Andrew Wyllie

Who is Andrew Wyllie?

Andrew H. Wyllie is a Scottish pathologist. In 1972, while working with electron microscopes at the University of Aberdeen he realised the significance of natural cell death. He and his colleagues John Kerr and Alastair Currie called this process apoptosis, from the use of this word in an ancient Greek poem to mean "falling off". He completed postdoctoral training in Cambridge and became Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1992. He left Edinburgh for Cambridge in 1998 His works have contributed to the understanding of apoptosis in health and in disease, and he continues to lecture to undergraduate medical and natural sciences students in Cambridge today.

After retirement, Wyllie was succeeded in his role as Head of the Department of Pathology at Cambridge by Geoffrey L. Smith in October 2011.