Lionel Harrison was born May 29, 1929, in Liverpool, U.K. He received his first degree in chemistry in 1949 and a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1952, both from the University of Liverpool. He worked for Imperial Chemical Industries in Ardeer, Scotland, from 1952 to 1955. Shortly afterward, he moved to Canada and began teaching at UBC, becoming an associate professor in 1963 and a full professor in 1967. In 1973 he chaired an oral exam for Thurston Lacalli’s doctoral dissertation and became interested in the chemical underpinnings of biological patterning. As well as numerous articles, he published two books, Kinetic Theory of Living Pattern and How Does Life Devise Its Shapes and Sizes? published posthumously.
Additionally, Harrison was asked by CBC-TV to produce a computer simulation of the growth of Acetabularia, a green seaweed that grows in warm seas. He was the recipient of a research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada in Physical Chemistry, Especially Kinetic Theory, of Biological morphogenesis. He was a fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada, a member of the Institute of Applied Mathematics at UBC, and the Department of Botany. Harrison retired and became an emeritus professor in 1994. He died in 2008.