HEINZ Wolff, who has died aged 89, was a renowned scientist and TV presenter who began his prolific career in Oxford.

Mr Wolff was most famous for the BBC 2 programme The Great Egg Race – a show requiring teams to invent mechanical solutions to various problems – which he presented from 1977 to 1986.

His fascination with how human physiology could adapt to life in space led him to invent a machine to grow food on Mars.

He became scientific director on the British and Russian Project Juno, which sent Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, into space.

Heinz Siegfried Wolff was born in Berlin in 1928, to parents Oswald, a publisher specialising in German history, and Margot Wolff – nee Saalfeld.

He grew up in the days of the Weimar Republic and during the emergence of a Nazi government.

His father Oswald used his connections to help fellow Jews to escape abroad but it attracted the attention of the Gestapo and the family stayed at a different location each night.

When his mother died in 1938, the pair, along with Heinz's aunt, uncle and cousin, fled to Holland.

After the Dutch threatened them with deportation they boarded a boat to Gravesend in Kent.

They arrived on September 3, 1939 – the day Britain and France declared war on Germany – out and moved into a house in Hampstead and Heinz went to a school in Golders Green.

The family was later evacuated to Oxford and, in his mid-teens, Mr Wolff went to the City of Oxford High School for Boys.

He was offered a place to read chemistry at St Catherine's College but was asked to defer for a year due to returning servicemen.

Instead he got his first job as a technician in the department of haematology at the Radcliffe Infirmary, where he invented a machine to count red blood cells.

In 1952 he was hired by the National Institute for Medical Research and sent off to University College London where he earned a first class degree in physiology and physics.

During an NIMR project which took him to Cardiff he met Joan Stephenson, a nurse, who he married in Hampstead in 1953.

The couple had two children, Anthony, a technical director of a printing company, and Laurence, an artist and teacher.

By 1962, he was head of the institute’s biomedical engineering division.

He left the Medical Research Council in 1983 after nearly three decades and founded the institute for bioengineering at Brunel University London – now housed in the Heinz Wolff building.

Colleagues at Brunel –- where he became an emeritus professor working on a time-backing scheme which aimed to solve societal issues connected to the elderly population – recalled his penchant for practical jokes, including arriving at his 80th birthday party celebrations on a scooter propelled by fire extinguishers.

He invented a series of objects to help four groups of people – astronauts, deep sea divers, the elderly and the disabled.

Having joined the European Space Agency in 1976 he advised the British National Space Centre and he served on the board of the Edinburgh international science festival.

In 1987 he was made a fellow of University College London and in 1992 he received the Edinburgh Medal for outstanding contribution by a scientist to society.

With his trademark bow tie and tufts of hair above the ears, Prof Wolff become known to British television audiences in the 1970s and 1980s on the The Great Egg Race, which encouraged teams to invent useful objects out of limited resources.

His on-screen career had began in 1966 on Panorama with Richard Dimbleby, where he produced a radio pill that could measure pressure, temperature and acidity in the gut.

Even after his retirement in 1995 he continued to work on experiments and inventions and was awarded honorary doctorates by the Open University, de Montfort in Leicester, Middlesex University and Oxford Brookes.

He died on December 15.

His wife Joan died in 2014 and he is survived by two sons and four grandchildren.