
James McAlpine
President (2004-2005), Fellow (2018), Constitution and Bylaws Committee
University of Illinois at Chicago
Jim McAlpine was born in tropical North Queensland and grew up in almost all of the eastern
states of Australia. He received a B.Sc. (Hons., 1962), M.Sc. (1964) and a Ph.D. (1968) from the
Univ. New England with Noel Riggs, on the stereochemistry of natural products from the New
South Wales bitter vine, Piptocalyx moorei. A postdoc at Northwestern
Univ. on the mode of action and biosynthesis of the erythromycins segued
into a research position in the Pharmaceuticals Division of Abbott
Laboratories, where Jim spent 24 years devoted to the discovery of
principally anti-infectives and anticancer agents. From 1980-1996 he headed
up Abbott’s natural product discovery efforts, which yielded a large number
of novel bioactive microbial secondary metabolites and a series of 9-
dihydrotaxol analogs inspired by the discovery of the parent from Taxus
brevifolia. He was a member of ASP’s Taxol Historical Committee, which,
prior to the 2000 ASP meeting in Seattle, scoped out the collection sight of the first T. brevifolia
samples and chose a nearby location in the La Wis Wis campground, populated with Taxus, for a
historical marker. From 1996-2002 he was Vice President of Chemistry at Phytera Inc., working
on manipulated plant cell cultures and marine derived microbes, and from 2002-2008 he was
with Ecopia BioSciences Inc (later Thallion Pharmaceuticals Inc.) concentrating on the discovery
of microbial secondary metabolites via analysis of the biosynthetic genes of the producing
organism. As president of ASP he worked with committee chairs Nick Oberlies and Eric
Schmidt to revamp the 45 year old constitution of the Society and the establish the rank of ASP
Fellow. (JM)