Sir George Porter(1920–2002)

George Porter was born at Stainforth, a colliery village on the north bank of the river Don eight miles east of Doncaster, on 6 December 1920, the elder son of John Smith Porter, a railway clerk at the Doncaster works, and Alice Roebuck. He was schooled at Thorne Grammar School and won a scholarship to the University of Leeds in 1938 to read chemistry. He took the BSc with first-class honours in 1941, by which time the war had been on for two years and the chemistry department at Leeds was running courses on radar physics for the Royal Navy under the wartime emergency programme. He was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1942 and spent the next four years on radar duty, first at HMS *Cabbala* on the Wirral, then on Atlantic convoy work, then on the cruiser HMS *Belfast* in the Far East where the ship was operating with the British Pacific Fleet through the closing months of the Japanese war. The radar work was where he learned the practical engineering of microsecond-scale electronic measurement that would, four years later, give him the apparatus on which his Nobel Prize was built.

He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1945 to read for a PhD under Ronald G. W. Norrish at the physical chemistry department. Norrish, fifty in 1947, was the British physical chemist of his generation and was working on a problem that the orthodox laboratory tools of the 1940s could not reach: the kinetics of very fast chemical reactions, the millisecond and sub-millisecond timescale on which most photochemistry actually happens. The problem was that you could not measure what you could not see, and the existing optical-spectroscopy techniques of the 1940s required a slow steady-state reaction to read. Porter brought the radar background to the bench. The technique he and Norrish worked out between 1947 and 1950 was flash photolysis: fire a very short, very bright burst of light at the reaction mixture to start the reaction at a known instant, then fire a second, much shorter probing flash microseconds later through the same volume to record the transient spectrum at that moment. By varying the gap between the two flashes you could photograph the reaction's intermediates one slice at a time across a microsecond. The technique made the intermediate states of photochemical and combustion reactions visible for the first time. He took the PhD in 1949 and the Cambridge ScD in 1951.

He moved from Cambridge to the chair of physical chemistry at Sheffield in 1955 (the first British physical-chemistry chair held by anyone under thirty-five for nearly fifty years), where he ran the Department through eleven years of post-war expansion and used flash photolysis to extend the technique into nanosecond and then picosecond regimes. The collaboration with Norrish continued; they shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with the German physical chemist Manfred Eigen for the development of methods (Eigen had developed temperature-jump on a related principle) that made it possible to follow chemical reactions on the microsecond and shorter timescales. Porter was forty-seven and was the youngest British chemist to win the Nobel since Sir William Ramsay in 1904.

He left Sheffield for London in 1966 to become Director of the Royal Institution at Albemarle Street, the institutional home of British chemistry since Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. He ran the Royal Institution for nineteen years to 1985, modernised its research laboratories around picosecond and femtosecond spectroscopy, and continued through it the famous Christmas Lectures programme that Faraday had begun in 1825. He gave the Christmas Lectures himself three times (1969, 1976, 1980); the 1969 series, *The Laws of Disorder*, on entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, became the most-watched chemistry lectures in British broadcasting history and was published as a book that sold ninety thousand copies in the first year. He used the platform throughout to push the position that the basic-science laboratory of an industrial country produced its long-term economic foundations, and that the cuts of the Thatcher decade to UK basic-science funding were the foundational mistake of the period.

He was knighted in 1972, awarded the Order of Merit in 1989, and raised to the peerage as Baron Porter of Luddenham in 1990. He served as President of the Royal Society from 1985 to 1990, the five years that ran from the Westland affair through the publication of the Royal Society's *Climate Change* report (the foundational British scientific document on anthropogenic global warming, which he commissioned and signed off). He moved from the Royal Institution back to research in 1985 as professor at Imperial College and worked there in his eighties on the photochemistry of plant photosynthesis, the topic he believed the next generation's energy economy would have to crack. He died at Canterbury on 31 August 2002, eighty-one years old, six weeks after the death of his wife of fifty-three years, Stella Porter. The Porter name in the English-side catalogue is otherwise the medieval *portour* (the gate-keeper and the load-carrier together); he carried it from a Doncaster railway-clerk's family to the Albemarle Street directorship through which Faraday and Davy had run British chemistry into the modern world.