- English
organic chemist who investigated the stereochemistry of natural
compounds. He showed that their biological activity often depends
on the shapes of their molecules and the positions and orientations
of key functional groups. He shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for
Chemistry.
Barton was born in Gravesend, Kent, and studied at Imperial College,
London. He has held various professorships in the UK, beginning
at Birkbeck College, London, 1953 and ending at the University
of London from 1978, the same year that he was appointed director
of the Institute for the Chemistry of Natural Substances in France.
While lecturing in the USA at Harvard 1949-50, Barton studied
the different rates of reaction of certain steroids and their
triterpenoid isomers (substances with the same composition but
differing in the way their atoms are joined and arranged in space).
He deduced that the difference in the spatial orientation of
their functional groups accounts for their behaviour, and so
developed a new field in organic chemistry which became known
as conformational analysis.
Barton went on to examine many natural products, concluding that
the structures of many phenols and alkaloids could be explained
and predicted.
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