George Porter, 81; Shared Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967

George Porter, 81, who shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on light-driven chemical reactions, died Saturday in London of undisclosed causes.

Porter shared the chemistry prize with his mentor, R.G.W. Norrish of Cambridge University and Manfred Eigen of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Eigen received half the prize and Porter and Norrish a quarter each.

Working under Norrish, Porter used extremely short pulses of light in a device he built to study gaseous free radicals and combustion. One of the practical applications has been the development of ways to stop dyes from fading.

Porter was knighted in 1972 and elevated to the House of Lords in 1990. He also worked with Norrish to develop a technique known as flash photolysis, allowing short-lived molecular fragments to be identified by spectrophotometry.