Jack Baldwin

Sir Jack Edward Baldwin – 5 January 2020 ) was a British chemist. He was a Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford (1978–2005) and head of the organic chemistry at Oxford.

Education Baldwin was the second son of Frederick C N Baldwin and Olive F Headland. He was educated at Brighton Grammar School and Lewes County Grammar School. He attended Imperial College, London (BSc, DIC, PhD) who described him as his best student. where he published his most significant work — Baldwin's rules for ring closure reactions. It was also where Baldwin met his future wife, Christine Louise Franchi; they married in 1977. In 1978, he moved to Oxford to become head of the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, where he upgraded its facilities and revolutionised the type of work done, while building links between Organic Chemistry and basic biological research. The laboratory formally closed in 2003, but his group moved to the new research facility, the Chemistry Research Laboratory on Mansfield Road.

One of Baldwin's passions was finding out how nature makes chemicals that researchers cannot. This led him to ‘biomimetic’ synthesis: using the principles of nature to improve the generation of biomolecules in the laboratory.

The Baldwin group’s range of interests includes mechanisms of reactions; total synthesis of natural products such as trichoviridin, acromelic acid A, hypoglycin A and lactacystin; and biomimetic synthesis of natural products such as (-)-xestospongin A. Baldwin published over 700 papers.

Some positions held

Derived from Who's Who 2020. 1978 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society 1984 Paul Karrer Gold Medal at the University of Zurich