the foundation's little cash on the latter. Amobi isn't bitter because, in his opinion, Lissner is the main reason people still talk about male contraception. But she still has regrets. "It's shocking that they can't get backing for the first new idea about HIV transmission prevention in ages."

Having started the Parsemus Foundation in 2005 with a little of her own money, Lissner has a personal relationship with how it's spent. In contrast to Blithe, she dislikes hormonal approaches because of their side-effects, and she also dislikes risk. Parsemus has therefore adopted an approach similar to one already tested in men, in India. But it's not a pill – it's a 'hydrogel' injected into the vas deferens, the tube linking the epididymis to the penis.

Called Vasalgel, it lets throughnote-books in his neat handwriting), classifying them with enthusiasm before making his deductions, which he explained with lucidity.   He was a very sick man in his final years and was at work on a book on carcinoma and the thyroid when he died, in the Charing Cross Hospital, of coronary thrombosis, on 22 February 1958 at the age of fifty years.

Selected publications

The Thyroid, a physiological, pathological, clinical, and surgical study. Edinburgh, Livingstone 1954. The 606-page text book was reviewed in

Personal life
Levitt was one of four children born to Benzion (Ben) and Jenny Levitt, Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who ran commercial hotels in Franschhoek and Cape Town. Levitt's many obituaries (including in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the Medical Proceedings - Mediese Bydraes, a South