Delphine Parrott

Delphine Mary Vera Parrott FRSE (2 May 1928 – 17 January 2016) was a British endocrinologist, immunologist, and academic. She did research at the National Institute for Medical Research in the 1950s and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the 1960s.

She was an honorary member of the British Society for Immunology.

Early life She was born in Dulwich in May 1928. She studied physiology at Bedford College, graduating in 1949, and then gained a doctorate at King's College London School of Medicine in 1952. Alan Parkes then recruited her to assist him researching reproductive biology at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. He valued her skill in vivisecting small animals and she started by transplanting ovaries into mice that had been sterilised by radiation, as a way of restoring their fertility.

In this case, she removed the olfactory bulb of female mice to show that this prevented them from aborting when exposed to a strange male.

At the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, she studied the immunological effect of the thymus, experimenting on newly born mice by observing the effects of removal of the thymus upon their immune system such as the production of lymphocytes. These results were widely debated as the findings were unexpected.

In 1967, she moved to the University of Glasgow, to work in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology as a senior lecturer. In 1973, she became a professor, the first woman to hold a chair in Glasgow University's 500-year history. In 1974, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She retired in 1990.

Later life Parrott died on 17 January 2016, aged 87.