John Foxton Ross Kerr (born January 24, 1934 in
Sydney) is an
Australian pathologist. He was the first to describe the
ultrastructural changes in
apoptosis, and could show that they differ significantly from the changes that occur in
necrosis, another form of
programmed cell death. For the first time, he placed the roles of cell death in normal adult mammals, and in disease, into scientific focus.