Leslie Latty Bennett was born in Portland, Oregon on November 15, 1908. He received an A.B. degree in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1933 and a Ph.D. in Anatomy, also from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in 1937. In 1940 he received his M.D. from the University of California and served his internship and residency at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. In the spring of 1942 he began a long teaching association with the University of California School of Medicine, first as a lecturer and instructor in physiology and medicine (1942-1943), then as an assistant professor of physiology and medicine (1943-1945), and as an assistant professor of physiology and experimental biology (1945-1948). Dr. Bennett took a sabbatical leave from 1948 to 1949, which he spent as a Commonwealth Fund senior medical fellow; during that year he held a research fellowship at Harvard University and a medical assistantship at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In 1949 he returned to the University of California School of Medicine as an associate professor of physiology and was named professor of physiology the following year; he held this position from 1950 until his retirement in 1976. Other titles held by Dr. Bennett during this period include Morris Hertzstein Professor of Biology (1955-1973), Chairman of the Department of Physiology (1953-1966), Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs (1965-1971 and 1973-1977) and Research Enodcrinologist at the Hormone Research Laboratory (1971-1976).

The bibliography of Dr. Bennett's publications extends to some 137 items, not only research articles and chapters but also addresses, reviews and reflective pieces. Notable among his published work were research collaborations in the 1940s and 1950s with I. L. Chaikoff, Choh Hao Li and Herbert M. Evans, and in the 1960s with Gerold M. Grodsky. Dr. Bennett was a member of many professional groups, most notably the American Physiological Society, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, the Endocrine Society Council and the California Academy of Medicine. He served in the Endocrinology Study Section of the National Institutes of health from 1952 to 1955, and on the Research Committee of the San Francisco Heart Association from 1957 to 1964. He was awarded the Silver Medallion of the California Heart Associaton in 1973, the University of California San Francisco Medal in 1978 and the Silver Medallion of the American Heart Association, California Affiliate, in 1979. Dr. Bennett died in [1995].