Salimuzzaman Siddiqui must be one of the few scientific personalities of the twentieth century to lay genuine claim to being a true Renaissance man. His early university education was in philosophy, a subject for which he retained a lifelong passion. He wrote poetry and admired the work of great Urdu and Persian poets of the past. He remained enchanted by oriental and European classical music right up to the closing years of his long life. He was a significant practitioner of modern painting and could have made a name as an artist. Above all, he was a natural product chemist of the highest quality with the genius of isolating from the plants of the Indian subcontinent pharmacologically active compounds whose structures, when determined by others, were found to contain novel architectural features. Siddiqui was a gifted experimentalist, an immensely cultured and charismatic man.