Past Presidents

Following World War I, he actively searched for antibacterial agents, having witnessed the deaths of many soldiers from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. In 1921, he discovered lysozyme, which he always considered more important than the discovery of penicillin.

By 1927, Alexander Fleming was investigating the properties of staphylococci and was elected Professor of Bacteriology of the University of London in 1928. On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory, having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On returning, he noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci that had immediately surrounded it had been destroyed, whereas other colonies farther away were normal. He grew the mould in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mould as being from the Penicillium genus, and, after some months of calling it ‘mould juice’, named the substance it released penicillin on 7 March 1929. For his ground-breaking work, Alexander Fleming received a knighthood in 1944 and was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. He died at his home in London in 1955 and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.

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Marjory was born on 24 January 1885 at Burwell, near Cambridge, where she graduated from Newnham College. Her career as a biochemist started at University College London, and during the First World War she ran hospital kitchens in France and worked as a VAD in Greece. She was awarded an MBE in recognition of her service.

After the war she returned to Cambridge to work in the department of biochemistry, working on bacterial metabolism and the study of intracellular enzymes, with particular emphasis on oxidation mechanisms. Together with Margaret Whetham and Juda Quastel, she developed the washed suspension technique, which had originated with Louis Pasteur, for extracting enzymes from bacteria. She was appointed Lecturer in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge in 1943. In 1945, Marjory was one of the first two women elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

She died in 1948, one year after being appointed Reader in Chemical Microbiology at the University of Cambridge. The Society established the Marjory Stephenson Prize in her honour in 1953, awarded annually to an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the discipline of microbiology.

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On the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as a temporary lieutenant, going to France in 1915. He was mentioned in dispatches four times, was awarded the military OBE and worked equally hard at original research on trench fever, trench nephritis, bacillary dysentery and the bacteriology of epidemic influenza. He was invalided out of the army in June 1919 and was then appointed First Lecturer in Bacteriology in Matthew J. Stewart’s Department of Pathology at the University of Leeds, thus commencing an association of 33 years with the School of Medicine.

From 1920, he worked with Pneumococcus, ultimately demonstrating the formation of peroxide by that organism, and in the succeeding decade he studied bacterial respiration and oxidation-reduction phenomena, putting forward an interesting theory of anaerobiosis. Together with his colleague John Gordon, they discovered the oxidase reaction for the recognition of gonococcal colonies in mixed culture, now widely used in diagnostic laboratories. A diphtheria epidemic in Leeds gave Walter an opportunity to combine his clinical interests with new diagnostic laboratory methods, of which he took full advantage, culminating in 1931 with the recognition of three types of Corynebacterium diphtheriae – gravis, intermedius and mitis – which he correlated with clinical severity. He died on 11 March 1978 at 92 years old.

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Henry Bunker (1897–1975) was born in London on 27 April 1897 and educated at St Olave’s Grammar School. He returned after World War I to St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, to take a degree with botany as the principal subject. On leaving Cambridge, he took up his first professional position, as Assistant Bacteriologist in an Admiralty research organisation, the Royal Naval Cordite Factory at Holton Heath in Dorset.

During World War II, at the instigation of both the Medical Research Council and the armed forces, Henry worked as part of a group of scientists headed by A. C. Thaysen on a project to supersede cellulolysis and the sulfur bacteria. Widespread malnutrition was, quite correctly, expected as a result of the war, and one of the first installations for preparing a food yeast on a pilot scale was set up at Teddington. The potential of microbes as protein sources intrigued Henry and the topic remained one of his major interests for the rest of his career.

Henry was an influential and respected figure in the learned societies associated with microbiology. He was President of the Society for Applied Bacteriology, a Fellow of the Institute of Biology and its President from 1967 to 1969, he was the first Chairman of the Microbiology Group of the Society of Chemical Industry, Fellow of the Institute of Food Science and Technology, of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Royal Society of Arts. He played an important part in the organisation of Brunel University, and Brunel recognised his contributions, both to the University and to science, by conferring upon him an Honorary Doctorate of Science in 1969. He died on 8 August 1975 at the age of 78.

