The most dramatic medical advance in the second half of the 20th century was, arguably, in the field of tissue and organ transplantation – now commonplace for a great many organs, but unthinkable in the 1950s. Richard Batchelor, who has died aged 84, played a very significant part in this revolutionary development.
As director of the Blond McIndoe Research Centre in East Grinstead, West Sussex, founded as a tribute to the great plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe who treated and rehabilitated badly burnt airmen during the second world war, Batchelor led a team of research scientists who attempted to elucidate many of the basic obstacles that stood in the way of successful transplantation of foreign tissues and organs.
A stream of publications from the late 1960s onward was devoted to this objective. Once a Korean surgeon, S Lee, had foreshadowed a technique for transplanting kidneys in laboratory rats, Batchelor and his colleague ME French perfected the technique and showed that the lifespan of kidneys transplanted between genetically different rats could be substantially prolonged, in many cases indefinitely, by the transfer of antisera containing high levels of antibodies directed against the tissue markers – the histocompatibility antigens – of the donor kidney.
This paradoxical result – the antibodies might have been expected to cause the accelerated destruction of the kidneys – was evidently brought about by antibodies induced after multiple immunisations of the antibody donors – the “enhancing” antibodies. The “enhancement” of rat kidneys became a big preoccupation of transplantation immunologists in the 1960s and 70s, and the solution to the puzzle, to which Batchelor and his colleagues contributed, was the finding that the sera had helped to generate “immunoregulatory” T lymphocytes, which can subdue the response of the conventional T lymphocytes that are normally responsible for the rejection of foreign grafts. However, so far as organ transplantation is concerned, “enhancement” proved to be largely confined to the rat.
Another area of research to which Batchelor made seminal contributions was the study of the histocompatibility antigens – a highly complex system of cell surface molecules triggering graft rejection. Each individual is virtually unique for his or her histocompatibility antigens, with the exception of identical twins. These molecules are deeply involved in the way that different kinds of cells interact and collaborate with each other to produce immune responses; in the mouse they are known as the H-2 system, in humans as HLA.
We owe their discovery to pioneers including Peter Gorer (of Guy’s hospital) and George Snell (Bar Harbor, Maine) in the mouse, and subsequently Jean Dausset (Paris), J van Rood (Leiden) and Rose Payne (Stanford University) in human populations. Subsequently many others became involved. Batchelor became a regular participant in the frequent histocompatibility workshops in which the complexity of the HLA system was studied with on-the-spot comparative experiments, leading to the correct identification and classification of the antigens and to an internationally accepted nomenclature. Tissue typing of organ donors’ recipients thus became the norm, especially once Paul Terasaki had devised a technique using minuscule amounts of antibody and cells. Even with the advent of immunosuppressive drugs, it is still of the utmost importance in bone marrow transplantation.
Batchelor and his colleagues went on to study the association of specific HLA types with certain autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, for which they can be important diagnostic markers. He spent some weeks, together with Peter Morris (later Sir Peter), in the remote highlands of New Guinea determining the HLA distribution of the native population. This arduous fieldwork allowed them to identify the origin of a population that had been isolated since time immemorial.
Although born of English parents, Esme (nee Cornwall) and Basil Batchelor, in Woking, Surrey, Batchelor spent his childhood in Madras, India. (His grandfather, Lt Col Jesse Cornwall, had been deputy director of the Indian Medical Service and his father had moved to India to become a director of Binny’s, a shipping and banking company, and a decorated captain during the first world war.) He was later educated at Marlborough college and qualified as a doctor in Cambridge. His first research experience was in the laboratory of Gorer who, being a heavy smoker, died prematurely of lung cancer, leaving the young Batchelor in charge of his laboratory.
This proved to be a formative experience and Batchelor never looked back. He became a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Pathologists and Medicine and a valued member of the transplantation community. After his long stint as director of the Blond McIndoe Research Centre, he went on to become professor of tissue immunology and, later, head of the immunology department at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith hospital. He became deputy chairman of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and helped the institute to make its transition from London to Oxford. At one time or another he was the European editor of the journal Transplantation, chairman of the Medical Research Council’s grants committee, and president of several professional societies, including the international Transplantation Society.
Batchelor became a regular member of a small elite of mainly British and American immunologists and transplant surgeons regularly invited to the annual round table discussions in a ski resort in Austria organised by the Institute of Surgical Science in Munich. A keen sportsman all his life (cycling, hockey and real tennis), he skied very competently and was the winner of “the English professors’ downhill race” on the Axamer Lizum, his faster but more reckless competitors, Roy Calne (later Sir Roy) and myself, having come to grief towards the end of the race.
He had family connection with the Skinners’ Company and served as its master, as well as chairman of the board of governors of its school. His wife, Moira, a physician and a passionate gardener, suffered from a debilitating condition for the last 15 years of her life and Batchelor became her devoted principal carer; she predeceased him by six months.
He is survived by four children, Simon, Annabelle, Lucinda and Andrew, and nine grandchildren.
• John Richard Batchelor, immunologist, born 4 October 1931; died 21 December 2015
