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.
