Link to AST Website

Link to ASTS Website

Obituary by Terry Strom, MD.

Charles B. Carpenter, Bernie to all that knew him, was raised in greater Boston and educated at elite universities and medical centers in the northeast. As a young academic he became a member of John Merrill’s Cardiorenal Division at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, thereby joining the team that performed the world’s first organ transplants. These were halcyon days as patients with end stage renal disease came from all over the world for care, as did physicians seeking training in nephrology. Bernie’s scientific skills were soon recognized and he opened a laboratory devoted to transplant nephrology long before transplant nephrology was recognized as a viable subspecialty. Given the excitement of the field and Bernie’s skill as a scientist, his laboratory filled with ambitious, talented physician-scientists, and Bernie immediately showed phenomenal talent for mentorship. His students, primarily talented clinicians with meager basic science training, were treated with kindness, dignity and respect. He shared his apparently boundless knowledge base in immunology and transplantation with his students and offered a door that was always open, mental and material support, sage advice and tremendous, unending pride in their accomplishments.

Bernie and his students became the backbone of a movement to create the subspecialty of transplant nephrology by opening transplant immunology labs throughout the world. The continuing devotion of these students for Bernie created an extended family, and we the students commonly seek each other out for advice, friendship and collaboration. Bernie, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard, was a very accomplished and brilliant scientist but his true legacy lies in his devotion to a kinder, gentler, and successful form of mentorship. His long and loving marriage with Sandra produced two loving sons and their families. Family and friends supported him during his valiant nine-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. The outpouring of genuine affection for Bernie following his recent death clearly states that he shall be missed.