor at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine, working at Saint Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, United States.

He shared the award with Rolf M. Zinkernagel, both working in the field of immunology, more specifically with Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes and MHC restriction models.

Research and career

Doherty's research focuses on the immune system, and his Nobel paper described how the body's immune cells protect against viruses. He and Rolf Zinkernagel, the co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, discovered how T cells recognize their target antigens in combination with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins.

Viruses infect host cells and reproduce within them. Killer T cells destroy those infected cells so that the viruses cannot reproduce. Zinkernagel and Doherty found that for killer T cells to recognize infected cells, they had to recognize two molecules on the cell's surface—not just the virus antigen, but also a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule. This recognition was performed by a T cell receptor on the surface of the T cell. MHC was previously identified as responsible for the rejection of incompatible tissues during transplantation. Zinkernagel and Doherty discovered that the MHC was also responsible for the body's fight against meningitis viruses.

His semi-autobiographical book, The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize was published in 2005. In 2012 he published the book Sentinel Chickens. The fourth book of hers The Knowledge Wars was published in 2015.