Bill Milne received his Ph.D. from University of Manchester in England and after a two year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin joined the NIH in 1962. He worked in the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute until 1981 studying applications of mass spectrometry in chemistry and biochemistry, and the development of the NIH-EPA Chemical Information System . He then moved to the National Cancer Institute's Developmental Therapeutics Program where he established the NCI Drug Information System (DIS), an interactively searchable database of chemicals that have been tested by the NCI for antitumor activity. Between 1990 and 1998 he worked on the development and use of 3D databases, in particular a 3D version of the DIS. During his career at NIH he has spent study leaves in Russia (1970), Australia (1972) and Slovenia (1996). He served in 1990 as Chairman of the Division of Computers in Chemistry of the American Chemical Society; he also has served as an Editor for CRC Press. He has published over 180 research papers and 18 books.

He retired from NIH in 1998 and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he enjoys himself writing and editing. From 1989 through 2004, he was Editor-in-Chief of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences , and in addition, he edited many Chemistry publications for Ashgate Publishing whose titles,subsequently acquired by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,  include Drugs: Synonyms and Properties and Traditional Chinese Medicines, available online from CambridgeSoft.

Bill has been a pioneer in both 2D and 3D chemical structure searching. Recognizing the possibly large dividends of the application of modern computing techniques to problems in chemistry and biochemistry, he initiated the NCI's computer-aided drug discovery efforts based upon recognition of pharmacophores and searching in 3D databases for compounds containing them. This technique was used successfully with protein kinase C , HIV-1 protease and HIV-1 integrase and is now a standard method. With Ashgate, he has published thirteen books dealing with chemical reference information, particularly in the field of medicinal chemistry