Derek H. R. Barton (1918-98)

Derek Barton was born in Gravesend, England, on 8 September 1918. His family were in what he referred to as “the wood business”. The young Barton followed in this for several years, but became acutely bored, and decided to seek a university degree, entering Imperial College, London, at 20. The late start was compensated by his securing a bachelor's degree in only two years and then a PhD in only two more. He spent the next two years on war-related research and then another two in industry, where he did not “find the work very challenging in its intellectual content”. However, he was able to return to academia, first at Imperial College and then at Birkbeck, where he was appointed reader in 1950.

But the academic year before that was the crucial one of his career. He spent it at Harvard as a visiting lecturer, filling in for R. B. Woodward who was on sabbatical. Barton had already been thinking about the small barrier to rotation about the C-C bond in ethane, and about the work of Hassel on the shape (conformation, to use the technical term) of the cyclohexane ring. In a seminar given by the Harvard expert on steroid chemistry, L. F. Fieser, Barton proposed explanations for chemical facts that had not been explicable before, based on his developing ideas of ‘conformational analysis’. Fieser urged him to publish a short article expounding his explanation, and this article was the spark that lit the powder keg. Soon all organic chemists recognized that Barton's conformational analysis held the key to understanding a multitude of problems (and in 1969 he was to receive the Nobel prize for this work, sharing it with Hassel).