Brian William Fox
Brian William Fox (1929–1999) was a British scientist and botanist who helped develop standard methods for evaluating potential cancer drugs. He was a professor of experimental chemotherapy at the University of Manchester and the Paterson Institute, and he was also a keen botanist and lichenologist who studied plant and lichen distributions in northern England.
Born in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, Wales, Fox’s family moved to Lancashire in 1941. He studied chemistry at Durham University (King’s College, Durham) and earned his doctoral degree there; after National Service, he continued his research. In 1980 he was promoted to a personal chair in experimental chemotherapy at Manchester and became deputy director of the Paterson Institute at Christie Hospital.
As a botanist, Fox collected plant specimens across northern England from the late 1940s to the 1970s and donated about 1,000 specimens to Bolton Museum in 1984; these were part of Travis’s Flora of South Lancashire. He studied lichens across the UK, including Scottish mountains in 1981, and later Derbyshire and Cheshire. He taught lichen identification and noted shifts in lichen distributions as air pollution declined, with his observations published posthumously.
Fox served as president of the British Lichen Society from 1994 to 1996. He authored or co-authored more than 70 publications on chemotherapeutic agents and wrote several books. The University of Manchester Library holds many of his personal papers, including materials for his work on the hospital’s history.
Personal life: he was married to Mary Fox (died 1992). He died in 1999 in New Mills, Derbyshire, at about age 69 or 70. His doctoral thesis was Lupin and related alkaloids: synthesis of 6 ethyl pyrrocoline.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:12 (CET).