British biochemist (1917–1985)

Porter was educated at the university in his native city of Liverpool and at Cambridge University, where he was a pupil of Frederick Sanger. After working at the National Institute of Medical Research from 1949 to 1960 he moved to the chair of immunology at St. Mary's Hospital, London. Porter remained there until 1967 when he accepted the post of professor of biochemistry at Oxford.

In 1962 Porter proposed a structure for the important antibody gamma globulin (IgG). Ordinary techniques of protein chemistry revealed that the molecule is built up of four polypeptide chains paired so that the molecule consists of two identical halves, each consisting of one long (or heavy) chain and one short (or light) chain.

Further evidence was obtained by splitting the molecule with the enzyme papain. This split IgG into three large fragments, two similar to each other known as F_ab (fragment antigen binding) and still capable of combining with antigen, and a crystalline fragment known as F_c (fragment crystalline) without any activity. This immediately suggested to Porter that, because crystals only form easily from identical molecules, the halves of the heavy chain that make up the F_c fragment are probably the same in all molecules. Thus the complexity is mainly in the F_ab fragments where the combining sites are found.

Linking such insights with results obtained by Gerald Edelman and data derived from electron microscopy allowed Porter to propose the familiar Y-shaped molecule built from four chains joined by disulfide bridges with the variable combining part at the tips of the arms of the Y.

In 1972 Porter shared with Edelman the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their work in determining the structure of an antibody.

(b Durham, 26 April 1777; d St Petersburg, 4 May 1842). British painter, writer and diplomat. His family moved to Edinburgh in 1780, and there he knew the young Walter Scott and the Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald. A battle painting owned by Macdonald inspired him to become a painter of battle scenes himself. In 1790 his mother took him to London to see Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, who was impressed by Porter's sketches and arranged for him to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. There he made rapid progress and in 1792 was awarded a silver palette by the Royal Society of Arts for his drawing the Witches of Endor (untraced). The following year he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for Shoreditch Church in London, and he received a number of further commissions over the succeeding years. On a visit to his grandparents in Durham he painted his only known landscape, View of Durham (untraced), which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1797. Also in 1797 he and his sisters Jane Porter and Anna Maria Porter, both writers, founded the short-lived illustrated literary periodical The Quiz, with the support of Thomas Frognall Dibdin. By 1799 the whole family was resident in Joshua Reynolds's old house in London, which was visited by a host of writers and artists including West, Dibdin, Hannah More and James Northcote.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

British biochemist. He shared a 1972 Nobel Prize for his research on the chemical structure and nature of antibodies.

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