"My whole approach to becoming a synthetic organic chemist came from making things with my hands," said White, a chemistry professor at Oregon State University. As a boy growing up in England, he explained, "I was always into fiddling with things — I was a model airplane buff as a teenager, for example."
He describes his work now as "essentially molecule-building, putting pieces together with elegance and skill." In a career that has spanned more than four decades, he and his research team have achieved that goal a remarkable 45 times, recreating natural products made by plants, microorganisms or animals.
Researchers often look to synthetic methods because harvesting a compound directly from nature — especially in quantity, as in the case of a successful drug candidate — may be too expensive or its source too scarce.
One of White's projects in recent years has focused on epothilone, a compound derived from bacteria that shows promise as a treatment for cancer. Early clinical studies show it attacks the same cell processes as taxol, itself a natural product first found in the Pacific yew tree.
Epothilone "caught my eye in the mid-1990s," he said, "and it looked like we could plan its synthesis with little problem. And we did, with a unique and successful 25-step synthesis."
A U.S. pharmaceutical company has since expressed interest in using White's synthesis to develop the compound, and indeed epothilone may one day replace taxol in treating cancer: "The molecule certainly can be synthesized in sufficient quantity, and completely in the lab," unlike taxol, he said.
White received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University in 1959 and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. He is a member of the ACS division of organic chemistry.
The ACS Board of Directors established the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards in 1984 to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry. Cope was a celebrated organic chemist and ACS president. Each award consists of a $5,000 prize as well as an unrestricted research grant of $40,000.