Keith Roberts Porter (1912-1997) was an American cell biologist. He did pioneering biology research using electrom microscopy of cells Electron Microscopy in Chapter 1 of The Cell - A Molecular Approach second edition, by Geoffrey M. Cooper (2000) published by Sinauer Associates., such as work on the 9 + 2 microtubule structure in the axoneme of cilia. Porter also contributed to the development of other experimental methods for cell culture and nuclear transplantation.

Keith Porter was born in Nova Scotia and became a citizen of the United States in 1947. He was an undergraduate at Acadia University and a graduate student at Harvard University. Starting in the late 1930s he did research at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Porter helped found the American Society for Cell Biology and the Journal of Cell Biology.

Porter moved to Harvard University in 1961 and to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1968. He retired in 1983 and did post-retirement work at the University of Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania.

Porter's collegues Albert Claude, Christian de Duve and George E. Palade were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1974 "for describing the structure and function of organelles in biological cells", work that Porter is also well known for.

Awards

• 1964 Gairdner Foundation International Award
• 1970 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize

References

• Peter Satir (1997) "Keith Roberts Porter: 1912-1997" in Journal of Cell Biology Volume 138, pages 223-224.

American biologists