Gordon Lawson (d 2018) was a microbiologist, head of veterinary pathology, and "reader" at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies in the University of Edinburgh. He is credited with discovering the bacterium that has been named after him, Lawsonia intracellularis. This pathogen is associated with enteric disease in a variety of animals, but most prominently in pigs. In the early 1970s, this new bacterium was detected and associated with proliferative enteropathy (PE) in pigs. There was difficulty in cultivating the bacterium in vitro, until it was properly characterised for the first time in the early 1990s. It was found to be a curved bacilli within gut enterocytes, most predominately within the apical cytoplasm of crypt epithelial cells, and is an obligate intracellular Gram negative bacterium. Thus, it was named Lawsonia intracellularis in recognition of Gordon Lawson’s discovery of the bacterium.

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