FRED BROWN was Britain’s outstanding animal virologist. Independent and outspoken, he was committed before the 2001 outbreak to developing new vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease, and critical of disease control procedures, emergency or otherwise, that did not include their use. After the 2001 outbreak — when he was dismayed by the initial delays of slaughter on suspect farms — he was a member of the Royal Society inquiry that recommended vaccination as a priority for the future, doubtless with his strong support.

Fred Brown was born in 1925 and educated at Burnley Grammar School and Manchester University, taking a first in chemistry in 1944. His doctorate was awarded in 1948 for research on plant polysaccharides, including starches.

Most of his career was spent at the Animal Virus Research Institute in Pirbright, which he joined in 1955 and where he was head of biochemistry from 1964 to 1983. In this time, studies of the foot-and-mouth virus progressed from investigations of its components and their immunological properties to molecular cloning of the virus genome and comprehensive description of the replication cycle. Brown led the institute’s research through a highly productive period, attracting many first-class collaborators.

He worked not only on foot-and-mouth but on other viruses that cause diseases clinically indistinguishable from it. His work on vesicular stomatitis virus and the closely related rabies virus showed that their surface molecules induce antibodies that neutralise virus infectivity. Along with Italian colleagues he showed that swine vesicular disease is caused by a virus closely related to the human virus Coxsackie B5, in studies that were among the first to apply molecular techniques to the characterisation and differentiation of virus isolates. For another pig disease he found the cause to be Nodamura virus and showed that its genome contained two rather than one RNA molecules, establishing yet another new virus family, the nodaviruses.

Having identified new viruses, and even two new virus families, it was not surprising that he became heavily involved in virus taxonomy. He was a member of the international committee on the taxonomy of viruses from 1968 to 1981 and then its president until 1987.

He was deputy director of the Animal Virus Research Institute from 1980 to 1983, when he was appointed head of virology research and development at Wellcome Biotechnology, Beckenham. There, in collaboration with X-ray crystallographers in Oxford, he determined the three-dimensional structure of the foot-and-mouth virus.

He extensively explored the possibility that synthetic peptides might be valuable as vaccines. He had shown that the 1981 outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Britain was due to the use as a vaccine of incompletely inactivated virus, and he strove to find an alternative. As a secondary objective he developed effective chemical procedures to make sure that the virus could be reliably and totally deactivated.

He spent the last 13 years of his career at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. Having no intention to retire he became a professor at Yale University and a consultant with the US Department of Agriculture in 1990 and retained both positions until this year.

A true scholar, he had a strong interest in education and chaired the Royal Society’s biological education committee, 1983-87. He was grateful to his own teachers, especially at grammar school, where he captained cricket and football teams. He went on to be a fast bowler for Burnley in the Lancashire League and his local team in Surrey.

He was generous almost to a fault in giving his time to the scientific community and its societies. He had an exceptional memory, an interest in the history of science, and an enormous capacity for work that made him an ideal editor of no fewer than nine scientific journals.

From 1979 he was chairman of the comparative virology programme run by the World Health Organisation and the UN. He was scientific secretary of the International Association of Biological Standardisation from 1980, and sat on the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, 1990-98. He was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 1981 and appointed OBE in 1999.

He is survived by his wife Audrey, whom he married in 1948, and their two sons.

Fred Brown, virologist, was born on January 31, 1925. He died on February 20, 2004, aged 79.