He was a member of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee from 1990 to 1998, strongly advocating research in the field well before BSE raised its alarming head. He was disheartened that his unique experience and knowledge was not used in any advisory capacity during the epidemic, although he was a member of one of the Royal Society inquiries set up to learn lessons from the outbreak.Brown wrote many scientific papers and was also an editor for example of the Journal for General Virology and for the International Association for Biological Standardization. He would have liked there to have been an evaluation of the diagnostic kit developed by Usda under field conditions but, more important, he advocated less reliance on slaughter and an earlier use of ring vaccination around infected premises “Why destroy innocent animals?” he asked. He helped to develop such a method and do preliminary tests of a user-friendly kit. The method had the additional advantage of distinguishing vaccinated animals from infected ones.

This kit was offered by Usda to the British authorities in the 2001 outbreak and the help was declined, much to Brown’s disappointment.During that outbreak his opinion about the control measures used in England was often invoked in the press. He found a congenial niche as Visiting Scientist at the US Department of Agriculture Plum Island Animal Disease Center, off Long Island, New York. In these times of threat from terrorists the US authorities take the threat from bioterrorism very seriously, especially the deliberate introduction of foot-and-mouth disease.Brown was the ideal man to push forward defensive measures starting with means of rapid virus diagnosis capable of being carried out on the farm. He became enthusiastic about the possibility of using small peptides, strings of amino acids with such broad specificity as vaccines These could be chemically synthesised to meet a new threat. Results were promising in tests on lab animals but failed in target species.After he retired formally there was no question that he wouldn’t remain active in science.

No such incidents have been reported when AEI-treated vaccine has been used.Another problem that intrigued Brown and his colleagues was antigenic variation, the mechanism by which some viruses, notably foot-and-mouth, influenza and Aids, evade the protective immune response whereas others, such as poliovirus, measles and rabies, don’t. He tried to understand the process and devise ways to thwart its consequences.One clue was that some strains stimulate a broader protective immune response than others. Similarly there have been many examples of vaccine-induced foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks associated with failure of complete killing of the virus in the formalin-treated vaccine. It is well known that organisms escape killing by formalin in the presence of extraneous proteins, notoriously in the Cutter incident when cases of poliomyelitis were caused by residual living virus in the killed Salk-type poliovaccine.

The chemical he chose was acetylethyleneimine (AEI) and it was adopted by the UK manufacturer, the Wellcome Foundation.The conventional agent for killing microrganisms in the preparation of killed vaccines is formalin. A major contribution to the control of foot-and-mouth disease was his advocacy of the use of chemicals that selectively react with the nucleic acid of the virus leaving the protein coat of the virus in its native state. Nature shortly afterwards printed a picture of the stained-glass window in the church recording the association.Brown was always trying to apply the fundamental knowledge about the structure and function of the virus and its components to the control of the disease. He was an inspiring leader keen to give credit to his juniors and on the lookout for emerging talent.Amongst the discoveries of his group, with biophysicists from Oxford, was the fine structure of the virus by X-ray crystallography at the Daresbury facility in Lancashire. This needed special clearance to allow Brown to drive the crystals of virus from Pirbright for examination. When the paper describing this work appeared in Nature, it was accompanied by a picture of the virus on the cover of the magazine; but unfortunately it was a mirror image.