Rupert E. Billingham

Rupert Everett Billingham (October 15 1921 – November 16 2002) was an English biologist considered by many to have founded the fields of reproductive immunology and organ transplantation. [Hitt, E. 2002. Rupert E. Billingham dies. "The Scientist" 3(1):20021206-02]

Billingham was born in Warminster, Wiltshire. He completed his BSc in zoology at Oxford University. His studies were interrupted by the War, he completed war time service in the Royal Navy. He returned to Oxford in 1946 and commenced study under Peter Medawar, during his PhD he worked on skin grafts in guinea pigs, demonstrating that when black skin was grafted onto white skin, the white skin became black. They proposed that the change was due to the dissemination of a self replicating agent from normal melanocytes into non-melanin-producing cells; but this hypothesis was wrong and they later showed that pigment spread was due to cell migration. [Brent, L.B. 2005. [http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/bio_mems/Billingham%20press.pdf#search=%22Rupert%20%20Billingham%22 Rupert Everett Billingham] . "Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society"]

In 1947 Medawar accepted the chair of zoology at the University of Birmingham. He continued to work on transplantation with Medwar, and in 1951 they both accepted positions at the University College London. Together they demonstrated immune tolerance as proposed by Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Burnet and Medawar received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1960. They also worked on graft-versus-host disease.

Billingham emigrated to the United States in 1959, and took a position at the Wistar Institute and in 1970 moved to the University of Texas. He died following a long illness with Parkinson's disease.

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