Lloyd Noel Ferguson
[2][3][4][5] As a child in Oakland, California, Ferguson had a backyard laboratory in which he developed a moth repellent, a silverware cleanser, and a lemonade powder.[9] During his time at Berkeley, Ferguson worked with Melvin Calvin on the synthesis of Schiff base ligands used to form transition metal complexes that mimic the oxygen-carrying ability of biological proteins.While affiliated with Howard University, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 and an NSF grant in 1960 that allowed him to travel to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark, and to ETH Zurich in Switzerland.[5] Beginning with Ferguson's 1958 paper in the Journal of Chemical Education,[12] he developed a large body of knowledge around taste as it relates to the structure of organic compounds.[13] In the arena of chemosensing, Ferguson also published on carcinogens and chemotherapy, helping to summarize many of the mechanisms for chemical carcinogenesis and methods for determining structure-function relationships in anticancer agents.