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Between 1930 and 1933, while working at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Christopher and two other men, Patrick Laidlaw and Wilson Smith, researched and identified for the first time the human influenza virus, type A. From 1946 to 1960 they tried to isolate the virus in the laboratory.

Christopher went on to found the World Health Organization's (WHO) World Influenza Centre based at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). He was Deputy Director of the NIMR from 1952 to 1961. Among the many academic honours he received were the Stewart Prize of the BMA, the Robert Koch Gold Medal, a honorary LLD from the University of Aberdeen and a honorary MD from the University of Lund. He was knighted in 1961. He died in 1987.

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During World War II, the Medical Research Council (MRC), at the Government’s request, set up the War Wounds Committee to devise preventive methods, not only in the field and base hospitals but which would also be applicable to civilian hospitals that received air raid casualties and which were not subject to strict discipline. Ashley was a member of this committee and became Director of the MRC Infection Unit at the Birmingham Accident Hospital from 1942 to 1946. He collaborated with Wylie McKissock and Joyce Wright and they published the first controlled experiment of methods to reduce wound infection in hospital. He also devised simple experiments which nurses could perform to demonstrate to their own satisfaction that apparently clean sites could be heavily contaminated.

In 1946, he moved to the Department of Biological Standards where he was Director from 1947 to 1952. In 1952, he left this post to become Director of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of London, appointments which he held until retirement in 1971. He is famous for his simple method of performing viable counts of bacteria and for his co-authorship of William W.C. Topley and Graham S. Wilson’s Principles of Bacteriology, Virology and Immunity, begun when Topley died in 1944 and continued to the 7th edition published in 1984. The results of his studies on inflammation and the prevention of infection are, however, the most important parts of his outstanding contribution to medical microbiology.

In 1961, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, where he served on many committees and became Biological Secretary and Vice President from 1963 to 1968. He was an Honorary Member of the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1953, he was appointed CBE and, in 1966, he was knighted. Sir Ashley Miles died a month before his 84th birthday in 1988.

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When Fred moved to Rothamsted Research with the title of Virus Physiologist, work was no longer restricted to viruses that infect potatoes. Like most plant-virus workers, he switched to tobacco mosaic virus and, in a few weeks, using the methods that had been standard in protein chemistry for half a century, got liquid-crystalline preparations of an infective nucleoprotein. His interests after moving to Rothamsted were by no means limited to work on the properties of isolated viruses, as his books clearly show. Besides the four editions of Plant Viruses and Virus Diseases, he published a general book called Plant Diseases, took an active interest in fungus diseases and their control, and encouraged similar breadth of interest in his colleagues. Fred’s serological skill and experience, with both rod-shaped and approximately spherical viruses, helped to explain the already well-known differences between flagellar and somatic antigens. He also put it to good use in clearing up some of the confusion surrounding the tobacco necrosis viruses.

Fred became Director of Rothamsted Research in 1958. He accepted membership of an extensive range of committees and the Presidency of an almost equally extensive range of organisations, both in Britain and overseas. He was Chairman of the Agricultural Research Council of Central Africa, a Knighted Member of the Natural Environment Research Council, President of the Association of Applied Biologists and Treasurer of the Royal Society, to name a few. Honours he received included Fellowship of the Royal Society, the Research Medal of the Royal Agricultural Society and Honorary Life Membership of the New York Academy of Sciences. He died in 1972.

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In 1933, Reginald joined the Department of Pathology in the Royal Veterinary College and became a Reader in Bacteriology and the Deputy Director of the Research Institute in Animal Pathology. From this point onwards he started to work on problems of direct veterinary importance, and he was one of the first people to realise the importance of the relationship between infections of animals and of humans. He became concerned with the infectious diseases of young animals, particularly infections of calves caused by Corynebacteria. He was also concerned with the neonatal diseases of calves, and particularly calf diarrhoea and calf pneumonia.

