Ricard Batchelor died just before Christmas (December 21, 2015) after a short illness. This was unexpected and is a very sad loss to the worldwide transplant community. Richard was not only a colleague of mine for many years but a very old friend, and hence I feel doubly sad at our loss of a pioneer in transplant immunology and a good and supportive friend. Richard was born in 1931 and had much of his early education in India before returning to the UK where his secondary education was at Marlborough College and thence to Cambridge University and Guys Hospital to study medicine. On graduation from Medical School in 1956, after initial training posts in medicine and surgery at Guy’s, he did his National Service in the RAMC as a clinical pathologist. He was then appointed as a MRC research student in the laboratory of Dr Peter Gorer FRS, a pioneer in tumour immunology, at Guys Hospital. These studies led Richard, now a committed scientist, into transplant immunology. He was a senior lecturer in Pathology at Guys Hospital until 1967, when he was appointed as Director of the Blond McIndoe Research Institute at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead and also as a Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He built this unit into a powerhouse of transplant immunology between 1967 and 1979, when he became Professor of Tissue Immunology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School. In 1982 he became Professor of Immunology and Chairman of the department to succeed John Humphrey. He held that post until his retirement in 1994, when he became Emeritus Professor in the same department but continued to maintain an active interest in everything to do with transplantation and auto-immunity. Much of his early work was related to the induction of tolerance and the mechanism of rejection in experimental transplant models but, in addition, he was a pioneer in the development of tissue typing in organ transplantation and was the first to demonstrate an influence of HLA matching on the outcome of corneal grafts. He had a major interest in the association of HLA with autoimmune disease and also took part in a number of anthropological studies of HLA in South East Asia with myself (e.g. New Guinea and Fiji).
He was a former President of the International Transplant Society, the British Transplant Society and the Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and European Editor of Transplantation from 1963 – 1998. Following retirement he became a member of the Council of the Arthritis Foundation, and later a Trustee of the Kennedy Institute in London. Richard had a delightful personality and was a kind and gentle man. His contributions to both transplantation and auto-immune disease were enormous, and his wise words will be missed in both fields.