Natural Products Desk Reference

John Buckingham is a former lecturer in organic chemistry at the University of London, London, United Kingdom. He has been involved with the Chapman & Hall/CRC chemical database since its inception in 1980, initially as a Chapman & Hall employee and more recently as editorial consultant. From the database, various editions of the Dictionary of Organic Compounds and the Dictionary of Natural Products (both of which have been for some years solely electronic) have been produced. In addition, he compiled (with W. Klyne and later with R. A. Hill) two editions and supplements of the Atlas of Stereochemistry and has coauthored several other specialist dictionaries in the Chapman & Hall/CRC series.

He is also the author of the popular science books Chasing the Molecule and Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine.

Caroline M. Cooper completed her BSc in chemistry at King's College London in 1968, and then worked at Glaxo Research in Greenford. She contributes to the Dictionary of Organic Compounds, and, in 2011, she edited the second edition of Organic Chemist's Desk Reference, both published by CRC Press.

Rupert Purchase studied chemistry at the South-East Essex Technical College [Grad. RIC Part II (External), 1967] and the University of York (DPhil, 1972). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex (2014-2017). Dr. Purchase contributes to The Combined Chemical Dictionary published by CRC Press, and is a freelance editor for Science of Synthesis: Houben-Weyl Methods of Molecular Transformations published by Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart. He edited the Royal Society of Chemistry's (RSC) Environmental Chemistry Group Bulletin from 1995 to 2013 and was awarded the RSC's Long Service Award in 2011.