A native of Nova Scotia, Porter graduated from Acadia University in 1934 and received his doctorate in biology at Harvard University. His first and perhaps most fruitful scientific period started in the early 1940s at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York. While he was studying cells in tissue culture, it occurred to him that they might be spread thinly enough to be observed with a then-revolutionary type of instrument that used electrons instead of visible light for image formation. The boldness of this idea can hardly be imagined today when electron microscopy has become routine. Then, however, it was so radically new that procedures for specimen preparation were non-existent.
So how did one go about preparing a cell for viewing in this alien but powerful new instrument? A good start was to use an approach analogous to light microscopy, only replacing the glass slide with a thin film of plastic and using heavy metal atoms instead of dyes to enhance contrast. The plastic film with cells attached could be picked up on a small wire mesh, and introduced into the electron beam in the hope that some of the cells would come to lie in a hole of the mesh. In this first experiment, one of the cells did, and as Porter recalled “It became the most photographed cell in history” (see the cover of the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, April 1997). This was the birth of whole-mount electron microscopy, a technique that Porter would return to some 30 years later; and it was the first of his many contributions to the development of techniques for biological electron microscopy, the most significant being the construction, together with Joseph Blum, of the first reliable microtome for cutting thin sections.
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