John Finlayson grew up in New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Ohio. He completed high school in 1945 at the age of 15. He went to college in Ohio and 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. He was able to do draft deferment for another year to do a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Radiophysics in Sweden.

Dr. Finlayson came back to US in the fall of 1958 and got 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). He did his two years of service there. 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 now. From that point on he never left biologics. He was there for the administrative transition from the NIH to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1972. He worked in the Coagulation Section of the Laboratory of Blood and Blood Products when they were still under the NIH.

Dr. Finlayson worked on plasma derivatives most of his career, especially as related to hemophilia, a medical condition where the body can’t clot properly, sometimes causing severe bleeding, and Factor VIII, an essential blood-clotting protein, sometimes called anti-hemophilic factor (not licensed until 1966), derivatives.