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McMichael, the son of an architect and a homemaker, graduated from the University of Adelaide’s medical school in 1967, at a time of intense global concern about population growth. A summer in Delhi’s leper colonies and a trip to build a hospital in Papua New Guinea’s Tari highlands had been formative experiences for the sheltered young medical student, opening his eyes to the injustices and health impacts of poverty. “I was impressed by his generous nature, his quiet leadership and his intellectual curiosity,” his wife, Judith Healy, said of the man she first met in Tari.
Instead of following classmates into clinical practice—although he spent a brief period as a general practitioner—McMichael was drawn into politics as president of Australia’s National Union of Students (NUS). During this time he forged lifelong connections that would help him translate research into public health policy.
It was at the NUS that McMichael met Basil Hetzel, who convinced him to join Monash University’s newly created department of social and preventive medicine as its first doctoral student in epidemiology.
McMichael’s earliest recognition came with the publication of his paper on the “healthy worker effect”1—the idea that people who were employed were more likely to be healthy than the broader population. Cited some 450 times, the paper has engendered an entire body of spinoff research.
Inspired by the work of Rene Dubos and Paul Ehrlich, McMichael penned a series of student essays titled “Spaceship Earth,” about the fragile balance between humans and the planet. Over time these ideas crystallised into a...