Wainwright graduated from the in the field of botany. He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy from the same university in the field of mycology. After he went to the National Council of Canada as postdoctoral fellow, where he obtained a qualification in environmental microbiology.
After his postdoctoral fellowship, he went to work at the University of Sheffield.
Wainwright"s interests are in astrobiology and the history of science. He claimed that the idea of natural selection is not original to Darwin"s or Wallace"s theory. Also, he has claimed that the red rain in Kerala is a biological entity.
Wainwright has also written widely about the history of the discovery penicillin (including that Hitler’s life was saved by the drug) and streptomycin and on the hypothesis that bacteria and other non-virus microbes cause cancer.
