Percy Wragg Brian, 5 September 1910 - 17 August 1979

Abstract

Most of Percy Brian’s personal research was carried out while he was on the staff of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd, over the 27 years 1936—63, first at the Jealott’s Hill Research Station and later at the Akers (formerly named the Butterwick) Research Laboratories at Welwyn. At the Akers Laboratories he pursued long-term problems with a devotion and precision worthy of the most fundamental research. His work, and that of the Department of Microbiology which he directed for some 17 years, was primarily concerned with fungal metabolites but it branched out in various directions that could hardly have been predicted at the outset. His work and thinking on the role of antibiotics in the microbial economy of the soil, once a very controversial subject, has influenced modern views more than any other. In 1946, no one could have predicted the outstanding practical success of the medical antibiotic griseofulvin, which is still unique in its mode of antifungal action and has become almost the perfect therapeutic agent for control of superficial mycoses in man and his domestic animals. Still more surprising was the later development of the gibberellins, at first known only as metabolic products of a fungus causing a foot-rot disease of young rice plants; later they were found to function naturally as hormones, widely distributed in the tissues of all kinds of plant. For this work on the gibberellins, Brian turned himself into a plant physiologist, as competent as he already was in mycology and plant pathology.