Photographs from the Papers of Myron S. Simon

Myron S. Simon, educated at Harvard University under R.B. Woodward, worked as a research scientist at the Polaroid Corporation from 1949 to 1988, when he retired as Research Fellow and Associate Director of Organic Chemistry. He specialized in instant color photography and dye chemistry, and was awarded over seventy U.S. patents. Notably, he produced the first effective cyan dye developer and his work on the opacification process, carried out under the direction of Stanley Bloom, was an essential step in the development of the SX- 70 instant color photography system. Sir Derek Barton (1918-1998) was an English organic chemist who received many awards, including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1969 for his work on "conformational analysis" the study of the three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, which was particularly applicable to steroids. He discovered what is now called the Barton reaction, a photochemical process for synthesizing aldosterone, and did significant research in the chemistry of radicals and photochemistry. Barton taught at several universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, including Harvard University, where he worked closely with R.B. Woodward, Imperial College London, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Texas A&M University, among others. He was knighted in 1972.