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Milton Harris was a scientist who founded the Harris Research Laboratories and, for six years, chaired the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society.
Harris was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Portland, Oregon. His first independent business enterprise, at the age of twelve or thirteen, was building crystal radio sets. A high school science course piqued his interest in chemistry. In 1924, at the age of sixteen, Harris began his college education at Oregon State University, then known as Oregon Agricultural College. Despite the lack of a chemistry department at that time, Harris pursued a degree in chemical engineering and took all available courses in chemistry.
At the age of 18, Harris graduated from OAC, and began graduate work at Yale University. Upon his graduation from Yale in 1929, Harris took his first job as a chemist at the Cheney Brothers Mill. Harris was called away from Cheney in 1931 to join a new textile research group at the National Bureau of Standards. Harris was later appointed director of the research group, which would ultimately produce roughly 200 scientific papers on various aspects of textile chemistry. While he was at the NBS Harris, along with Vincent du Vigneaud, made important discoveries with regard to similarities between the three-dimensional molecular structures of wool, insulin, and human hair.
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