Keith R. Porter

Keith R. Porter

Keith Roberts Porter (1912–1997) was a Canadian cell biologist. He did pioneering biology research using electron microscopy of cells, 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. He also was responsible for naming the endoplasmic reticulum.

Keith Porter was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia on June 11, 1912, 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. The Keith R. Porter Endowment for Cell Biology, founded in 1981, supports an annual Keith R. Porter Lecture at the conference of American Society for 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, Baltimore County and the University of Pennsylvania. UMBC's Keith R. Porter Core Imaging Facility is dedicated to Porter.

In 1970, together with Albert Claude and George E. Palade, Porter was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. Porter's colleagues 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.