Background
Billingham was born in Warminster, Wiltshire, the son of a dairy farmer.
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Rupert Everett Billingham Federal Reserve System
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Education
He completed his Bachelor of Science in zoology at Oriel College, Oxford. His studies were interrupted by World World War II, he completed war time service in the Royal Navy serving on an anti-submarine escort.
Career
"He made numerous fundamental contributions to our modern knowledge of the mechanisms of graft rejection and how to prevent it, and he analysed some of the mechanisms responsible for the survival of the mammalian foetus in an immunologically hostile environment". He returned to Oxford in 1946 and became Peter Medawar"s research student. During his Doctor of Philosophy 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. In 1947 Medawar accepted the chair of zoology at the University of Birmingham.
He continued to work on transplantation with Medawar, and in 1951 they both accepted positions at the University College London. Together they demonstrated immune tolerance as proposed by Frank Macfarlane Burnet.
They also worked on graft-versus-host disease.
Billingham emigrated to the United States in 1957, and took a position at the Wistar Institute. In 1965 he became chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1971.
He died in Boston aged 81, following a long illness with Parkinson"s disease.
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society; American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Connections
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Born
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Died
November 16, 2002 (aged 81)