Peter Lachmann

Sir Peter Julius Lachmann, FRS, FMedSci (born 23 December 1931)[1] is a British immunologist, specialising in the study of the complement system. He is emeritus Sheila Joan Smith Professor of Immunology at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and of Imperial College. He was knighted for service to medical science in 2002.[2][3]

Sir Peter Lachmann
Born (1931-12-23) 23 December 1931
AwardsFellow of the Royal Society
Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge
ThesisThe immunological properties of cell nuclei, with special reference to the serological aspects and patho-genesis of systemic Lupus Erythematosus (1962)
Doctoral advisorRobin Coombs and Henry Kunkel
Doctoral studentsMark Walport

Biography

Born into a secular Jewish family in Berlin on 23 December 1931,[4] he moved to London in 1938. He went to school at Christ's College, Finchley,[1] then trained in medicine at Cambridge and University College Hospital, graduating in 1956, and obtained a PhD (1962) and ScD (1974) at Cambridge in immunology.

Scientific work

Lachmann's primary research interest now is the downregulation of the complement alternative pathway as a treatment for age related macular degeneration. he has previously worked on many aspects of complement biology; on microbial subversion of the innate immune response; on the immunology of measles, on systemic lupus erythematosus and on insect sting allergies.

Publications


Honours

He has held a chair at Cambridge University and served as President of the Royal College of Pathologists, Vice President and Biological Secretary of the Royal Society, and Founder President of the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences. His posts in immunology have included Head and Honorary Head of the Medical Research Council Group on Mechanisms in Tumour Immunity and Honorary Director of the MRC Mechanisms in Tumour Immunity Unit. He was also at one point Associate Editor of the journal Clinical and Experimental Immunology. From 1976 to 1999, he was Honorary Clinical Immunologist with the Cambridge Health Authority. Lachmann has also won a Gold Medal from the European Complement Network in 1997, the Medicine and Europe Senior Prize of the Académie des Sciences de la Santé in 2003.[5]

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (1997) and Honorary Foreign Member Czech Academy of Medicine (2012).[6] He is an honorary member of the British Society for Immunology.[7]

Public affairs


Lachmann's helped produce the Royal Society's first report on GM crops in 1998. The report, Genetically Modified Plants for Food Use, outlined the benefits of GM plants in agriculture, medicine, food quality and safety, nutrition and health, especially in alleviating food shortage in third-world countries. This caused him to be regarded as a controversial figure by the anti-GM food lobby. In 1999, he tried to persuade the editor of The Lancet not to publish Árpád Pusztai's research on the adverse effects of GM potatoes on rats on the grounds that it was not sound science. The Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, said he received a "very aggressive" phone call calling him "immoral" and threatening that if he published the paper it would "have implications for his personal position" as editor.[8] Lachmann said that he made the call but denied that he threatened Horton and said the call was to "discuss his error of judgment" in publishing the Pusztai letter and to discuss the "moral difficulties about publishing bad science".[8] Lachmann's own account of GMOs and the Pusztai affair can be found in Panic Nation (2005).[9]

Lachmann remains a proponent of the defence of reason and scepticism in scientific academia also on other topics that extend from vaccine scares to stem cell technology and to alternative medicine. He is also a bee keeper and this interest has led to an interest in the evolution of group behaviour in both bees and humans and the role of religious prescription as the building blocks of cultural evolution.[10][11]

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References
  1. LACHMANN, Sir Peter (Julius), Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014
  2. "Professor Sir Peter Lachman". The Academy of Medical Sciences. Retrieved 19 March 2012.
  3. Anon (2003). "Peter Lachmann". The Lancet. 362 (9380): 338. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(03)13998-0.
  4. William D. Rubinstein, Michael Jolles, Hilary L. Rubinstein, The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History, Palgrave Macmillan (2011), p. 542
  5. Simon Edwards (2005). "Professor Sir Peter Lachmann (DSc) - Distinguished Immunologist". University of Leicester. Archived from the original on 23 December 2012. Retrieved 19 March 2012.
  6. "Gruppe 7: Medisinske fag" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 7 October 2010.
  7. "Honorary members". British Society for Immunology. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  8. Laurie Flynn and Michael Sean Gillard for The Guardian, 31 October 1999 Pro-GM scientist "threatened editor"
  9. "Panic Nation". John Blake Publishing. Retrieved 19 March 2012.
  10. Lachmann, Peter (2010). "Genetic and cultural evolution: from fossils to proteins; and from behaviour to ethics" (PDF). Eur Rev. 18 (3): 297–309. doi:10.1017/s1062798710000050.
  11. Lachmann, Peter (2010). "Religion - An evolutionary adaptation". FASEB J. 24 (5): 1301–1307. doi:10.1096/fj.10-0502ufm.

Sources
Educational offices
Preceded by
not established		 President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, United Kingdom
1998 – 2002		 Succeeded by
Sir Keith Peters
Preceded by
Sir Dillwyn Williams		 President of the Royal College of Pathologists
1993 – 1996		 Succeeded by
Alastair Bellingham
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