Matteo Adinolfi obituary | From the Guardian – The Guardian

My husband, Matteo Adinolfi, who has died aged 91 from Covid-19, was an internationally esteemed immunologist focusing on prenatal diagnosis of gene disorders, and a talented amateur artist.

Matteo was born in Eritrea. His parents, Attilio Adinolfi and his wife, Maria (nee Sellitti) had moved there from Italy, to escape fascism. In 1943, on a visit back to Naples, the family was trapped by the advancing war and unable to return to Africa.

Attilio joined the navy; Matteo and his mother and two sisters survived the bombardments by fleeing from one hill to another, foraging for food and finding shelter where they could. At the end of the war, Matteo was emaciated and extremely ill with gastroenteritis.

After he recovered, his experience motivated him to study medicine in Naples in 1954. He then worked at the University of Naples until 1962. Once, while sharing a pizza with an American geneticist visiting Naples, he heard about a new electrophoretic starch gel the visitor had invented for identification of plasma proteins he wrote the formula on a paper napkin. Matteos curiosity led him to prepare the gel and test the blood of a lamprey eel from the laboratory aquarium. To his surprise, the lamprey haemoglobin closely resembled a single strand of four-chain human haemoglobin. The paper, published in Nature (1955), received international attention and got him known as the famous lamprey Adinolfi.

In 1962 he moved to London and joined the experimental haemotology research unit at the Wright Fleming Institute, at the same time practising at St Marys hospital. He was awarded his PhD in immunology at the University of London in 1966 and became a senior lecturer at the paediatric research unit at Guys hospital and medical school. Over the next 30 years, he worked as a consultant, teacher and researcher in London at Guys and at University College hospital and in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham Area Health Authority. He was appointed professor of developmental immunology at the University of London in 1983. In 1994 he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. The same year he went to the Galton Institute; he retired in 2004, aged 76.

Besides the lamprey haemoglobin work in Naples, in recent years at Guys hospital, Matteo and international colleagues developed laser microscopy in prenatal diagnoses of chromosome disorders and single-cell gene defects.

Matteo published hundreds of scientific papers, contributed chapters to many books and organised courses in many countries.

AMaking art was another of his passions. A prolific artist, he was proficient with collage, sculpture, drawing and printmaking. He and others founded the popular 407 Art Club at Guys hospital. He and I met at an etching class at the City Literary Institute in 1978, lived together from then, and married in 1985.

Matteo is survived by me and by his children, Carlo, Nora and Marina, from his first marriage, to Annetta De Giorgio, which ended in divorce. His second wife, Camille (nee Guthrie), died in 1975.

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Matteo Adinolfi obituary | From the Guardian - The Guardian