Donald Devereux Woods, 1912-1964

Abstract

Donald Woods, Iveagh Professor of Chemical Microbiology in the University of Oxford, died on 6 November 1964 at the early age of 52. He was the elder son of Walter and Violet Woods, born at Ipswich on 16 February 1912. Educated at Northgate School, Ipswich, he became a Scholar at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1933 with first class honours in Parts I and II of the Natural Science Tripos. He remained at Cambridge with a Beit Memorial Fellowship and took his Ph.D. in 1937. In 1939 he joined the Medical Research Council’s Unit for Bacterial Chemistry as a Halley- Stewart Research Fellow, working at the Middlesex Hospital, London. In 1940 to 1946 he was engaged in ‘war work’. In this latter year he became Reader in Microbiology in the Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Professor Sir Rudolph A. Peters) and in 1955 Iveagh Professor of Chemical Microbiology in the same Department (Professor Sir Hans A. Krebs). This was the first Chair in this subject in the United Kingdom, and was endowed by Arthur Guinness, Son and Company. Woods became a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1951. He was elected a Fellow of this Society in 1952.