One of the hallmarks of Norman R. Davidson's career has been the tendency to find new and interesting projects in areas relatively unrelated to those in which he has previously worked. Davidson received his doctoral degree shortly before the beginning of World War II and, thus, some of his earliest research was related to military programs. After returning to an academic career at the end of the war, he began a series of studies on the kinetics of ultrafast reactions. In order to study these reactions, Davidson found it necessary to develop new techniques and instruments that could detect the presence of various chemical species over time periods of less than 10^-5 second.

By the 1960s, Davidson had found a new topic of interest, the structure and function of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Again, Davidson developed methods of studying this important molecule that had previously been unavailable to chemists...