Scientist specialized in reactions

When he was a doctoral student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1940s, Britton Chance liked to sneak a pet monkey into classes.

"When the professor was looking his way," Inquirer reporter Art Carey wrote, he "would let the monkey peek out its head.

"The goal was to see whether he could elicit more than a blink from the famously unflappable dons."

Even in 2001, when he was 88, "in the gleam in his eyes, you see a still-thriving mischievousness," Carey wrote

On Tuesday, Nov. 16, Mr. Chance, 97, an enzyme researcher and director of the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1949 to 1983, died of heart failure at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

A building on the Penn campus - the Stellar-Chance Laboratories - is named for him.

Dr. Chance got to those British monkey-see classes in an inventive way.

While earning a doctorate in physical chemistry at Penn, Dr. Chance "was dabbling in a sideline - perfecting an automatic ship-steering mechanism," Carey wrote. "British General Electric made Chance an offer: If he'd install the gadget on one of its tankers and go along for a three-month trial cruise to Australia, the company would pay for a fellowship to Cambridge University."

A 1938 Evening Bulletin story reported that the trip for the 24-year-old would begin on the day after his Chestnut Hill marriage to 17-year-old Jane Earle, when they would sail for England and then on the tanker to Australia - "a combination honeymoon and business venture."

Engineering was in the genes. At the time of the marriage, his father, Col. Edwin M. Chance, was president of United Engineers & Constructors Inc. On the trip to Australia, Dr. Chance was taking no risks. He had tested the device on his father's 105-foot ketch on a 1935 trip to the West Indies.

In World War II, Dr. Chance helped develop a radar system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that, among other uses, allowed blimps to spot German submarines off the Eastern Seaboard. For that wartime work, an Army brigadier general visited Penn in 1949 to present him with the President's Certificate of Merit.

Dr. Chance had a lifelong fascination with the water, enough that in 1951 he commissioned construction of a four-man sailboat, and at its helm won the gold medal in the 5.5-meter class at the 1952 Olympics.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he led the national governing body of sailing.