John Postgate was an English microbiologist and writer, latterly Professor Emeritus of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. John Postgate’s research in microbiology investigated nitrogen fixation, microbial survival, and sulphate-reducing bacteria. He worked for the Agricultural Research Council’s Unit of Nitrogen Fixation from 1963 until he retired, by then its director, in 1987. In 2011, John Postgate was described as a “father figure of British microbiology”
His admired popularizing book on microbes in human culture, Microbes and Man, first published in 1969, remains in print.