Allan Victor Hoffbrand is Emeritus Professor of Haematology at University College, London. He is distinguished for his research and as an author of internationally read textbooks of haematology. He was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1935. After education at Bradford Grammar School, he gained an Open Scholarship in 1953 to The Queen's College, Oxford. He gained a BA degree in Physiology and began clinical studies at The (now Royal) London Hospital in 1957 and qualified in medicine at University of Oxford, BM BCH in 1959.He began a career in haematology at the Postgraduate (now Royal) Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital joining a Medical Research Council Group in the field of megaloblastic anaemia (Director D L Mollin) in 1963. He established the first reliable method for measuring red cell folate and used this assay to determine the incidence of folate deficiency in a wide range of clinical diseases. After a year as an MRC scholar spent at the New England Medical Center, Boston, USA, 1967-1968, he returned to the Haematology Department of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (Director Sir John Dacie). His further research was into vitamin B12/folateinterrelations and the DNA defect in megaloblastic anaemia