Scientist and broadcaster known for The Great Egg Race

Born: April 29 1928;

Died: December 15, 2017

PROFESSOR Heinz Wolff, who has died aged 89, created and named the field of bioengineering, and made significant contributions to medical technology; he was best-known to the public, however, as a TV “boffin” and presenter of the game show The Great Egg Race.

Had Wolff been created as a fictional character, the author would have been told to go away and come back with something less clichéd. With his bow tie, half-moon glasses, bald head with a halo of wispy hair above the ears, boundless enthusiasm and strong mittel-European accent, he was every Briton’s idea of the archetypal dotty scientist. In appearance and manner, he was a dead ringer for Heath Robinson’s illustrations for Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm books.

That was fitting enough, since The Great Egg Race, which ran on BBC One from 1977 until 1986, was a daft game show that featured Heath Robinson-style contraptions. Contestants would be given a pointless task (such as transporting an egg from one point to another in a vehicle powered by rubber bands, hence the show’s name) and random items with which to accomplish it. Points were awarded for design, ingenuity and entertainment value.

At first, Wolff was merely the head judge, with Brian Cant (and later Johnny Ball) presenting the show. But it soon became clear that Wolff was the primary attraction; his ready willingness to send himself up in order to illustrate a scientific principle – crawling on his stomach across a precarious balsa-wood bridge over a swimming pool, say – made for irresistible television. In later series he largely took over the presenting duties himself.

He popped up on other TV shows with a science component, such as Great Experiments and the annual Young Scientist of the Year competition, and became one of the foremost public popularisers of science, giving, for example, the 1975 Royal Institution Christmas lecture.

Wolff’s undoubted value as an entertaining turn, however, did not detract from his solid credentials as a scholar and innovator. Before he had even entered university, he had devised a machine which counted red blood cells for the haematology department of Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, and he was later credited with having invented the gel pad electrodes used in electro-cardiograms.

His research into physiology and attendant engineering solutions led him to set up the first department of bioengineering at Brunel University in 1983; he was largely responsible for the creation of the field, having minted its name in 1954. His work at Brunel included studies of the effect of weightlessness on biology, and he was the scientific director and co-founder of the Juno project, which resulted in Dr Helen Sharman becoming the first British astronaut, and the first woman to visit the Mir space station in 1981.

Heinz Siegfried Wolff was born on April 29 1926 in Berlin. As a four-year-old boy, he remembered watching torchlit processions of Nazis marching past his parents’ house and, by the time he was due to go to school, Jews had been banned from state education. He was a bright boy and moved up a form at the Jüdische Waldschule Grunewald, though he later claimed that he studied no science there. His father Oswald, however, still had his boyhood chemistry set, and at the weekends young Heinz manufactured toffee in the test tubes.

The family eventually fled from Germany in the nick of time, arriving in Britain on September 3 1939, the day that war was declared. The 11-year-old Heinz at first attended a mixed prep school in London. “I was classified as an enemy alien and was at school with people whose brothers and fathers were being killed by Germans – but at no stage was it ever held against me,” he remembered. “I don't believe there is another country where this would have happened.”

He then went to the City of Oxford grammar school, which he enjoyed immensely – especially since the school had a ready supply of war surplus scientific equipment. He was offered a place at an Oxford college, though he was twice turned down by Trinity, Cambridge, because his Latin was thought not quite up to the mark.

In the end, however, his university place was deferred in order to accommodate returning servicemen, and instead he went to work for a year at the Radcliffe, where his supervisor, Robert MacFarlene, discovered anti-haemophilic globulin from samples of Wolff’s blood. Wolff then took a Medical Research Council job at the Pneumoconiosis Research Unit at Cardiff, and then settled on University College London, from which he graduated with a first in physiology and physics. In the summer vacations he worked at King’s College Hospital in what he described as the “losing team” in the race to identify the double helix structure of DNA.

In 1953 he married Joan Stephenson, then a staff nurse at one of the hospitals where he worked. From 1954 until 1962 Wolff worked in the human physiology division of the National Institute for Medical Research, and from 1962 to 1970 he was head of its department for biomedical engineering, a speciality he had done much to develop. From 1970 to 1983 he ran the bioengineering department of the Medical Research Council before moving to Brunel.

He was appointed to the European Space Agency’s Life Science’s Working Group in 1976, and continued in the role until 1982. His first television appearance came in 1966 when he demonstrated a radio-transmitting pill which measured stomach pressure and acidity, by getting Richard Dimbleby to swallow it and then prodding his midriff.

Heinz Wolff published around 120 learned papers, and received several honorary doctorates. He described his hobbies as “lecturing to children” and “dignified practical jokes”; at his 80th birthday party he appeared on a scooter propelled by a fire extinguisher. His wife died in 2014; he is survived by their two sons.

ANDREW MCKIE