Book Review

Sunday's Child?: A Memoir

N Engl J Med 2009; 361:317-318July 16, 2009

Article

Sunday's Child?: A Memoir
By Leslie Baruch Brent. 308 pp., illustrated. New Romney, England, Bank House Books, 2009. $32. ISBN: 978-1-90440-844-4

This captivating memoir tells the story of an extraordinary life lived against the backdrop of one of the most cataclysmic events of modern times. Leslie Brent, a world-renowned immunologist and transplantation biologist as well as a codiscoverer (with Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham) of acquired immunologic tolerance, was born Lothar Baruch to German-Jewish parents. He had an idyllic childhood until the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Brent vividly recalls frightening childhood experiences, among them an incident of SA thugs (the Sturmabteilung, or Nazi storm troopers) marching past his house while singing the Horst Wessel song with its anti-Jewish lyrics. He also recalls repeated acts of anti-Semitism by teachers who were Nazi sympathizers. In 1938, when Brent was 13 years old, he was sent to England in the first of the Kindertransports — a program sponsored by the British government to bring Jewish children from Germany to England — while his family remained behind. He enrolled in the Bunce Court School, a liberal institution that was established in England in 1933 for the education of Jewish children. Brent's portraits of the many teachers and fellow students he befriended there are moving.

Passport Photograph of Leslie Baruch Brent, 1938.

Brent served as a captain in the British army's infantry. Because his status as a German national would have made him liable to execution in the event of capture, he was advised to change his name. Brent poignantly describes finding intact the last known apartment of his parents in postwar Berlin, with new occupants who knew nothing of his family. Town hall records identified his parents as “sent east,” and he assumed that they had died, probably at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Years later, he learned that three days after they were exported from Berlin, his parents had arrived in Riga, Latvia, and were immediately executed. After being discharged from the army, Brent became a naturalized British citizen and enrolled in the University of Birmingham, where he met Medawar and Billingham, Medawar's research fellow. Brent later joined them, as Medawar's postgraduate student, at University College London.

Brent gives a lucid account of the discovery of immunologic tolerance. He offers fascinating descriptions of experiments in Medawar's laboratory that were brilliantly conceived and executed. In these experiments, the researchers produced immunologic tolerance of allogeneic skin grafts in inbred strains of mice by injecting cells from the donor strain of mice into fetal (and later neonatal) recipient-strain mice that later, as adults, would receive donor-strain skin grafts that were not rejected.

For this discovery, Medawar shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who elaborated a theory of immunologic tolerance and first used the term “tolerance” in the immunologic sense. Brent's memoir includes a copy of a letter from Medawar to Brent's first wife, in which he states that “it was his [Leslie's] Ph.D. thesis, not mine that won the Prize . . . and I do so wish that he could have shared the titular award.” A generous check, part of the monetary award for the prize, was included in Medawar's letter. Brent was a professor of immunology at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School for 21 years, and his leadership made possible the creation of clinical immunology units and a major AIDS center. As president of the Transplantation Society from 1976 to 1978, he traveled widely, absorbing not only scientific experiences but also knowledge of local culture and politics — knowledge that is exemplified by his poignant description of a trip to South Africa during apartheid with Samuel Kountz, the black American surgeon who was a pioneer in the field of transplantation.

Brent also examines aspects of his nonprofessional life. He augments personal thoughts with well-researched, concise essays on diverse, relevant topics, including politics, marriage, divorce, children, the French people and their culture, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war. Brent reflects deeply on Judaism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the question of Jewish identity. He is not optimistic that a reasonable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians can be achieved. As a secular Jew who escaped the Holocaust, he abhors the aggressive, excessive use of military force in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He affirms his Jewishness, he is proud of Jewish history and traditions, and he has retaken his original family name — Baruch — as his middle name.

Brent's father called him ein Sonntagskind — a Sunday's child, meaning one of good fortune. It is an apt sobriquet for a man who has based his life on the moral principles of his loving, martyred parents. This memoir from a man whose scientific accomplishments are just one part of his extraordinary life story is powerful, engrossing, and timely. It would translate well to film.

Anthony P. Monaco, M.D.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115
amonaco@bidmc.harvard.edu