It seemed quite normal to me, growing up, to find bottles of blood in the fridge. My father, Thomas Dormandy, was a pioneering medical scientist. It was also normal to wake up to a new mural in the hallway: he was a lifelong and successful painter. The sound of typewriter keys, carriage returns and bells was the usual punctuation of life. Thomas wrote more than 200 articles and Lancet leaders, and later in life, a prize-winning history of tuberculosis, among several other books. He has died aged 86.
My father's own childhood in Hungary was idyllic. Time was divided between the vibrant cultural centre of Budapest and the safe repose of his family's estate, Dormand, 150 miles to the east. This was slowly shattered by the progress of the second world war. The intensification of nazism caused the family to flee, and the in-sweep of the Red Army rendered their refugee status permanent.
Thomas was never bitter about the loss. He was naturally sanguine and was constantly amazed by good fortune. Moving through Europe, he studied medicine in Cluj, Geneva and Paris, finally completing in London, with a gold medal at the Royal Free. There he met and married Katharine Baker, who would become a leading haemophilia specialist.
From the 1960s, at the Whittington hospital, my father made free radicals the subject of his research. Free radicals are atoms with an unbalanced number of electrons, thought to play a role in some diseases. In a groundbreaking series of papers, Thomas revealed their spontaneous generation in blood and tissue samples. He developed new techniques to measure their presence, and investigated the protective effect of antioxidants against damage they caused.
Our family home was established near Parliament Hill. For my two sisters and me, it was not always clear whether Thomas was at work or play. Research, painting, listening to opera and hospitality were bundled together inextricably in a mass of liveliness. Afternoons were marked by a lengthy snooze to balance the hours of nocturnal invention. Interruption of this snooze, we discovered, produced a clinically predictable reaction.
Katharine died in 1978, and in 1982 Thomas married Elizabeth Chapman, with whom he had two children, Michael and Letty. Participating in our education was always a joy, though always done in Thomas's own style: stories of ancient Greece; curiosities of Latin grammar; nuggets from cultural history that "everyone ought to know"; biological facts that proved the opposite of received wisdom.
In 1982 Thomas became the first president of the Society for Free Radical Research. However, his proposal for a logo, consisting of silhouetted, caped, radical activist holding a fizzing bomb was declined, in favour of a less mischievous, more scientific design.
His sister, Daisy, died in 2012, and his second daughter, Sophie, in 1987. He is survived by his brother, John; his wife, Elizabeth; children, Charlotte, Michael, Letty and me; and grandchildren, Edith, Jamie and Woodie.