| spouse = | children = Douglas }} Merton Franklin Utter (23 March 1917 – 28 November 1980) was an American microbiologist and biochemist.
Utter was born in Westboro, Missouri; in his first year, the family moved to New Market, Iowa, for his father's job in a bank.
In 1944, Utter was appointed assistant professor at the University of Minnesota; in 1946, he became an associate professor at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where his colleagues included Harland G. Wood, Warwick Sakami,[2] Thomas P. Singer, Victor Lorber, Lester Krampitz, John Muntz and Robert Greenberg.
As a graduate student and assistant professor he was involved in several classic experiments on the fixation of CO2 in bacteria and higher organisms.
In 1966, he examined the quaternary structure of pyruvate carboxylase of chickens by means of electron microscopy, which was one of its first applications for this purpose.