He was President of the Comparative Medicine Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Almroth-Wright Lecturer in 1951 and in the same year was presented with the Dalrymple-Champneys Cup and Medal. Much of his effort was later turned towards the affairs of the Microbiology Society, particularly as Honorary Treasurer during the period 1951–1961, and as President. He died in 1963.

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Soon after the outbreak of World War II he showed that mice could be killed by clostridial toxins administered in aerosols. His director, Sir John Ledingham, considered this result of sufficient importance for official action and, in the early summer of 1940, David found his time divided between the Lister Institute’s Serum Department at Elstree and the Chemical Defence Experimental Station (now known as Porton Down), Porton, Wiltshire, which already had experience in handling toxic aerosols. David had evolved an apparatus, known familiarly as ‘the piccolo’, for exposing animals to aerosols of pathogenic bacteria such as Bacillus anthracis and Pasteurella pestis, at known concentrations. Modifications of the ‘piccolo’ have been used throughout the world for controlled respiratory infections. With this apparatus and a more sophisticated sequel, ‘the organ’, David and his colleagues studied the effect of particle size on respiratory infection with B. anthracis, P. pestis and Brucella suis; the importance of small particles in establishing infection deep in the lung was recognised. Next David turned his attention to mixed infections by the respiratory route. He showed the profound effect that one infection could have on the course of another; for example, guinea pigs could be protected from anthrax and plague by first having brucellosis.

In 1946, David was offered the post of Chief Superintendent of the Biological Research Establishment and accepted as Director, Microbiological Research Department at Porton. David based his concept on the laboratory of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, planned before the war but still under construction. He wished to cover the same wide spread of scientific disciplines, from the physical sciences to the biological sciences, and to make special provision for the growth and handling of pathogenic micro-organisms on a considerable scale. He took possession of a laboratory, unique of its kind in the UK, which served for many years as a model for microbiological buildings in many parts of the world. By 1959, David and his staff had established an international reputation in microbiology. David’s cardinal role was recognised by the award of a CBE in 1957 and scientifically by his election to the Royal Society in 1959. David was an original member of the Microbiology Society. He was a member of the Committee that guided the affairs of the Society in its formative years, from 1947 to 1951. He died in 1968.

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His earliest work stemmed from problems of soil fertility, and he was thus led to studies of the natural balance of fungi in the soil and of the possible soil-ecological role of fungal antibiotics. Many active substances (including viridin, gliotoxin and others) were isolated from the culture filtrates of soil fungi, and their biological effects were studied. His demonstration that strains of Penicillium from the soil of Wareham Heath produce gliotoxin, and may therefore be associated with the mycotoxic and other biotic effects of this soil, was a landmark in soil microbiology and unfolded perspectives of enquiry which have been widely followed up.

In recognition of his achievements in science he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958, having been awarded the ScD of the University of Cambridge a little earlier. In 1962, Percy was appointed Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow. Characteristically, Percy did not push his own earlier interests but turned instead to the study of the relations between obligate fungal parasites and their plant hosts, a question which he had long had in mind. With the help of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) he was able to set up a small unit for this work, and on his accepting the invitation to the Chair of Botany at Cambridge in 1968, the unit was transferred and merged with the ARC Unit of Developmental Botany, the activities of which he continued to direct until his retirement in 1977. For many years he was active in the leadership and as Chairman of the Association of Scientific Workers. He served as a member of the ARC, was twice President of the British Mycological Society, President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and President of the Association of Applied Biologists. His presidential addresses to these societies, and his Leeuwenhoek Lecture to the Royal Society in 1966, were masterpieces of critical survey. In 1975, he was honoured with a CBE for scientific services. He died in 1979.  

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Ernest spent 50 years at the University of Cambridge, completing a degree in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) in 1936 and then a PhD in the Department of Biochemistry under the direction of Marjory Stephenson, for studies on the adaptation of sugar-metabolising enzymes in Escherichia coli and factors that influence the deamination of amino acids. This research led to a rapid and accurate method of estimating free amino acids, which in turn facilitated the study of the movement of amino acids into and out of bacterial cells. During the 1950s, Ernest worked on the involvement of RNA in the incorporation of amino acids into protein, using an in vitro system from Staphylococcus aureus. With hindsight, it is possible to distinguish the effects of mRNA and tRNA in the results obtained, but at the time they were part of a lively controversy, which Ernest eventually left to the likes of Francis Crick and Jacques Monod to resolve. Instead, Ernest turned his attentions to the mode of action of antibiotics. His book The Molecular Basis of Antibiotic Action remains a classic text. Later he turned his attention to antifungals, particularly the polyenes and mechanisms of resistance.

The originality of Ernest’s research and its significance was marked by the award of an ScD degree in 1947 and his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1953. In 1948, he became Director of the Medical Research Council Unit for Chemical Microbiology or 'Microbiology Unit' (MBU) within the Department of Biochemistry, and in 1960 the University of Cambridge created a personal Chair of Chemical Microbiology for him. He held many distinguished lectureships at home and abroad and travelled widely, giving lectures in Russia, the USA and Australia. He sat on several national and international committees, including the International Union of Biochemistry Commission on Enzymes from 1957 to 1961. He died in 2005.

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In 1948, Sidney was appointed Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, heading a biochemistry-based sub-department within the Bacteriology Department. In 1952, Sheffield University created a separate Department of Microbiology with Sidney as its head and the ARC then appointed him Honorary Director of a Unit for Microbiology, which they established within the new Department. The research programme expanded steadily and embraced photosynthetic bacteria, growth yields in relation to ATP generation, bacteriophages and bacteriocins as well as numerous aspects of anaerobes. In 1959, the West Riding of Yorkshire endowed a Chair of Microbiology with Sidney as the first incumbent.

In 1965, he started the second phase of his professional career by accepting the Directorship of the new ARC Food Research Institute to be built in Norwich. His careful planning and excellent rapport with the architects resulted in a spacious and elegant building with a good balance of standardised laboratories and specialised areas for services and large equipment. In the 1970s, Sidney became increasingly involved in a wide range of committee and advisory work relating to food research and biology, both locally and nationally. In 1985, the University of Sheffield recognised his distinction as a microbiologist and as Director of the Food Research Institute by awarding him the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa. Sidney died in 2006.

In 1961, David became Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, a position he left in 1971 to become Director of the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1960 and awarded their Buchanan Medal in 1977 for his work. He was awarded CBE in 1969 and knighted in 1977. He died in 1984.

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A project on anthrax immediately followed the mucin studies. Extracts of Bacillus anthracis isolated from infected animals were not toxic, but plasma from these animals caused oedema when injected subcutaneously, and killed mice and guinea pigs when injected intravenously. The toxin was subsequently produced in culture and shown to consist of three components, none of which were toxic when injected alone. This was the first chemical analysis of bacteria harvested from infected animals: it had three repercussions. First, it stimulated fresh interest in a subject that had become moribund; second, it showed that toxins can be multi-component; and finally, it confirmed Harry's lifelong interest in microbial pathogenicity.

In 1964, Harry successfully applied for the Chair in Microbiology at the University of Birmingham where he established a department focusing on plant, microbial and viral pathogenicity. A major project for many years was to determine the molecular basis of gonococcal serum resistance: in short, how do gonococci survive in the human body? It was almost 20 years later that the nucleotide CMP-NANA was identified as the host factor that protects the gonococcus against complement-mediated killing by sialylating its lipo-oligosaccharide.

