Leo earned his PhD at Bowman Grey School of Medicine for work on vesicular stomatitis virus in Doug Lyles' laboratory before joining my group as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Like many other laboratories at the time, we set about immunizing animals with cultured T cell clones and screening for clone-specific or anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibodies that would hopefully identify the T cell antigen receptor. We never obtained the specificity we sought, but Leo did make several monoclonal antibodies reactive to determinants expressed by terminally differentiated cytotoxic T lymphocytes that were clearly not reactive to the desired T cell antigen receptor. I told him to drop that research and get back to screening, but he wisely persisted and turned it into a Nature paper! On the basis of that episode, Leo established a maxim for students and postdoctoral fellows: “Ignore your advisor...but your idea had better be good.” From the start, he was his own man, with the confidence and strength to go his own way.
Leo then went to Upjohn in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he pursued his interests in the 'late' differentiation antigens expressed by cytotoxic effector T cells, and that led him to explore the gut mucosa and the intraepithelial lymphocytes that express these determinants. That led in turn to his discoveries about the other type of T cell found at high frequency in the gut: those T cells that express the gd T cell antigen receptor. In 1992, after 5 years at Upjohn, Leo returned to academia, joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut Health Center. This provides an answer to a question frequently asked by students finishing their degree and by postdoctoral fellows at the end of their stint: “Is there life in academia after biotech?” If you are like Leo Lefrançois, then yes, it is possible to come back. Leo was a native of Bristol, Connecticut, and although he had worked all around the USA, his final workplace at the University of Connecticut meant his net travel from home was only 10.8 miles.
