Prof. R. T. Leiper C.M.G., F.R.S

Abstract

THE title of emirsius professor of helminthology has been conjra oby the University of London upon Prof. R. T. Deiper, who is retiring from the William Julien Colrtauld chair of helminthology. When he went to the London School of Tropical Medicine (which later amalgamated with the London School of Hygiene) Leiper set himself to organise the courses of instruction in helminthology which have been so valuable to medical men taking postgraduate courses and to others who have been able to attend them. Leiper was also director of the Institute of Agricultural Parasitology at Winches Farm, St. Albans. To his inspiration and wise guidance we are largely indebted for the series of researches done at this Institute upon the nematodes which do so much harm to valuable crops and also upon the nematodes and other helminths which attack farm animals. Winches Farm, now well known wherever parasitology is studied, is also the home of the Imperial Bureau of Agricultural Parasitology, the services of which to research workers and to others can scarcely be under-estimated. Leiper also founded and edited the Journal of Helminthology, which was, until it became necessary, during the recent War, to discontinue it, one of the very few British journals devoted entirely to parasitology. Prof. Leiper's own researches take us back some forty years, when he began to publish the long series of papers in which his work is recorded. Outstanding among these papers is the record of his work on the life-histories of the human blood-flukes, Schistosoma hoematobium and S. mansoni. When Japanese workers worked out the life-history of Schistosoma japonicum, which causes human schistosomiasis in Japan and adjacent areas, Leiper set to work in Egypt and demonstrated that S. hcematobium and S. mansoni are different species, which employ as their intermediate hosts different species of snails. He thus laid the biological foundation of our present extensive know ledge of the biology and control of the forms of schistosomiasis caused by these two species of Schistosoma. Throughout his tenure of the Courtauld chair of helminthology, Prof. Leiper's advice and help were continually sought and generously given. He was a member of many committees and advisory bodies and exercised, as an adviser to these and to the Agricultural Research Council and other Government organisations, a widespread influence.