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George Porter was born in Stainforth, Yorkshire, in 1920. He was educated at Thorne Grammar School 1931-1938, and was Ackroyd Scholar at the University of Leeds, 1938-1941. He served as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Radar Officer in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean from 1941 to 1945. In 1949 he married Stella Jean Brooke and they had two sons, John Brooke and Andrew Christopher George. In 1945 he went to the University of Cambridge to research chemical kinetics and photochemistry. He stayed at Cambridge until 1954 when he became Assistant Director of the British Rayon Research Association in Manchester. He studied the problems of dye fading and phototendering of fabrics. He was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield from 1955 to 1963 and became Firth Professor of Chemistry there from 1963 to 1966. He was also Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) from 1963 to 1966. In 1966 he became Director of the RI as well as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry of the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory at the RI. He researched into applying flash photolysis to the problem of photosynthesis and extended it to the nanosecond and picoseocnd regions. He remained Director of the RI until 1985 and during this time, he gave many lectures including several broadcasts on television. He published many papers and also books such as Chemistry for the Modern World, 1962 and Chemistry in Microtime, 1996. He received many awards for his work, gaining the Davy medal in 1971, the Rumford medal in 1978, the Michael Faraday medal in 1991 and the Copley medal in 1992. In 1967 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with M. Eigen and R. G. W. Norrish. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1960 and became President of the Royal Society in 1985 until 1990. He became Chairman of the Centre for Photomolecular Sciences, at Imperial College London in 1990. He was knighted in 1972, awarded the Order of Merit in 1989 and made a life peer in 1990.