John Fincham

John Robert Stanley Fincham FRS FRSE (11 August 1926 – February 9 2005) was a noted British geneticist who made important contributions to biochemical genetics and microbial genetics. Perhaps most notably, he obtained the first direct evidence for the "one gene-one enzyme" hypothesis. He accomplished this considerable feat using mutants of Neurospora crassa deficient in a specific enzyme.

Fincham was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences. He did his PhD in the Botany School at Cambridge and then did a year's postgraduate research at Cal Tech with Sterling Emerson (whose daughter Ann he married).

Fincham was the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge University between 1984 and 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1978.