Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland FRS (8 April 1907 – 27 June 1980) was a Scottish physicist. Biography Sutherland was born on 8 April 1907 at Watten, Caithness. He was the youngest of seven children of Peter Sutherland and Eliza Hope (née Morrison), both teachers. He was taught by his parents until he was ten, when he attended Leven Academy for a year before moving to Morgan Academy in Dundee for 6 years. From there he went to the University of St Andrews where he took the unusual route of studying for a double degree: an MA in mathematics and applied mathematics, and a BSc in physics. This involved a 5-year combination of courses that had not been taken before. He graduated in 1928 and 1929 with first-class honours in each. Sutherland’s first research work was at Trinity College, Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler, but after a year he concluded that he did not have the mathematical ability to be a good theoretical physicist, so he switched to experimental work on Raman spectra with Martin Lowry and C. P. Snow. During this time he met, and was much impressed by, David M. Dennison who was on sabbatical from the University of Michigan. He successfully applied for a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, and so sailed from Liverpool on the MV Britannic in September 1931, en route to Ann Arbor. He worked in Dennison’s group for two academic years on a detailed infrared study of NO2 and N2O4 together with Raman studies on N2O4 and ozone. Having gained a Carnegie Fellowship, Sutherland was able to return to Cambridge, this time to Lennard-Jones’s group where he worked with W G Penney on trying to understand the reasons for the very weak Raman spectra of hydrazine and hydrogen peroxide. This was resolved, as was the that for the ozone spectrum. Sutherland then successfully applied for the Stokes Studentship tenable at Pembroke College, and was elected to a Staff Fellowship the following year. He soon built up a group of very able researchers, including Gordon K T Conn and Mansel Davies. From 1939 Sutherland was engaged in war work. This initially involved locating and disabling unexploded bombs, and later the use of infrared spectroscopy to help in the analysis of the petrol being used by the Germans in their fighters and bombers. He found that iso-octane component of the fuel had a highly characteristic set