George Bellamy Mackaness was born in Sydney, Australia. He obtained his MD and BS from the University of Sydney in 1945 and DPhil (University of Oxford, 1952) working under the mentorship of Sir Howard Florey with whom he worked as Senior Fellow. He joined the Department of Experimental Pathology, John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University as a scholar on 1 July 1948; Research Fellow, 1 July 1951; Senior Fellow, 1 July 1953; Reader, 8 August 1958. He later accepted the position Professor of Microbiology at the University of Adelaide. In 1965 he was appointed Director of The Trudeau Institute, Saranac Lake, New York and held this position until 1976 when he became President of the Squibb Institute for Medical Research in Princeton, New Jersey. Mackaness was awarded the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Medicine in 1975 and the Novartis Prize for Clinical Immunology in 1998. Mackaness died on 4 March 2007, in Charleston, South Carolina.