John Finlayson grew up in New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Ohio. He completed high school in 1945 at the age of 15 and went to college in Ohio where he was pre-med. Instead of going to medical school, he completed a masters (1955) and Ph.D. (1957) in Biochemistry at University of Wisconsin-Madison and was able to do defer the draft deferment for another year to do a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Radiophysics in Sweden.
Dr. Finlayson returned to the US in the fall of 1958 and got received a commission in the Public Health Service (PHS). He was assigned to the Laboratory of Blood and Blood Products in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Biologics Standards (DBS), where he carried out his two years of service. After 2.5 years, he went into inactive reserve for the PHS and then worked in the same laboratory role but as a civil servant. Dr. Finlayson worked in the Coagulation Section of the Laboratory of Blood and Blood Products as an NIH employee and then continue to perform his duties when his section came under the jurisdiction of the FDA in 1972.
Dr. Finlayson worked on researched plasma derivatives most of his career, especially as related to hemophilia, a medical condition where the body can’t cannot clot properly, sometimes causing severe bleeding, and . Dr. Finlayson worked on Factor VIII, an essential blood-clotting protein, sometimes called anti-hemophilic factor (not licensed until 1966), derivatives.
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Dr. John Finlayson and Mimi Reyes in 1963 in a lab on the first floor of Building 29.
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Dr. John Finlayson's DEAE cellulose column. The column of DEAE (Diethylaminoethyl) cellulose in the back was synthesized by Dr. Finlayson. The far bottle holds water and acts a counterweight to hold the base of the rod. The string handing down is a plumbline to keep the column straight. Sigma pump (black piece) or Sigma motor pump with housing on the top. The housing had small steel fingers hooked to a camshaft for sigmoid motion (a sin curve). The round-bottom flask has tubing leading to a pump to column and to Erlenmeyer flask through a rubber stopper. Photo taken inside cold room, Bldg. 8. Reset in Building 29 after the move in 1960. Buddy Kleer was the refrigerator technician to handle the move.
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Photos from John Finlayson’s Collection at Office of NIH History & Stetten Museum.
