Keith Roberts Porter: 1912–1997

Keith Roberts Porter died on May 2, 1997, just over a month short of his 85th birthday. He had the perspicacity, good fortune, and patience to take advantage of the fast moving frontier of analytical biology after the Second World War to provide many of the techniques and experimental approaches that established the new field of biomedical research now known as cell biology. He was renowned for taking the first electron micrograph of an intact cell, but his contributions went far beyond that seminal instance. They ranged from technical developments, such as the roller flask for cell culture and the Porter-Blum ultramicrotome, to experimental and observational achievements, such as studies on the synthesis and assembly of collagen, on the role of coated vesicles in endocytosis, on lipid digestion in the intestine, and on the universality of the 9 + 2 axoneme in cilia. The initial ultrastructure descriptions of...