Henry M. Leicester
Henry Marshall Leicester (1906–1991) was an American biochemist and a respected historian of chemistry. He grew up in San Francisco as the youngest of three children, with parents who were early members of the Sierra Club. He finished Lowell High School at 16 and went on to Stanford, where he earned a BA in chemistry (1927), an MS (1928), and a PhD in biochemistry (1930). His doctoral work was on aromatic selenonium salts and the relative electronegativities of organic radicals.
From 1930 to 1938, during the Great Depression, Leicester traveled and conducted research in Europe (Zurich and London), taught at Oberlin College for a year, spent part of a year at the Carnegie Institution, and held a year-long research associate position at Stanford. He published widely, including six papers with Francis Bergstrom on selenium compounds, a paper with Leopold Ružička on betulin derivatives, a paper with Thomas Midgley Jr. on polystyrene, and two papers with Albert L. Henne on organic fluorine compounds.
Between 1938 and 1940 he was a research associate at Ohio State University, where he developed a strong interest in the history of chemistry in Russia. He corresponded with Soviet chemists and collected many Russian books on the history of science, later donating the collection to Stanford.
Leicester was a professor of biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco (now UCSF Dugoni School of Dentistry) from 1941 to 1977, retiring as professor emeritus. He also chaired the physiology and biology departments and led the college’s research program. He chaired the American Chemical Society’s History of Chemistry Division from 1947 to 1951 and helped found the journal Chymia, serving as editor-in-chief from 1950 to 1967.
A prolific writer, Leicester edited or translated several books and collaborated with Herbert Klickstein on A Source Book in Chemistry, 1400-1900 (1952). He contributed to Collier’s Encyclopedia Americana, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. He became an international authority on the history of chemistry in Russia and was known for his work on caries and the promotion of water fluoridation in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1962 he received the Dexter Award for his achievements in the history of chemistry and gave an address titled Some Aspects of the History of Chemistry in Russia. He married Leonore Azevedo in 1941; they had a son and two daughters. Their son, Henry M. Leicester Jr., became a professor of English literature at UC Santa Cruz and wrote The Disenchanted Self.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:55 (CET).