Hopeton Overton Brown is a recording engineer and producer who rose to fame in the 1980s mixing dub music as "Scientist". A protégé of King Tubby, Scientist's contemporaries include several figures who, working at King Tubby's studio, had helped pioneer the genre in the 1970s: Ruddock, Bunny Lee, Philip Smart, Pat Kelly and Prince Jammy.
Scientist was introduced to electronics by his father, who worked as a television and radio repair technician. He began building his own amplifiers and would buy transformers from Tubby's Dromilly Road studio. While at the studio, Scientist asked Tubby to give him a chance at mixing. He was taken on at Tubby's as an assistant, performing tasks such as winding transformer coils, and began working as a mixer in the mid-1970s, initially creating dubs of reworked Studio One tracks for Don Mais's Roots Tradition label, given his chance when Prince Jammy cut short a mixing session for Mais because he was too tired to continue. His name originated from a comment by Tubby to Bunny Lee, with regard to his technical proficiency, "Damn, this little boy must be a scientist." He left King Tubby's at the end of the 1970s and became the principal engineer for Channel One when hired by the Hoo Kim brothers, giving him the chance to work on a 16-track mixing desk rather than the four tracks at Tubby's.
Scientist came to prominence in the early 1980s and produced many albums, his mixes featuring on many releases in the first part of the decade. He made a series of albums in the early 1980s, released on Greensleeves Records with titles themed around Scientist's fictional achievements in fighting Space Invaders, Pac-Men, and Vampires, and winning the World Cup. The music on these albums was played by Roots Radics, his most frequent collaborators. In particular, he was the favourite engineer of Henry "Junjo" Lawes, for whom he mixed several albums featuring the Roots Radics, many based on tracks by Barrington Levy. He also did a lot of work for Linval Thompson and Jah Thomas. In 1982 he left Channel One to work at Tuff Gong studio as second engineer to Errol Brown. Scientist worked as an engineer in recording studios in the Washington, D.C. area starting in 1985.
Licensing issues
Scientist has alleged in court that Greensleeves originally released albums without his knowledge, according to his interview with United Reggae online magazine. After this, Dub Мир label began working directly with Scientist to reissue his best-known work. In 2016, Greensleeves removed the Scientist moniker for a run of reissues, substituting titles such as Junjo Presents: Wins The World Cup.
