Jake MacMillan

John MacMillan (13 September 1924 – 12 May 2014), always known as Jake MacMillan, was a British scientist who worked at the interface between biology and chemistry. He "became renowned for his work on isolating, naming and determining the chemical structure of gibberellins, which regulate growth and influence processes such as stem elongation and germination".

Biography John MacMillan was born on 13 September 1924 in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, and lived there for his first 10 years. His father, John, like his grandfather, was a “signalman on the old London Midland and Scottish (LMS) railway line”, and his mother, Barbara (née Lindsay) came from a farming background. His parents, he and his younger brother lived in a two-room tenement, in which the ‘best’ room, as was the custom then, was never used, so the family essentially lived in a single room.

MacMillan gained a place in the top entry form at Lanark Grammar School.

Imperial Chemical Industries After gaining his PhD in 1948, MacMillan was not attracted to academia, especially with its low salaries. Instead, “as luck would have it […] an ideal position with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) fell into my lap”. at Stanford, and then to New York to attend the 132nd Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). MacMillan made a second trip to the USA in 1960, to attend the 138th ACS meeting in New York. There he met and developed a life-long collaboration with Nobutaka Takahashi, leading to several visits to Japan.

Long Ashton Research Station Again with funding from AFRC, Jake MacMillan was able to take up research at Long Ashton Research Station “working at the bench and learning new methods in enzymology and molecular biology [and] for the first three years he spent six months each year in Bernie Phinney’s lab at UCLA”.

In 2003 MacMillan returned to the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, as Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow.