Past President John Postgate dies aged 92

17 November 2014

The Society for General Microbiology was saddened to learn of the death of Professor John Postgate FRS, our former president, who died last month at the age of 92. Professor Postgate was described as a “father figure of British microbiology”.

John was a long time supporter of the Society for General Microbiology. He was president between 1984 and 1987, and was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of General Virology between 1970 and 1974. John received his Royal Society Fellowship in 1977.

John received a first class degree in Chemistry from Balliol College, Oxford, followed by a doctorate in Chemical Microbiology, in which he studied how bacteria become resistant to sulphonamide drugs. In 1948, John began working at the Chemical Research Laboratory in Teddington, before moving to the Microbiological Research Establishment, part of the Government’s Porton Down research facility, where he researched the ways that bacteria endure stresses and made fundamental insights into the survival of bacteria as spores.

John co-founded the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation in 1963, which investigated the methods that micro-organisms use to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. The Unit was based in the University of Sussex from 1965, where John became Professor of Microbiology. He became director of the unit in 1980, and remained there until his retirement in 1987.

Alongside his lab work, John wrote a number of specialist and popular science books including Microbes and Man, which was released in 1969 and remains in print. In 1995, John wrote Fifty Years On, to celebrate the Society for General Microbiology’s history between 1945 and 1995. In addition to his science writing, John was a passionate, self-taught jazz musician who played a number of instruments and regularly wrote for Jazz Monthly.

John was married to Mary Stewart, a graduate in English of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and later a Justice of the Peace, who died in 2008. They are survived by their three daughters Selina, Lucy and Joanna, and seven grandchildren.