2004 RACI One-day Natural Products Group Symposium

Abstract

is dedicated to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute’s Natural Products group. The group meets annually, in the first week of October, for a one-day symposium at a venue in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This year’s program was held at Southern Cross University (SCU) in Lismore and attracted a large audience from Queensland, as well as NSW, because of Lismore’s proximity to the Queensland border. The most recent program can be found on the web at http://www.chem.mq.edu.au/npg. This collection of seven papers form the proceedings of the 2004 one-day symposia and I would like to thank the authors for their patience and our sponsors Davies Collison Cave, Biosignal, Agilent Technologies, Medos and of course the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) for their generous support. Natural products chemistry has a long history in Australia. In fact, the first chemistry department in the country, at the University of Sydney, was founded on natural products chemistry with such great names as H. G. Smith, Sir Robert Robinson, Ernest Ritchie, W. C. Taylor and Rod Richard, to name just a few. Australia’s unique flora and fauna has assured more or less continuous interest in natural products chemistry in this country, both terrestrially and (more recently) in the marine environment. However, interest in natural products and natural product chemistry has surged in the last year or two and we all hope that this trend continues, spurred on by the new Biotech boom that is focused on the pharmaceutical industry and the quest for new products for human health. The scientific program reflected the current state of natural products chemistry in Australia and the first paper in the special issue, by Ian Southwell, set the scene by outlining the history of natural products research in the Department of Primary Industries over the past 25 years. An historic perspective also opened the Symposium, with a lecture from Peter Waterman, who also opened the 1999 RACI Natural Products Symposium [1]. At that time, Southern Cross University lured Peter from the UK with the promise of a Centre for Phytochemistry (now Centre of Phytochemistry and