Stephen Finney Mason
Stephen Finney Mason FRS FRSC (6 July 1923 – 11 December 2007) was a British chemist and scientific historian.[1][2]
Biography
Stephen Finney Mason was born in Leicestershire[3] on 6 July 1923, the first child of Leonard Stephen Mason, a garage owner, and Chrissie Harriette (née Finney). He won a scholarship to Wyggeston Grammar School from 1933 to 1941; from there he gained an open scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford. He graduated with a first-class degree in 1945 and, in 1947, was awarded a DPhil on the biological activity of antimalarials, supervised by Dalziel Hammick.
Mason had hoped to continue research in the chemistry department, but his attempt to find a position was blocked by Robert Robinson as the result of a dispute between Robertson and Hammick. He turned, instead, to the history of science.
In 1947 he was invited by F. Sherwood Taylor, the curator of the History of Science Museum, Oxford to join his staff as a departmental demonstrator (junior lecturer), on condition that he also became the secretary and treasurer of the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry. His role in the museum was to give lectures of general interest on the history of science, which required greatly expanding his reading and knowledge. In 1953 he published A History of the Sciences, a book that has been reprinted 27 times and translated into seven languages.[4]
Throughout this time, though, Mason was concerned that he was slipping further away from the bench; and he was also aware that Oxford would not welcome him back as a research scientist.
He was offered a fellowship by Adrien Albert, the head of the Department of Medical Chemistry at the ANU, which was temporarily based in the Wellcome Institute in London. In 1953 Mason joined the man whose work he had long admired, where he was put in charge of a new suite of spectroscopic instruments. In 1955 had to move to UCL (his lab at the Wellcome by was needed by the Institute), where he had the chance to improve his understanding of quantum chemistry and molecular spectroscopy.
Work on the new labs in Canberra was finished in 1956, and Albert returned to the ANU. Mason was offered the chance of a post there but, for various reasons, it did not work out[1]
He was Professor of Chemistry at the University of East Anglia from 1964 to 1970, and Professor of Chemistry at King's College London from 1970 to 1987.[5]
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982.
References
- ^ a b "Stephen Finney Mason. 6 July 1923 — 11 December 2007". Royal Society. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
- ^ "Mason, Stephen Finney". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/100835. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ The ODNB says in Leicester; the FRS memoir says in Anstey.
- ^ Mason, Stephen F (1953). A History of the Sciences: main currents of Scientific Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- ^ ‘MASON, Prof. Stephen Finney’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2016
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