(1918-) 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 US 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 behavior, 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. + prikaži više