Past President

David Kingston became interested in natural products as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, discovering through a series of lectures by Lord Todd that natural products were not just interesting structures, but were also medicinally important. He received a B.A. and Ph.D. with Don Cameron and Lord Todd, and began his research career at the State University of New York at Albany in 1966. He moved to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1971, where he began his studies of potential anticancer agents from plants. He became interested in the ASP in part through the series of review papers published in Lloydia by Jonathan Hartwell (which was later published as a bound volume: Plants Used Against Cancer. A Survey), leading him to attend his first ASP meeting in 1974 in Chicago. He found the ASP to be very friendly and its members very helpful, something that has not changed over the years since. He initiated the Book Review section of J. Nat. Prod. in 1979, serving as Book Review Editor from 1979-2002, and as Associate Editor from 1983- 1998, where as the first chemistry professor to serve as an editor, he helped to increase the journal’s visibility among other chemists. The Research Achievement Award (RAA), his first major award, aided his promotion to University Distinguished Professor and led to additional honors, including the Ernest Guenther Award of the ACS in 2008, as well as almost 200 invited lectures. For the 1985 joint meeting in Chapel Hill, he served as the Chair of the Scientific Program Committee, and this was also the first meeting where the attendance broke 300. That meeting and the 1999 meeting in Amsterdam where he received the RAA, are two of many special meetings that stand out as particularly memorable. (Russell B. Williams)