Milton Wainwright

Biography

I am British microbiologist, graduated from the University of Nottingham in botany and obtained my PhD from there in mycology and soil microbiology. After which, I went to Canada as a National Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow, researching aspects of environmental microbiology. After my postdoctoral fellowship, In 1975 I was appointed to the University of Sheffield. I have been awarded honorary professorships from Cardiff and Buckingham Universities in the UK, King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, and from the Megunaroden Slavjanski Institute in the Republic of Macedonia. I was also made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), (2014), and a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Panspermia and Astroeconomics – Japan (ISPA) (2015).

Research Interest

My main research areas: a) astrobiology, particularly in relation to our recent research findings that microbes exist in space, and continually arriving to Earth from the cosmos, b) Alternatives to antibiotics for use against MRSA, c) the hypothesis that bacteria and other non-virus microbes cause cancer. I also research and publish on the history of Science, particularly showing that the idea of natural selection is not original to Darwin’s or Wallace’s theory. I have also written widely about the history of the discovery of penicillin and streptomycin.