Rodney Robert Porter was born October 8, 1917, in Newton-le-Willows, near Liverpool in Lancashire, England. His mother was Isobel Reese Porter and his father, Joseph L. Porter, was a railroad clerk. He attended Liverpool University, where he earned a B.S. in biochemistry in 1939. During World War II he served in the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, and the Royal Army Service Corps, and participated in the invasions of Algeria, Sicily, and Italy. After his discharge in 1946, he resumed his biochemistry studies at Cambridge University under the direction of Frederick Sanger.

Porter's doctoral research at Cambridge was influenced by Nobel laureate Karl Landsteiner's book, The Specificity of Serological Reactions, which described the nature of antibodies and techniques for preparing some of them. Antibodies, at the time, were thought to be proteins that belonged to a class of blood-serum proteins called gamma globulins. From Sanger, who had succeeded in determining the...