The respected scientist and television presenter Heinz Wolff, who presented the long-running BBC 2 science show The Great Egg Race, has died at the age of 89.

The German-born inventor and social reformer suffered heart failure on December 15, his family said in a statement released through Brunel University London.

Professor Wolff was a former adviser to the European Space Agency and presented The Great Egg Race from 1977 to 1986.

He arrived in Britain at the age of 11 from Berlin as a Jewish refugee with his father and other relatives in September 1939, on the day the Second World War broke out.

Wolff went on to attend school in Oxford, before working in haematology at the city's Radcliffe Infirmary where he invented a machine for counting patients' blood cells.

He then graduated from University College London with a first-class degree in physiology and physics.