Johannes Joseph ‘Jon’ van Rood was a pioneering immunogeneticist who made significant advances to our understanding of the human leucocyte antigen (HLA) system and its significance for transplantation. He was born in the Hague in the Netherlands. His father, Albert Hendrik van Rood, was a civil engineer and celebrated architect; his mother, Anna Marina Adriana van Rood née Röell, was a musician. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother went on to marry Bob Bruyn, a portrait painter.
Van Rood was imprisoned twice as a teenager during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, but managed to escape while on the way to being transported to a labour camp in Germany. He hid in a cellar, where he studied, and entered Leiden University in 1944. He gained his MD in 1952, having spent a year in New York in the department of medicine at the Presbyterian Hospital.
He then became a junior doctor in the department of medicine at the University Hospital, Leiden. He had to look after the small blood bank as well as 16 beds, and was given the task of recruiting more donors and advancing blood bank technology. He became interested in the role of antigens (or the molecules capable of provoking an immune response) in transplantation. In 1958, he discovered two HLA genes, a discovery that led to better matching and a huge increase in the success rates for transplants of all kinds.
In 1957, he became head of the immunohaematology department and the blood bank of Leiden University Hospital. In 1969, he was appointed as a professor of internal medicine and, from 1976, he was director of the haematology department at Leiden University Hospital. He was among the founders of the Leiden Institute for Immunology.
In 1967, van Rood founded Eurotransplant, a non-profit organisation which encourages and enables international organ exchange. Initially this matched kidneys and later livers, hearts and pancreases. Van Rood and his team also organised Europe’s first bone marrow transplant in 1968 and also supported the establishment of tissue-typing laboratories around the world. In 1985, he founded the European Foundation of Immunogenetics.
He won many national and international honours and awards. In 1977, he was awarded the Robert Koch prize. A year later, he gained the Wolf prize in medicine with George D Snell and Jean Dausset, in recognition of his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HLA system. Also in 1978, he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1985 became a Knight of the Dutch Lion. In 1990, he was awarded the Dr A H Heineken prize for medicine. In 2010, the Jon van Rood prize was established by the European Blood and Marrow Transplant Group.
Outside medicine, he enjoyed sailing. In 1957, he married Sacha, Baroness van Tuyll van Serooskerken. They had a son, Peter, and two daughters, Yanda and Anne (Tinka).
RCP editor
[The Times 14 October 2017 www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jon-van-rood-obituary-shr0gzj8r – accessed 17 January 2020; The Lancet 2017 390 2138 www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)32739-3.pdf – accessed 17 January 2020; Cellular Therapy and Transplantation Obituary. In memory of Professor Jon van Rood http://cttjournal.com/en/archive/tom-6-nomer2/nekrolog/nekrolog-pamyati-professora-yona-van-rooda/ – accessed 17 January 2020; Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen Johannes J Van Rood (1926), The Netherlands www.knaw.nl/nl/prijzen/laureaten/dr-a-h-heinekenprijs-voor-de-geneeskunde/johannes-van-rood – accessed 17 January 2020]