Overview

Professor Leslie Baruch Brent (known in the scientific world as Leslie Brent) arrived in England late in 1938 in the first of the many Kindertransports. His German-Jewish family was among millions who were murdered by the Nazi regime. In 1943, at the tender age of eighteen, he volunteered for the armed forces, served in an infantry regiment, and was demobbed in 1947 with the rank of captain. Having studied zoology at the University of Birmingham he became an eminent immunologist in the field of tissue and organ transplantation. He was the junior member of a pioneering three-man team, led by Professor P.B. Medawar (they became known in the USA as 'the holy trinity'), which established and studied the phenomenon of 'immunological tolerance'. This vital discovery, which set up the 'holy grail' for clinical organ transplantation, is only now beginning to resonate clinically. It enabled them to transplant foreign tissues such as skin grafts without recourse to toxic drugs or to irradiation. The discovery led to the award of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to Medawar. Professor Brent's memoirs provide a fascinating and disarmingly frank account of his personal and professional life, and they include a vivid description of the state of British politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which he played an active and leading role at local level. His well-researched and thought-provoking, yet even-handed reflections on some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - among them the Holocaust, the war years, the creation of the state of Israel and its consequences, his thoughts about France and its conduct under the Occupation, and the American-British attack on Iraq - reflect his passionate interest in the world around him, and they illuminate some of the most troubling events of our time.

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