Born in Worthing, Sussex, Gwyn Macfarlane left Cheltenham College in 1924 and a year later entered the Medical School of St Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

With a year as a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1944, where he was involved trying to treat the complications of gas gangrene on the war front, he continued to work in Oxford for the rest of his professional life.

He led a team that included Rosemary Biggs and Ethel Bidwell, to investigate congenital coagulation defects, the treatment of bleeding disorders and to develop replacement therapies that enabled haemophiliacs to enjoy an almost normal life.

Gwyn Macfarlane was a close associate of Howard Florey during the development of a process to extract penicillin from culture grown in the Dunn School of Medicine.

Baron Florey went on to be President of the Royal Society and Macfarlane developed an enormous respect for the capabilities of a man, held by many to be one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century.

In later life Macfarlane felt that his close personal exposure to these developments left him as a conduit to modern science education, and his contributions both written and in BBC TV programs etc.

202,221 1979 Howard Florey, The Making of a Great Scientist, Oxford University Press 1984 Alexander Fleming, The Man and the Myth, Chatto and Windus, Video, Russell's Viper Venom, Blood clotting