My pal and mentor of almost 40 years, Mike Brown, who has died aged 92, was an educational pharmacist and pharmaceutical microbiologist who made many essential contributions to understanding how micro organism adapt to withstand antibiotic remedy.
Maybe the largest satisfaction of his profession got here from his work on bacterial survival with the Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg throughout a spell at Stanford College in California within the early 2000s. A lot of Mike’s analysis was on the notoriously hard-to-treat pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, serving to to reveal that standard laboratory exams of its sensitivity to antibiotics underestimated its resistance in contaminated sufferers.
Mike’s considering prolonged means past pharmacy and microbiology and into poetry and philosophy, and was captured in his e book, Human Survival (2018), which seemed on the incompatibility between our evolutionary background and our socially disconnected, trendy life.
He first made his mark as professor and head of the college of pharmacy at Aston College in Birmingham, beginning in 1970 on the age of 39. There he constructed up the college to be an early analysis powerhouse by making a purposefully worldwide outlook and hiring younger lecturers. His ecumenical outlook was expressed in his establishing and chairing a bunch to foyer and fundraise to create the Martin Luther King Centre on the college as a centre for folks of all faiths, and none, to pursue justice and peace via reasoned dialogue.
From 1982 to 1988 Mike was dean of the school of science and professional vice-chancellor for postgraduate affairs at Aston, the place he gained big respect for by no means being afraid to talk reality to energy on its strategic path.
Born in Wallasey in Merseyside to Joseph Brown, a bookmaker, and Gertrude Auburn, a housewife, Mike went to St Anselm’s school in Birkenhead. He certified as a pharmacist from the College of Manchester and took his PhD on the faculty of pharmacy, College of London (now a part of College Faculty London). After postdoctoral research on the College of Florida and a interval on the College of Tub, he moved to Birmingham, the place he remained till he retired in 1997, persevering with to collaborate with colleagues afterwards as professor emeritus.
Mike’s legacy lives on via greater than 200 printed papers, in addition to the many individuals who have been touched by his humanity. They included not solely these, like me, whom he supported and mentored, however the determined stranger on the street whom he would by no means move with out giving them a form phrase and a few cash.
Mike met Margaret Hayes once they have been each working at a scholar camp in Kent in 1953, they usually married in 1956. His colleagues from the Nineteen Seventies recall the energetic neighborhood that he and Margaret introduced collectively of their dwelling to alternate views on life and politics.
His eldest son, Michael, died in 2017. Mike is survived by Margaret, his 4 different kids, Sarah, Paul, Beth and Jessica, 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
