Herman Lent, scientist and citizen--II.

Brazil and Science lost a unique figure on July 7, 2004, when Herman Lent died, at 93 years of age. Herman Lent was Emeritus Researcher of the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, recipient of the Order of Scientific Merit in the category of Grã-Cruz in 2002, Member ofAcademia Brasileira de Ciências (Brazilian Academy of Sciences) and Lecturer and Researcher level 1A of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq – National Research Council of Brazil). His memory and reasoning remained intact up to the last, and he never left off discussing problems related to science and mainly to ethics in human behavior with his colleagues at the laboratory, which he frequented assiduously. Even in his last years. Hunted politically, due to his political and ethical attitudes, he had his political and civil rights suspended by the military dictatorship that came into power in 1964, which led to his dismissal from the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz in 1970, one of the ten researchers who were forbidden to exercise any scientific or teaching activity there, besides being banned from frequenting Manguinhos library. At the beginning of his career, he dedicated himself to helminthology and later on to entomology, investigating the vectors of Chagas’ disease, a field in which he became a distinguished researcher and was acknowledged as one of the greatest triatomine specialists in the world, he published two hundred and forty scientific papers on this group of