Brown, Daniel ("Dan") McGillivray was born at Giffnock near Glasgow on 3 February 1923 and from Giffnock Primary School went on to Glasgow Academy. Dan’s interest in science began at Glasgow Academy and his science teacher suggested he might try for Cambridge. The necessary extra two years schooling and the learning of Latin deterred him so he went to Glasgow University at the age of seventeen. In 1945 Dan went to do a PhD in London. He moved to Cambridge in 1948 and joined Christ’s as a graduate student, where he did a second PhD (1952). As a postdoctoral student, Dan focused on RNA (ribonucleic acid) and was able to throw light on how the adjacent nucleotides in RNA (and by analogy in DNA) were joined together. In 1955, when he became college lecturer in chemistry at King’s. He was awarded the Sc.D in 1968, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982. Dan became Vice-Provost at King’s in 1974 and was succeeded in that position by his close colleague and friend, Hal Dixon, in 1981.