People of ASP

Gordon did his undergraduate training at Rhodes University, South Africa, and obtained his D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1963. After a postdoc at UCLA, he returned to S. Africa in 1965 where he served on the faculties of the Univ. South Africa, and the Univ. Cape Town. In 1979, he returned to the US to join the Cancer Research Institute at Arizona State University, working with Bob Pettit, and in 1985 he moved to the NCI where he was appointed Chief of the Natural Products Branch in 1990. He retired in 2004, and is currently serving as an NIH Special Volunteer. He was awarded NIH Merit Awards for his contributions to the development of taxol (1991), leadership in establishing international collaborative research in biodiversity and natural products drug discovery (2004), and contributions to developing and teaching NIH technology transfer courses (2004). In 2006 he was awarded the “William L. Brown Award for Plant Genetic Resources” by Missouri Botanical Garden at a two day Symposium held in his honor, where a recently discovered Madagascar plant, Ludia craggiana, was named in his honor. At NCI, his primary focus was the importance of multidisciplinary and international collaboration in drug discovery and development; he has established collaborations between NCI and organizations in many countries promoting drug discovery from their natural resources, and he has given invited talks at conferences worldwide emphasizing this point. Thus it was a privilege and pleasure to join the fellow presidents of European societies in promoting international collaboration at the joint meeting in Amsterdam in 1999. Gordon is proud of the international character of the ASP and the leadership the Society has taken in establishing natural products as the prime source of drug leads, both through the outstanding research performed by its members, and the record of top quality publications appearing in the J. Nat. Prod. (GMC)