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 where he established the NCI Drug Information System (DIS),
an interactively searchable database of chemicals that have been
tested by 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 16 books.
He retired from NIH in 1998 and now
lives in Williamsburg, Virginia 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 (titles subsequently acquired by John Wiley & Sons, Inc) including 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 ten books dealing with chemical reference
information, particularly in the field of medicinal chemistry
