John Foxton Ross Kerr AO (24 January 1934 – 4 June 2024) was an Australian pathologist.
He was the first to describe the ultrastructural changes in apoptosis, and could show that they differ significantly from the changes that occur in necrosis, another form of cell death.
For the first time, he placed the roles of cell death in normal adult mammals, and in disease, into scientific focus.
[citation needed] Starting in 1965, he taught pathology at the University of Queensland, and was made a professor in 1974.
[1] Kerr, in collaboration with Andrew Wyllie and Alastair Currie, coined the term apoptosis to describe natural developmental cell death.