César Lattes, a young physicist from São Paulo who had achieved international fame due to his co-discovery of a new kind of nuclear particle, the pion (pi-meson), Leite Lopes was instrumental in creating in January 1949, in Rio de Janeiro, the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (Brazilian Center for Research in Physics) (CBPF), a research center in theoretical physics (the first in Latin America), maintained by funds from Confederação Nacional de Indústrias (Brazilian Confederation of Industries), then presided by Euvaldo Lodi. In the same year Leite Lopes was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to spend another year of study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he attended lectures by Richard Feynman, Victor Weisskopf and Paul Dirac. In 1957 he again visited the US on a fellowship, by invitation of Richard Feynman, at the California Institute of Technology. In 1969, the new military regime in Brazil took away his political rights, together with several other professors, supposedly on the basis of his participation in a "communist conspiracy". He was dismissed summarily from the very Center he had created and exiled himself voluntarily in the USA (at the Carnegie Mellon University) but after evidence of USA collaboration with the 1964 military coup was manifest he went to Université Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg, France. From 1974 to 1978, Leite Lopes was appointed full professor with the Université Louis Pasteur, taking up the directorship of the Division of High Energy and the position of vice-director of the Centre de Recherches Nucléaires, a part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He returned to Brazil in 1986, as the director of the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. He was also an honorary president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. Among many international and national honors and prizes, Leite Lopes received the 1999 UNESCO Science Prize and received the Great Cross of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit. Works Leite Lopes is internationally recognized for his many contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in the following areas: Prediction of the existence of neutral vectorial bosons (Z0 boson), in 1958, by devising an equation which showed the analogy of the weak nuclear interactions with electromagnetism. Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam used later these results to develop the electroweak unification. They were awarded with the Nobel Prize of Physics in 1979. The vector dominance model in nuclear electroweak interactions Nuclear