Nationality British Name John Buckingham | Role Chemist Fields Organic chemistry | |
 | ||
Born March 21, 1943
London, England ( 1943-03-21 ) Died August 28, 2015, Carinthia, Austria | ||
2015 george awards john buckingham
John Buckingham (March 21, 1943 – August 28, 2015) was a British chemist known for his authorship of several chemical dictionaries including the Dictionary of Natural Products.
Contents
Education and career
John Buckingham won a scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys' School at the age of 11. It was there that he discovered chemistry and chose to apply to the University of Southampton where he won a First Class Honours degree. He gained his D.Phil from the University of Sussex.
He became a lecturer in Chemistry in William Klyne’s department at Westfield College, University of London. Professor Klyne was writing a book on organic stereochemistry for Chapman & Hall and John’s expertise and attention to detail made him the ideal co-author. So the Atlas of Stereochemistry was published in 1974 to great reviews, with two subsequent volumes following a few years later.
John’s skills were recognized by the managing director at Chapman & Hall, Richard Stileman, who then engaged him on a full-time basis to prepare a new edition of the Heilbron’s Dictionary of Organic Compounds (DOC). This was a multi-volume reference work which needed bringing into the modern world with significant amendments required for the fifth edition. John was pivotal in converting the DOC into a database, and this now forms the basis of the modern DOC and its related dictionaries.
Once the DOC was published, John’s attention turned towards the chemistry of natural products such as alkaloids including strychnine and morphine, taxol. John had the foresight to anticipate the tremendous growth in natural products research and its relevance to the modern drug industry. His expertise with deciphering chemical literature and organising natural products by structure, coupled with his unflagging energy and enthusiasm, culminated in the publication of the Dictionary of Natural Products. This heralded a new phase of publishing with electronic products very much at the forefront. The CD ROM version of the Dictionary was published in 1991, two years before the book was published. It continues to be updated twice a year and John continued working on it full-time until the end. As Fiona Macdonald, the current editor of the Dictionary commented in a eulogy at his memorial service: "No other publication has ever achieved the breadth and depth of the Dictionary of Natural Products and today it is widely regarded as the benchmark in natural product information. John was very proud of its success and it truly is his life’s work and his legacy."