Assignment:
Scientist Summary
Delphine M. V. Parrott (1928-2016) was one of the foremost woman scientists of her generation, being a pioneer of T cell Immunology and making seminal findings on lymphoid anatomy and lymphocyte recirculation. Delphine was born near London, graduating in Physiology at Bedford College and completing her Ph.D. at King's College London in 1952. She began her scientific career as an endocrinologist, working on reproductive physiology and then on olfactory sensation, based in London and Edinburgh, before moving to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London to study the thymus.
Here, she made use of the surgical skills she had acquired working on endocrine organs to study the effects of thymectomy on the immune system. This led to the seminal finding that removal of the thymus from neonatal mice caused a wasting disease, lymphopenia, and immunosuppression. This was a highly competitive field at the time and, although Delphine's study was eventually published in Nature in 1962, delays in the process meant that this was some time after Jacques Miller's paper in the Lancet describing the immunological role of the thymus.
As a result, Delphine never received the full recognition she deserved for the discovery, something she would say in later life that reflected the prejudice against women scientists at the time.
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