Richard Lathe is a molecular biologist who has held professorships at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Edinburgh, and the State University of Pushchino. He was assistant director at the biotech company Transgene in Strasbourg, a principal scientist at ABRO, Edinburgh, and Co-Director of the Biotechnology College ESBS based in Strasbourg. Lathe is also the founder of Pieta Research, a biotechnology consultancy in Edinburgh, current academic appointments are with the University of Edinburgh and the State University of Pushchino. He resigned from his post at Pushchino in 2022. Early work Lathe studied Molecular Biology at Edinburgh under Bill Hayes and Ken Murray, followed by doctoral studies at Brussels under Rene Thomas. He then moved to Cambridge (under Mike Ashburner), to Heidelberg (Ekke Bautz) before joining the newly founded Biotech company Transgene SA under Jean-Pierre Lecocq, Pierre Chambon, and Philippe Kourilsky. Vaccines Lathe is the primary inventor of the vaccine that eradicated rabies in France.; other members of the team included Marie-Paule Kieny. Extension of this work included the development of vaccines against virus-induced tumors. The European rabies vaccination campaigns proved tremendously successful and constituted a paradigm for wildlife vaccination programs. France was declared free of rabies in 2002, but success in North America has been less dramatic owing to the prevalence of several species capable of transmitting rabies Gene technology The most highly cited paper regards a tool for isolating coding sequences, published in 1985 in the Journal of Molecular Biology. This paper makes him among the 1000 citations clan of authors who have achieved a thousand citations for a single-author work Hippocampal function A review in the Journal of Endocrinology entitled 'Hormones and the Hippocampus' argues that external and internal biochemical sensing have been crucial for the evolution of the mammalian brain. Although the hippocampus is likely to play a role in internal sensing, other brain regions have been implicated, and a far wider role of the hippocampus in consciousness, episodic memory, and emotional feelings has been discussed Autism, Brain, and Environment In Autism, Brain, and Environment (2006, , ), Lathe proposes that autism is largely a disorder of the limbic brain, balancing evidence that environmental factors may trigger autism with a recognition of genetic vulnerability. In his book, he analyzes biomedical evidence pertaining to the genetics, endocrinology, immunology, toxicology, virology, and neuroscience essential for understanding the causes of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Lathe contends that the recent