Maurice Osburn Moss (1937-2025)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing away of our friend and former colleague, Professor Maurice Moss, aged 88. 

Maurice was born in Plumstead, near Woolwich, Kent. He attended Wickham Street Primary School, then Eltham College. He went on to study Chemistry at Imperial College, London (1955-1958) and stayed to study for a PhD entitled “The effect of certain members of the Citric Acid Cycle on the growth and sporulation of Chaetomium globosum”, the black mould fungus. These were boom years for mycology following the discovery of penicillin a few decades earlier. 

Maurice then joined Beecham Research Laboratories in Betchworth, Surrey, where he worked on microbial biochemistry, in particular the use of microorganisms in the production of penicillin derivatives. From 1964 to 1968, he worked at the Tropical Products Institute (now the Natural Resources Institute, part of the University of Greenwich), researching toxic metabolites of Penicillium rubrum, isolating and elucidating the structure of rubratoxins. This work was at the forefront of research on mycotoxins. He moved to the University of Surrey in 1968 as a lecturer in Microbiology, initially based at Falcon Road, Battersea, before relocating to Guildford when the new Microbiology building was completed. 

Throughout his teaching career, Maurice continued his research, writing many papers on mycotoxins and also several book chapters. He translated and added to Moulds, Toxins and Foods by Claude Moreau in 1979. In 1985, he wrote a classic textbook on Mycotoxins, with Professor John E. Smith of Strathclyde University, with whom he also edited The Applied Mycology of Fusarium in 1982. His research was not only on fungi as, in the 1970s, he started to study diatoms, publishing his first paper on them in 1974. He continued to work on diatoms and other aquatic microorganisms, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He organised a biennial international Food Microbiology summer school at Surrey and, with Martin Adams, wrote the standard textbook on Food Microbiology, now in its 5th edition.  

He even made an appearance on TV, as a Fungal Toxicologist in an episode of a TV series, Secrets of the Dead, entitled “Bewitched” about ergot poisoning and the Salem Witch Hunts, filmed in the microbiology lab at Surrey. After it aired on TV, some of his colleagues phoned to reprimand him for not wearing a lab coat! 

 Alongside his work at the University, Maurice was an active member of the Microbiology Society and the Society for Applied Microbiology (now Applied Microbiology International) and was deeply involved in several other scientific and conservation organisations. He was a long-standing member of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1969 to 2025, serving as President and later as an Honorary Member. He was also a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the British Mycological Society and Butterfly Conservation. Locally, he was an Honorary Member of both the West Weald Fungus Recording Group and the Friends of Warnham Local Nature Reserve, and a supporter of the Natural History Museum.  

I first met Maurice when he was on the interview panel for my job as a lecturer in Microbiology at the University of Surrey. When appointed to the job, Maurice was patient enough to teach me how to use a microscope and perform staining techniques so that I could teach the practical course. He kindly confessed, much later, that though he had favoured a much better-qualified microbiologist candidate for that position, I had proved him wrong. 

I will always remember Maurice for his immense kindness, his patience with the most ham-fisted students (and sometimes new lecturers) in the microbiology lab and his bottomless enthusiasm for his favourite microbes, ecology and the natural world. We always looked forward to joining his autumn fungal forays through the Surrey woods and the delight with which he would describe the features of each of the mushrooms that we might discover.  Maurice was a wonderful scientist, colleague and friend. He will be sorely missed. 

Emeritus Professor Johnjoe McFadden.