Academic;

Born: September 25, 1934; Died April 20, 2013.

STRUTHER Arnott, who has died aged 78, was an expert in the structure of DNA who described himself as a Scotsman, scientist and internationalist.

As principal and vice-chancellor of St Andrews University, he was also a man ahead of his time in the way he ran the country's first institution of its kind which this year celebrates its 600th anniversary.

When he arrived in the 1980s he had spent 15 years in academia in the United States and preferred the term manager: "Administration is what nurses do when they give out medicine," he once said. "Management is a more creative process."

Already an accomplished biophysicist, he realised then, and before anyone else, that St Andrews faced a stark choice: become excellent in science or get out of it altogether. His strategy was to invest in excellence and to disinvest in mediocrity.

Today it is rated as one of the world's top universities for scientific performance and has a student community embracing 100 nations.

He was a principal who loathed the notion of second best, said current principal Louise Richardson, and who believed that St Andrews could and should be the equal of the best in the world.

"His legacy is a university which has in recent years performed consistently strongly in the top reaches of the major domestic league tables and whose science faculty commands international respect. His effect is still seen today in the quality of our staff, their publications, patents, ideas and St Andrews' recognition as a research intensive university."

Educated at Hamilton Academy, he gained his BSc and PhD from Glasgow University, later heading to King's College, London where he worked as a scientist in the Medical Research Council's biophysics research unit. During his ten years there, from 1960-1970, he was a physics demonstrator and then director of post-graduate studies.

In 1970 he moved to Purdue University, Indiana as professor of molecular biology, becoming head of its department of biological sciences five years later. By 1980 he was Purdue's vice-president for research and dean of the graduate school.

During the 1980s he was also a senior visiting fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a Nuffield research fellow at Green College and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow.

Elected to the Royal Society in 1985, for his work on the structure of DNA determined by fibre diffraction, the following year he took up his appointment as principal and vice-chancellor of St Andrews.

Before he left America he spoke to The Herald, outlining his thoughts on the ancient institution in Scotland: "My analysis is that St Andrews wants its native roots to be respected and protected, its Scottishness preserved, but not in any parochial way. St Andrews wants to be a comprehensive university, committed to the arts and science. And it wants to maintain a world-class reputation."

Once he arrived back home, he set about bringing his vision to reality, his eye for talent matching his drive to raise the profile of St Andrews in the world of sciences, as did his determination that it should equal its strength in the arts.

Controversially, he lured Prof Paul Wilkinson, a globally-renowned expert on terrorism, away from Aberdeen University where he was head of the department of politics and international relations. He wanted the best and had head-hunted him, defending his methods saying: "He is the sort of person we would like to see here... it's an orthodox translation, not an institutional transfer. It's a matter of recruiting somebody."

Although he could never be said to have been a man of self-effacing modesty, he was a principal known for his sense of decency, old-fashioned kindness and, most significantly, for his ability to envisage and shape the successful way ahead.

In the words of Louise Richardson: "He is widely regarded as an intellectual giant whose decisive and robust style of management laid the foundations for what has become a world-renowned science faculty in St Andrews. "

Mr Arnott served the university for more than 13 years, until retiring in 1999 after which he returned to London, where he was part of the Biological Structure Data Processing, Modelling and Visualisation Group within biomedical sciences at Imperial College, London. He was also Haddow professor of biomolecular structure at the Institute for Cancer Research's Chester Beatty Laboratories from 2000-03.

He returned to St Andrews recently, when former colleagues decided to name the new seminar room in the Biomedical Sciences Research Complex in his honour. An intellectual, still in possession of a razor-sharp mind, he lectured for an hour without notes to students and academics on the history of the structure of DNA

The author of numerous papers in scientific journals, he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1988 and made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996. He also was also conferred with honorary degrees from Purdue and St Andrews, Laurinburg universities in the United States, as well as St Andrews.

Mr Arnott, who died at his home in Doncaster, is survived by his wife Greta and their family.