Leslie Brent (1925–2019)

Leslie Baruch Brent was born Lothar Baruch to a Jewish family in Köslin, Germany (present-day Koszalin, Poland). His parents were Charlotte and Arthur Baruch, a children's clothing sales rep who had won the Iron Cross in World War I. He had an older sister, Eva. In 1936, at age 11, he was forced to leave school by Nazi persecution. He escaped Germany on the first of the Kindertransport to the UK in 1938. In England, he attended Bunce Court, a progressive German-Jewish boarding school that had been relocated to Kent by Anna Essinger, its farsighted head teacher, in 1933. When he was 16, the children's charity that supported him ran out of money, so he went to work as a lab assistant at Birmingham Central Technical College and studied part-time. At 18, during World War II, he volunteered for the British Army to serve his new country and to try to help save his family. At officer training school, he was told to change his name and chose Leslie after the actor Leslie Howard and Brent from the phone book; many years later, he added back his original surname of Baruch. He arrived in Italy as the war ended and then joined the British Army of the Rhine. A trip to Berlin to trace his parents and Eva revealed only that they had been sent east. Years later, he learned that in 1942 they had been deported to Riga, Latvia in packed cattle trucks, taken into the woods, and shot. After being demobilized in 1947, Brent studied zoology at the University of Birmingham, where he was an outstanding student and president of the Students' Union. In 1953, while a PhD student at University College London, he did groundbreaking research on acquired immunological tolerance with his advisors and senior colleagues Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham. Their findings that the capacity to accept an unrelated tissue transplant could be induced in mice, first published in the journal Nature, brought Brent lifelong fame and led to an international explosion of research on transplantation. The team later published their extended findings in the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions in 1956. In 1967, Brent helped establish the British Transplantation Society and served as its first general secretary. Medawar was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize for the work (jointly with Australian immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet) and shared his prize money with Brent and Billingham. Brent was professor of zoology at the University of Southampton, then in 1969 became professor of immunology at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, where he remained for 20 years. He published more than 200 scholarly papers and A History of Transplantation Immunology (1997). He also wrote Sunday's Child?: A Memoir, published in 2009. He received many national and international honors in his lifetime and was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) posthumously in 2020.