He was awarded a CBE in 1993 for services to the Ministry of Defence. His many academic awards included a fellowship of the Royal Society, the Stuart Mudd award in 1994 and visiting professorships in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Seattle and Ann Arbor in the US and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. As well as serving as President of the Microbiology Society from 1975 to 1978, he was also Treasurer and Meetings Secretary and an Honorary Member. The Society’s Harry Smith Vacation Studentships Grant is named in his honour. Harry died at the age of 90 on 10 December 2011.

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It was in the short stay in Cambridge that Peter established his name among virologists worldwide. With Sydney Brenner and Bob Horne, he applied the technique of negative staining to the study of viruses. The interest created by this work led Peter into virus classification, and his 1966 Nature paper ‘What's in a virus name?’ set out a logical scheme for classifying viruses. This led in turn to the formation of the International Committee for Virus Nomenclature (later the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses), of which Peter was the first chairman. In 1963, Peter became Professor of Virology and Bacteriology at the University of Birmingham, where he put together an excellent herpes virology team. At this time he also founded a new journal, Journal of General Virology, with Colin Kaplan, which from its humble beginnings in 1967 became a well-established and well-regarded addition to the virology scene. In 1975, Peter moved to the Chair of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and became a fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

Because of his many contributions to microbiology, Peter was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1962. He served on the board of the Public Health Laboratory Service, as well as being an adviser to the World Health Organization and a member of several governing bodies of research council institutes. Peter died from lung cancer in Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, on 10 March 1987 and was buried at Hinxton. The Peter Wildy Prize Lecture, named in his honour, is presented at the Society’s Annual Conference every year

During his career, his principal research themes were the biochemistry and bacteriology of the sulfate-reducing bacteria; the physiology of death and survival of freezing and starvation in Klebsiella; and the biochemistry, physiology and genetics of non-symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

John was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977, a Fellow of the Institute of Biology in 1965 and was its President from 1982 to 1984. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois from 1962–1963 and at Oregon State University from 1977–1978. Other honours include Hon DSc, University of Bath, 1990; Hon LlD, University of Dundee, 1997; and Honorary Member of the Society for Applied Microbiology. He published a number of books, including The Sulphate-Reducing Bacteria (2^nd edn, 1984), The Fundamentals of Nitrogen Fixation (1982) and An Introduction to Nitrogen Fixation (3^rd edn, 1998); and over 200 research papers. In addition, he edited several symposia over 30, and wrote articles on popular science and two books, Microbes and Man (4^th edn, 2000) and The Outer Reaches of Life (2^nd edn, 1995). Non-scientific books include A Stomach for Dissent (1994, with Mary Postgate), a biography of his father, Raymond Postgate, and Lethal Lozenges and Tainted Tea (2001), a biography of an earlier John Postgate, a Victorian food reformer. He died in 2014.

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In 1982, he moved to Toronto to help start Allelix, Canada’s biggest biotechnology company, as Vice-President and Scientific Director, and in 1987 returned to the UK as Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, retiring in 1995. In addition to being President of the Microbiology Society from 1987 to 1990 he served on a number of scientific bodies: he was Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, a member of the Cancer Research Campaign Council and Chairman of the Council of the CRC Paterson Institute for Cancer Research. He was also Chairman of the Governing Council of the John Innes Centre from 1987–1995, and a member of the Science & Engineering Board and the Technology Interaction Board of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council from 1994–1997. From 1993–1995, he was a member of the Office of Science and Technology’s Technology Foresight Steering Group, was Chairman of Genome Research Limited, the body responsible for the governance of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge from 1997 to 1998, and was a member of the Governing Bodies of several Research Institutes, including the Institute for Food Research in Norwich from 1994 to 2002.

Outside research, Derek was a Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology from 1995 to 2003, and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ Working Party on the Genetic Modification of plants from1997–1999 and 2003–2004. He was a member of bodies concerned with ethical issues arising out of new science for both the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council from 2004–2007 and the Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council from 2007–2010. Derek Burke was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant of Norfolk in 1992, and awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours List in 1994. He died on 15 March 2019.

