My friend and mentor of nearly 40 years, Mike Brown, who has died aged 92, was an academic pharmacist and pharmaceutical microbiologist who made many important contributions to understanding how bacteria adapt to resist antibiotic treatment.
Perhaps the biggest satisfaction of his career came from his work on bacterial survival with the Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg during a spell at Stanford University in California in the early 2000s. Much of Mike’s research was on the notoriously hard-to-treat pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, helping to demonstrate that conventional laboratory tests of its sensitivity to antibiotics underestimated its resistance in infected patients.
Mike’s thinking extended way beyond pharmacy and microbiology and into poetry and philosophy, and was captured in his book, Human Survival (2018), which looked at the incompatibility between our evolutionary background and our socially disconnected, modern life.
He first made his mark as professor and head of the school of pharmacy at Aston University in Birmingham, starting in 1970 at the age of 39. There he built up the school to be an early research powerhouse by creating a purposefully international outlook and hiring young academics. His ecumenical outlook was expressed in his establishing and chairing a group to lobby and fundraise to create the Martin Luther King Centre at the university as a centre for people of all faiths, and none, to pursue justice and peace through reasoned dialogue.
From 1982 to 1988 Mike was dean of the faculty of science and pro vice-chancellor for postgraduate affairs at Aston, where he gained huge respect for never being afraid to speak truth to power on its strategic direction.
Born in Wallasey in Merseyside to Joseph Brown, a bookmaker, and Gertrude Auburn, a housewife, Mike went to St Anselm’s college in Birkenhead. He qualified as a pharmacist from the University of Manchester and took his PhD at the school of pharmacy, University of London (now part of University College London). After postdoctoral studies at the University of Florida and a period at the University of Bath, he moved to Birmingham, where he remained until he retired in 1997, continuing to collaborate with colleagues afterwards as professor emeritus.
Mike’s legacy lives on through more than 200 published papers, as well as the many people who were touched by his humanity. They included not only those, like me, whom he supported and mentored, but the desperate stranger in the street whom he would never pass without giving them a kind word and some money.
Mike met Margaret Hayes when they were both working at a student camp in Kent in 1953, and they married in 1956. His colleagues from the 1970s recall the lively community that he and Margaret brought together in their home to exchange views on life and politics.
His eldest son, Michael, died in 2017. Mike is survived by Margaret, his four other children, Sarah, Paul, Beth and Jessica, 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
