Spencer Wharton Brown (28 November 1918 – 10 June 1977) was a professor and cyto-geneticist. He taught and did research at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1945 until his murder on June 10, 1977. Brown was internationally renowned and sometimes referred to as "Mr. Chromosome." He was the president of the International Congress of Genetics. Brown was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 in the field of plant studies. He was the first to identify what is called paternal genome elimination in scale insects.