Bob Williams (chemist)
English chemist (1926–2015)
Robert Joseph Paton Williams (25 February 1926 – 21 March 2015) was an English chemist, an Emeritus Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford.
Education and early life
Robert Joseph Paton Williams was born on 25 February 1926 in Wallasey to Ernest Ivor Williams, a customs and excise officer at Liverpool, and Alice Williams (née Roberts), a milliner; he was the second of four children.
Williams failed to gain a scholarship to Wallasey Grammar School, having missed six months’ schooling with diphtheria, but his parents paid for him to attend. He went on to gain a place and be awarded a Postmastership to read chemistry at Merton College, Oxford in 1944. For his final undergraduate research year he worked with analytical chemist Harry Irving. This enabled him to establish an order of the relative stabilities of metal–organic complexes along the latter half of the transition series manganese through zinc. From these findings he saw a parallel with the selective uptake of metal ions by organisms.
Williams’s plan was to continue working with Irving for his DPhil, but he first visited the lab of Arne Tiselius at Uppsala University. He was impressed by what he saw there, and returned to Sweden after he gained his DPhil in 1950. During the longer stay he worked on protein purification and devised a method called gradient elution analysis.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bob Williams (chemist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.