He was born on 26 January 1905 in Glasgow the son of the Rev Robert Lee Kirk, a Church of Scotland minister, and his wife Primrose Adair Martin, daughter of John Martin, a brewer.
The Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene awarded him the Chalmers Medal for his work.
His proposers were Sir John Graham Kerr, Robert Staig, Edward Hindle and Charles Wynford Parsons.
[3] In 1948, he was awarded an OBE and granted membership of the Royal College of Physicians of London.
In 1955, he left Africa and took the Sinclair Chair in Singapore, and in 1960 moved again to be Professor of Pathology at the University of Hong Kong.