Rodney Porter was born in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire in 1917. He was educated at Ashton-in-Makerfield Grammar School (1928-1935) and Liverpool University (1935-1939), where he gained a first class degree in biochemistry. The second world war interrupted his post-graduate research at Liverpool and he saw active service in the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Service Corps. On demobilization in 1946 he studied for his PhD under Fred Sanger in the department of biochemistry, at Cambridge, and it was here that he developed an interest in immunoglobulins. He married Julia Frances New, a research assistant in the physiology department at Cambridge, in 1948, and they had five children. After completing his PhD, he moved to the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, London in 1949. He was offered a position there by Thomas Work to pursue the interest of his own choice - the nature of antibody molecules. Although he made important advances during the period, notably the division of the molecule into three parts by papain digestion, in 1959 he still had little idea of the structure of the molecule (Bibliog. 15). In 1960 he was appointed to the first chair of immunology in Britain at the Wright-Fleming Institute at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington, London. His discovery of the 4-chain structure of antibody molecules in 1962 (Bibliog. 18-19) followed shortly after the demonstration by Geoffrey Edelman in the USA that antibodies were multichain proteins. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Edelman in 1972 (Bibliog. 21). He was appointed the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford in 1967 where his interests changed to the proteins of the complement system. He died tragically in a road accident in 1985, shortly before he was due to retire, at the age of 67.

Beside the Nobel Prize, Porter received many honours in his lifetime. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1964, and received the Royal and Copley medals in 1973 and 1983 respectively. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and shortly before his death he was made a Companion of Honour. He was elected to foreign membership of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972.

Further information can be found in the Dictionary of National Biography and Who Was Who.