Hugh O’Neill McDevitt

August 26, 1930 - April 28, 2022

Hugh McDevitt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Dr. Charles Joseph McDevitt, a urologic surgeon, and Katharine O’Neill McDevitt. He was the youngest of five children.

Hugh attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and continued to Harvard Medical School for graduate education. After an internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he spent 2 years in the US Army Medical Corps in Japan before returning to Boston to finish his clinical education at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He had at that point developed an interest in medical research and continued as a postdoctoral fellow, first at Harvard Medical School and subsequently at Mill Hill in London. He then returned to Harvard Medical School as an Instructor in Bacteriology and Immunology.

In 1966, Hugh McDevitt was recruited to Stanford University as an Assistant Professor of Medicine. He later became Professor of Medicine, Microbiology & Immunology and was known for being a community builder at the new Stanford University School of Medicine, which had recently moved down from San Francisco to a new hospital in Palo Alto. He spent the following 50 years at Stanford University, where over the years he held a number of different leadership positions in the School of Medicine. He went emeritus at age 78, but he was fortunate to keep mentally and scientifically engaged until the very end of his life.

Hugh was an avid reader and loved classical music, opera, plays, and going to museums. He was very interested in politics, the welfare of other people, and the world around him. When his children were younger, he enjoyed spending weekends and vacations sailing with them on Tomales Bay, going on trail rides, and attending horse shows.

Out in the world, Hugh McDevitt was better known as the scientist who unraveled the relationship between the immune response genes and the transplantation genes in the mouse, and later in humans, where they are called the HLA genes. These findings opened up a new field of scientific thinking that still inspires many of the modern developments in vaccinology, cancer therapy, and treatment of autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes.

Most of all, Hugh will be remembered by a long line of gifted immunologists from all over the world, as the beloved mentor that they would still drop by to visit when they came to the Bay Area.

Hugh McDevitt is survived by his wife of 38 years, Dr. Grete Sonderstrup McDevitt; his four children, Elizabeth, Katharine, Thomas, and Lina; his children’s spouses, Colette, Rochelle, and Brian; his grandchildren, Mila and Kai; and numerous nieces and nephews.

May his memory be a blessing.