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It was with Calvin that he published the classic paper on the carboxylation of ribulose bisphosphate to phosphoglycerate in cell extracts of Chlorella in 1954. He became recognised universally as being the godfather of the subject, and he tutored and inspired many with his knowledge and insight which was far broader than carbon metabolism. Rod returned from Calvin's lab in 1955 with a brief foray into pyrethrum insecticides at the Tropical Products Institute in London, moving swiftly to Hans Krebs' laboratory in 1956 to continue his passion for the metabolism of C1 and C2 compounds. There, he collaborated with Hans Kornberg and showed that bacterial growth on acetate involved the glyoxylate cycle. He used his experience in photosynthesis from Calvin's lab with labelled compounds to set out evaluating the metabolism of methanol, formate and carbon dioxide in bacteria. His work led to the discovery of the serine pathway and, from studies with methane-oxidising bacteria, the ribulose monophosphate cycle that paved the way for the discovery of a variety of cycles and pathways in C1-utilising bacteria and yeasts.

Rod was Senior Lecturer and then Professor at Sheffield University, was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath in 1983 and Chaired the British National Committee for Microbiology from 1985–1990. Rod's pioneering work was recognised by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and the award of the CIBA Medal and Prize of the Biochemical Society, both in 1978. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Göttingen in 1989, Bath in 1992 and Sheffield in 1992. He died in 2006.

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Howard returned to the University of Sussex in 1970 to work with Dr Bob Bray in the Department of Chemistry on two molybdenum-containing enzymes, nitrate reductase from Aspergillus nidulans and xanthine dehydrogenase from Veillonella alcalescens. Professor Roger Whittenbury persuaded Howard to take up a lectureship in Microbiology at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Warwick. Howard built up a large research group at Warwick, which pioneered work on a soluble, cytoplasmic methane mono-oxygenase (MMO) and a completely distinct membrane-bound particulate MMO. Through this research he also made extremely important contributions to research into the use of microbes to produce chemicals, work which was to stimulate his later interests in biofuels.

Howard was awarded a Personal Chair at Warwick in 1983 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993. He was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal at the Royal Society in 2000 and received a knighthood in the New Year Honours list in 2007 for his services to science. Howard also made significant contributions to the life of the University of Warwick. He was Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences from 1999–2002 and held many positions at the University, dealing with academic matters and other areas of university life. In 2002, Howard was seconded to become Chief Scientific Adviser to Defra, a role in which he sought to instil scientific rigour into policy-making decisions based on sound scientific evidence. He died of a heart attack on 12 January 2008.

More than 50 years later, after posts as Assistant Lecturer at Cambridge, Lecturer in Glasgow, and finally Head of the Genetics Department at the John Innes Centre and Professor at the University of East Anglia, Norwich (now Emeritus), he is still as interested in the same microbe – Streptomyces coelicolor – as on day one of his PhD studies. Through the efforts of many scientists, this organism became, genetically, the model for the actinomycetes, with versatile in vivo and in vitro genetics.

David’s interest in antibiotics was kindled by studying the genetics of actinorhodin, the blue polyketide antibiotic pigment that gives S. coelicolor its name. After the complete gene cluster was cloned, segments of it were used to produce the first hybrid antibiotics by inter-species cloning. This was a catalyst for the development of the field of ‘combinatorial biosynthesis of unnatural natural products’. He was involved in this field as a visiting fellow at Kosan Biosciences, Inc., in Hayward, CA, US. Meanwhile, he coordinated the project to sequence the large (8.7 Mb) linear chromosome of S. coelicolor. The sequence most notably revealed more than 20 gene clusters for interesting antibiotics and other specialised metabolites that are not expressed under typical screening conditions. He received a knighthood for his work in 1994.

