It is with great sadness that just after reporting the death of Richard Batchelor I have to report the death of another old friend and colleague, Paul Terasaki, Professor of Surgery at UCLA. Paul died on January 25, 2016 at the age of 86. Paul Terasaki was one of the giants in the history of organ transplantation and made wide-ranging contributions to the field.
He was born in in Los Angeles in 1929 to poor Japanese immigrant parents and then at the age of 12 was placed with his family in what was called euphemistically a relocation camp, one of many which held Japanese Americans during the Second World War. After the war they moved to Chicago and when he graduated from High school he entered premedical school at the University of Illinois. However Chicago was too cold for the Terasakis and they moved back to Los Angeles where he was accepted as a transfer student at UCLA, and never left. He completed his BA, Masters and PhD in zoology there and then with the help of William Longmire, the Chief of Surgery, who recruited him into his department as a scientist; he was accepted by Peter Medawar, FRS and Nobel Laureate, as a post-doctoral fellow in London for a year. This shaped his subsequent career in transplantation research as Medawar was regarded as the father of transplantation immunology. He returned to William Longmire’s department of surgery at UCLA, very proud that he was a PhD and not an MD. He rapidly rose up through the ranks and soon was a Professor of Surgery, a rare appointment in those days for a scientist.
Paul was one of the true pioneers of HLA typing and he and John McClelland, his senior technician, invented the micro cytotoxicity technique which became the standard tissue typing technique throughout the world until the advent of molecular typing some 30 years later. He was a truly lateral thinker and was continually introducing new innovative approaches to the field. What is not realised is that he was responsible for the work in his laboratory that introduced static cold storage with a fluid known as Collins solution after the young Australian research fellow, Geoff Collins, who did the experimental work in Paul’s laboratories. Paul wanted an easily obtained longer preservation time of the kidney so that HLA typing of the donor could be done in time to select an appropriate recipient. This was a radical change to preservation techniques which at the time were based on machine preservation and very quickly static cold storage became the norm.
His activities in the latter part of his career were directed at the role of antibodies in chronic allograft rejection a concept to which he was firmly committed, and he more than anyone changed our thinking on the role of antibodies in graft rejection. Amongst his other contributions were the establishment of the UCLA tissue typing laboratory and the UCLA renal transplant registry, before there was federal registry.
Paul was a giant in the field and received many awards for his work, including the Medawar prize. In 1984 he was elected as President of The Transplantation Society (TTS). He founded the One Lambda Company which produced products for tissue typing and One Lambda became the world leader in the field. He also created the Terasaki Foundation which provided support for research in HLA. His philanthropy was enormous and included a $50 million bequest to UCLA to establish a Life Sciences building now named in his honour, and the Paul and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese studies in 2006.
I first met Paul in Longmire’s department in 1966 and became a disciple thereafter. He leaves his wife Hisako, who was always an enormous support to him and always graciously entertaining the innumerable research fellows and visitors to Paul’s laboratories, and 4 children, Mark, Keith, Taiji and Emiko. His quiet sense of humour and his knowledge will be sorely missed by all of us in the field.