Porter, George (1920-2002)

English chemist. He and Ronald Norrish shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967 for the development, from 1947, of a technique by which flashes of high energy are used to bring about extremely fast chemical reactions. He was knighted in 1972 and made a baron in 1990.

Porter was born in Stainforth, Yorkshire, and studied at Leeds. After World War II he carried out research at Cambridge under Norrish. Porter was professor at Sheffield 1955-66, director of the Royal Institution 1966-85, and president of the Royal Society 1985-90. In the 1960s he made many appearances on British television.

Porter began using quick flashes of light to study transient species in chemical reactions, particularly free radicals and excited states of molecules. In 1950 he could detect entities that exist for less than a microsecond; by 1975, using laser beams, he had reduced the time limit to a picosecond (10−12 sec). His early work dealt with reactions involving gases (mainly chain reactions and combustion reactions), but he later extended the technique to solutions and also studied the processes that occur in the first nanosecond of photosynthesis in plants. He developed a method of stabilizing free radicals by trapping them in the structure of a supercooled liquid (a glass), a technique called matrix isolation.