Peter Doherty and co-recipient Rolf Zinkernagel received the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for the discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defense system. From Doherty's research, a clearer understanding of the association between tissue types and the susceptibility to certain diseases has emerged.

Peter Doherty was born in Queensland, Australia on October 15, 1940. Doherty was educated at Queensland and later at Edinburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in 1970. He worked as a research fellow in microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at Australian National University in Canberra (1973-75) and was head of the Department of Experimental Pathology from 1982-1988. In the interim, he worked at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia from 1975 to 1982. In 1988 he returned to the United States to become chairman of the Immunology Department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

The work for which Doherty ultimately...