Jacquelin K. Barton

In our conversation at Caltech on May 20, 1999, my first question was about Dr. Barton s family background and initial interest in chemistry. 

My family Jived in New York City, and there were no scientists in the family. My father was born in New York City, and was a Supreme Court judge in New York State. I was very close to him. My mother was born and raised in Belgium, where my grandfather was in the diamond business. The family is Jewish. On the day the Germans invaded Belgium, my grandfather was in London on a business trip. My mother and her family 

Of course. Hunter College is not the same as it was decades before, but my colleagues were wonderful. There is a very wide distribution of students there, and some are very motivated. But the focus at Hunter 

Then I moved to Columbia where I was an Assistant Professor, and as far as my colleagues were concerned, I was a new Assistant Professor starting out. The faculty was very supportive. And many of the faculty earlier had been my teachers, and my heroes. I got tenure in two years and became a fiill professor the year after. I moved out to Caltech in 1989. 

While I was at Columbia on the faculty, Peter Dervan, later to be my husband, was at Caltech. He has been at Caltech for over 20 years. We met each other as members of the chemistry community. We sat on the same committees, and even at the beginning reviewed each other s papers. To some extent, in the nucleic acid field, he was probably originally a competitor. But really he was someone I looked up to because of his beautiful work. In 1989, I came to Caltech for a sabbatical. Then and now Caltech was an outstanding place to do chemistry. In 1990, Peter and I were married. 

---

Jacqueline K. Barton is Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1974 and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1979. She did subsequent postdoctoral work at both AT T Bell Laboratories and Yale Uni-... 

Jacqueline K. Barton, California Institute of Technology, Steering Committee Liaison... 

Pyle, Anna Marie and Barton, Jacqueline K. Barton, Probing Nucleic Acids with Transition Metal Complexes. 38 413... 

T. Gregory Drummond, Michael G. Hill and Jacqueline K. Barton, Nature Biotechnology 21, 1192 (2003). 

---