Our friend and colleague Michael Sargent, who has died aged 70 after a heart attack, was a scientist, science writer and science communicator. He joined the MRC National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), in London, in 1969 and for 15 years studied the growth of Bacillus subtilis, a bacterium that lives in the human gut, but in 1984 made a remarkably successful switch to embryology. Michael's expertise in molecular biology allowed him to identify two vertebrate homologues of the Drosophila gene snail. His pioneering work on the genes snail and slug in the frog embryo inspired the field and led to the conclusions that these genes regulate cell movement during early development and are involved in metastatic behaviour in cancer.
Michael was born in Chatham, Kent. He went to the Royal Hospital school in Suffolk and studied botany at Nottingham University, where he met his wife, Jean, whom he married in 1966. He did his PhD at Nottingham and then spent three years as a postdoc at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He returned to the UK in 1969 and joined the NIMR.
Michael was passionate about communicating science. In the early 1990s he organised the first Schools' Day at NIMR, inviting year 12 students from local schools to come to the institute to learn how research is done. The NIMR schools programme continues to this day, including a research summer school and an essay competition. For the past 10 years he also organised an annual meeting on science for the University of the Third Age. In all these activities he was helped by Jean, by then a science teacher.
If Michael's outreach work was important to him, so was his belief that science can make the world a better place. Towards the end of his career at NIMR, he was awarded a Winston Churchill travelling fellowship to visit Ethiopia, India and Canada to study the effects in later life of nutritional and other physiological stress on the developing foetus. His ideas about how the prospects for human life might improve, together with an examination of the ethical checkpoints to biomedical intervention, were discussed in his book Biomedicine and the Human Condition (2005).
As a colleague, he was stimulating and fun, and his booming laughter often reverberated along the lab corridor. He was always a pleasure to be with, and was unfailingly energetic, kind, cheerful and positive. Michael's turn of phrase, sense of humour, delight in the world, originality and amusement with life have influenced many, not least his daughter, Catherine.
Michael is survived by Jean and Catherine.