He was a foundation member of the United Nations University/World Food Programme technical advisory group and the Food Standards Agency Scottish Food Advisory Group. Hugh said he felt enormously privileged to be Society’s President, and he was particularly pleased to be able to use the influence of the Society to induce the three Norwegian microbiology societies to meet together – for the first time – in Bergen with the Microbiology Society. Hugh was elected FRSE in 1997 and FmedSci in 1998. In 2013, he received a CBE for services to microbiology and food hygiene.

Early in his career, Robin found that retroviral genomes can be inherited as Mendelian traits in host DNA, marking the discovery of endogenous retroviruses. More recently, he showed that endogenous retroviruses in pigs can infect human cells and be a potential hazard for xenotransplantation.

Robin has made pioneering contributions to HIV and AIDS, most notably the identification of CD4 as the HIV receptor. He has worked on AIDS-associated cancers such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and is investigating HIV vaccine and microbicide development, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These investigations sparked an interest in cross-species infections and the origins of pandemics. He is Chair of the Board of the newly established Foundation for Vaccine Research registered in Washington, D.C. Robin also held the post of President of the British Association of Cancer Research from 2001–2005.

Hilary joined the Society in 1984. She was elected to various Society committees and became Convener of the Environmental Microbiology Group in 1996. She was appointed the Scientific Meetings Officer in 2004 and introduced the present Division and theme structure of conference planning and organising. She was elected to the Society’s Council in 2000 and as President in 2009. Hilary was the second female President in the nearly seven decades of the Society’s history, after Marjory Stephenson over 60 years before. As President, she combined the leadership and figurehead roles to deliver unprecedented levels of change needed for the Society. Hilary also established the Microbiology Society Prize Medal (first awarded in 2009) and other initiatives to encourage young microbiologists. Uniquely, she held both the Microbiology Society Presidency and the Presidency of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) (for two terms, 2006–2010) simultaneously.

Some of Hilary’s initiatives for ISME included co-founding The ISME Journal and promoting microbial ecology globally, including successful initiatives in Asia and South America. She initiated and delivered a Memorandum of Understanding between the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and ISME. Hilary is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the Society of Biology and the European Academy of Microbiology.

As Professor of Microbiology at Birmingham, he succeeded Harry Smith, a former President of the Society. At Birmingham, Nigel became Head of Biological Sciences and subsequently Head of Chemistry. He was simultaneously Chief Editor of FEMS Microbiology Reviews and oversaw its Impact Factor rise from 4.6 to 10.2. He was always adamant that only those who had spent time doing research should manage research, and in 2004 he was appointed Director of Science and Technology of the BBSRC, managing the BBSRC grants portfolio and science strategy as well as initiating a number of major programmes, including Systems Biology and Bioenergy. After four successful years at BBSRC, he was invited to be Head of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, later becoming Senior Vice-Principal with responsibility for planning, resources and research policy.

During his career he was elected to Fellowships of the Institute (later Society) of Biology, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He took early retirement in 2012 to focus on his external activities – including inter alia President of the Society, member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council and Vice-Chair of the ERA-Net in Systems Biology of Microorganisms. He was the founding chair of the Microbiology Society Policy Committee, producing the Society’s first position papers.

Neil’s research focuses on the fields of fungal biology and medical mycology, exploring how the cell walls of fungal pathogenic species are assembled, respond to antifungal antibiotics and are recognised by the human immune system. As President of the Microbiology Society, Neil oversaw the launch of the ambitious new 2018–2022 strategy and was instrumental in the creation of the Early Career Microbiologists’ Forum. Under his presidency, the Society saw a growth in membership numbers and arranged its biggest and most diverse Annual Conference to date in 2017.

Neil is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Institute of Biology, Royal Society of Edinburgh, and American Academy of Microbiologists. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). In addition to the Microbiology Society, he is a former President of the British Mycological Society as well as the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology (ISHAM).