Douglas Scott Falconer, or D. S. Falconer as he normally styled himself, died on 23 February 2004, within days of his 91st birthday. His health had deteriorated and his eyesight, sadly, was failing, but he was able to retain many of his interests until his brief final illness. He had been for many years a prominent member of a remarkable group of geneticists that the late C. H. Waddington had gathered in Edinburgh after the second world war, and for a long time he was regarded as a leading authority in the area of quantitative genetics.