About John Postgate (microbiologist)
John Raymond Postgate FRS was an English microbiologist and writer, latterly Professor Emeritus of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. Postgate's research in microbiology investigated nitrogen fixation, microbial survival, and sulphate-reducing bacteria. He worked for the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Nitrogen Fixation from 1963 until he retired, by then its director, in 1987. In 2011, he was described as a "father figure of British microbiology". His admired popularizing book on microbes in human culture, Microbes and Man, first published in 1969, remains in print. In 1941 he was awarded an exhibition scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a first class degree in Chemistry. Postgate managed to culture large populations of the organism and his experience of competition informed his first paper, in which he showed that selenates are powerful competitive inhibitors of sulphate reduction.
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