Sir Alan Rushton Battersby

Alan Battersby was one of the most productive, eminent and internationally admired organic chemists of his generation. He had a huge work ethic and yet led a life that was well balanced with much time devoted to family and outdoor activities. He inspired large numbers of students to pursue careers as chemists in academia and industry. He was renowned for applying his great skills in chemistry to decipher the routes by which complex natural products are built in nature from basic chemical building blocks and was a pioneer in the field of biosynthesis of natural products. He launched this initiative in 1954 at Bristol, and continued it from 1962 at Liverpool, establishing in great mechanistic detail how diverse classes of isoquinoline alkaloids are derived from the aromatic amino acids phenylalanine and tyrosine. Also at Liverpool, he solved the longstanding puzzles of the origin of the tropolone alkaloid colchicine, and of the indole alkaloids. On moving to Cambridge in 1969, he initiated research into the biosynthesis of the porphyrins, chlorins and corrins represented by haem, chlorophyll and vitamin B12, and revealed in detail how a fundamental rearrangement takes place en route to the macrocyclic structures of all these important biomolecules. Finally, he defined in depth the multi-step pathway that leads to coenzyme B12, a veritable Everest that he conquered just before his seventieth birthday.