Bio-physicist; Born June 20, 1943; Died February 24, 2008. Stanley Dover, who has died aged 64, was an outstanding academic who, when still at school, was called upon in class to answer mathematical and scientific questions that his teachers could not.
Dover was born in Ayr but his family moved to Glasgow in 1946 and he attended Glasgow Academy from 1948-61. He was an exemplary pupil although at times there were doubts about his survival because of the explosions he caused by his ceaseless experimentation at school and at home.
Dover brought great credit to his school by winning a major scholarship to Cambridge where he read natural sciences at St John's College and obtained a double-starred first-class honours degree, followed by a PhD at King's College, London, with subsequent postdoctoral posts at Oxford as a Fellow of Wolfson College and at Purdue University, Indiana.
He worked from 1971-74 in research on crystal structure analysis with the famous scientist, Jack Dunitz, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, at the Eidgenossische Techniche Hochschule in Zurich.
Dover returned to London in 1974 and spent the rest of his academic career in research at the department of biophysics, King's College, where he worked in the field of X-ray crystallography for medical application. He was proud to have worked with Nobel laureate Maurice Wilkins, who was also a graduate of St John's, producing X-ray images that were used by Wilkins and the team that eventually discovered DNA. Latterly, he took on the additional task of developing and managing the computer systems at King's.
He took early retirement at 50 and started a new career in computer programming, eventually working on developing systems for the BBC and the National Air Transport Service. Dover was still working on projects for Nats at the date of his death following an operation on an acoustic neuroma, a form of brain tumour. At his funeral, two Cambridge dons were overheard to say that he was the brightest student in his field either before or since.
He is survived by his wife, Daphne; three children, Anna, Aaron and Deborah, from his earlier marriage to Jenny; an elder brother, John; and a grand-daughter, Sophie. He died at the Royal Free Hospital Hampstead.
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