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It is with sad news that the Division of Medicine hear of the passing of Dr Glenys Tennent
Auto-obituary Dr Glenys Ann Tennent
Dr Glenys Ann Tennent, former Associate Professor of University College London (UK) until 30 April 2020, died of lymphoma aged 68 years old on 13 July 2024 in New Zealand, having enjoyed a 40 year career in London (1979-1999 Hammersmith Campus, Imperial College London, and 1999-2020 Royal Free Campus, University College London) as a research scientist (amyloidosis/drug discovery) and academic. Loved sister of Robin, sister-in-law to Karen and aunt to nephews Matthew, Hamish and Connor (NZ); loved and longstanding friend of Beth, Sarah, Clare and Lorna (UK), and beloved “mum” to her cherished cats Raffi, Ziggi, Coco and Gigi.
Words from Professor Sir Mark Pepys MA MD FRCP FRCPath FRS FMedSci
Emeritus Professor of Medicine, UCL
Glenys Tennent immigrated to England in 1979, having qualified as a biomedical laboratory technician in Auckland, New Zealand. She was appointed to a Junior Technician post in the Immunological Medicine Unit, which I had founded in 1977. I had been appointed Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Honorary Consultant Physician and invited to establish my own Unit within the Department of Medicine at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital, London. She remained in my laboratory, literally at its heart and core, until her retirement over 40 years later.
Although appointed on a three-year grant from the then Leukaemia Research Fund, to work on a specific project devoted to detection of cell surface markers on peripheral blood lymphocytes in whole blood (Pepys, E.O., Tennent, G.A. and Pepys, M.B. (1981) Enumeration of T and B lymphocytes in whole peripheral blood: absence of a null cell population. Clin. Exp. Immunol., 46: 229‑234), it very soon became apparent that she was a superbly trained technician with a very broad range of expert skills. She was therefore rapidly involved in most of the other active projects in the Unit, making critical, invaluable and often seminal contributions to them. From the outset, her experimental work was punctiliously accurate and entirely reliable, and she soon extended her range to administrative tasks, becoming the de facto laboratory manager, utterly reliable and always efficient, so that all the Unit’s work and all its personnel became dependent on her to a greater or lesser extent. As a result she was swiftly promoted through the technical grades, eventually becoming Chief Technician.
Within 10 years of arriving, a whole new aspect of Glenys’s character and personality emerged, when she decided to become a research scientist. It was a pleasure to supervise her PhD research project and even more so to observe her dramatic increase in appropriate skills, self-confidence and original, knowledge based thinking. She presented complex scientific work clearly and authoritatively and became a world leading expert on the molecules and processes that she studied. One example: her invitation to write the definitive chapter on techniques for isolation and characterisation of amyloid fibrils for Methods in Enzymology. Her 1995 PNAS paper (Tennent GA, Lovat LB, Pepys MB. Serum amyloid P component prevents proteolysis of the amyloid fibrils of Alzheimer's disease and systemic amyloidosis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1995;92(10):4299-303) based on part of her PhD work, is a landmark, opening the way to new fundamental understanding, IP and successful drug development that has received many millions of pounds of investment which continue to this day. At the same time as her major projects she also continued to initiate and make invaluable contributions to many others, as documented in her impressive list of publications (https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/6911-glenys-tennent/). Furthermore Glenys continued her role of unofficial, but extremely efficient, laboratory manager or major domo, for which I, as head of the laboratory, was always immensely grateful and appreciative.
On a personal note, Glenys was, on one hand, a very self-contained and self-sufficient personality and, on the other, an enthusiastic party animal, always ready for a drink and celebration of events and achievements. At the centre of all this, she was equally strongly the most loyal, faithful and team spirited colleague imaginable. She was always prepared to help out if a major laboratory project urgently needed it, even at the cost of delaying or temporarily setting aside her own main projects or experiments. A laboratory director’s dream!
In 1997 the RPMS was merged into Imperial College but by then our Unit had long been the de facto national referral centre for amyloidosis. The scintigraphic method I had invented for diagnosing and quantifying systemic amyloidosis attracted increasing patient numbers and greatly increased clinical activity that required more space than was available at Hammersmith. In 1998, UCL invited me to become Head of Medicine at the Royal Free Campus, providing two new floors to be built on top of the existing Medical School building to accommodate my whole team and other parts of the pre-existing Department, and also several newly created clinical professorial, honorary consultant posts and other supporting resources. We then had to design the 3,000 m2, £9 million building, at which point Glenys displayed yet another amazing talent. Based on our laboratory, clinical and research requirements, she almost single-handedly designed the necessary office, administrative, laboratory and clinical space, and construction proceeded accordingly. Furthermore, during the course of our next 20 years at the Royal Free Campus, she repeated this type of exercise twice more: when we raised funds to substantially expand the accommodation of the Centre for Amyloidosis and Acute Phase Proteins that I had founded on arrival in 1999 and when I founded the Wolfson Drug Discovery Unit with funding from the Wolfson Foundation in 2009.
In a surprising but nonetheless characteristic fashion, Glenys composed her own auto-obituary, recording in her will what she wanted to be published at her death. It is therefore redundant to say anything other than professional comments about her. She was, without doubt, the most wonderfully faithful, loyal, industrious, precise and helpful colleague imaginable. She made a substantial and invaluable contribution to all achievements, discoveries, awards and accolades made and/or received by the RPMS Immunological Medicine Unit from 1979 and, from 1999-2020, by the UCL Royal Free Campus Centre for Amyloidosis and Acute Phase Proteins. She is most sadly missed.