A Tribute James Bull was born in East London, South Africa in 1937, and grew up in KwaZulu-Natal, where he attended school and commenced his University studies. He completed an MSc degree at the University of Natal, Durban, on flavonoid plant extractives, then proceeded to Oxford University as a Commonwealth Scholar in 1961, to further his studies at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory. Here, he made a first acquaintance with steroid chemistry under the tutelage of Sir Ewart Jones and Dennis Meakins,

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... nd completed his DPhil degree on this topic in 1964. Following a post-doctoral period year under William S Johnson at Stanford University, during the early unfolding of the strategy directed toward total synthesis of steroids based upon biomimetic cyclization of polyenes, he returned to South Africa in 1965, taking up a position as researcher at the National Chemical Research Laboratory (NCRL) in Pretoria. His initial research assignment entailed beneficiation of local plant products through selective structural modification, aimed at seeking out potential precursors of novel steroidal hormone analogs. This project evolved into a more broadly based program of predictive design and synthesis, in which steroids and related bioactive substances constituted a strong connective theme that has been sustained throughout his career. During his NCRL career, James progressed through the ranks and, after serving as Head of the Organic Division for 10 years, was appointed as Chief Director, in succession to Piet Enslin, in 1984. At that stage the Laboratory enjoyed international recognition for research excellence and the provision of high quality research services to the South African academic community. Programs of perceived national and regional significance were complemented by an environment in which nascent talent was nurtured in preparation for career outlets in academic and industrial life. This congenial and creative institutional culture was the brainchild of visionary founders of the parent Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1947, and was responsible for nurturing an entire generation of outstanding chemists and the attendant growth in strength and stature of the academic sector in South Africa during the intervening years. Sadly, this irreplaceable resource was to be dismantled within 3 years, following an ill-considered policy shift by the CSIR executive hierarchy in 1987, which resulted in disestablishment of this and other discipline-defined Laboratories, in order to pursue more overtly business-oriented programs based on technology transfer at the expense of innovation. James's fierce opposition to the detrimental impact of this policy change on the national infrastructure of chemistry was unavailing, and precipitated his departure from the CSIR and subsequent appointment to the Mally Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town in 1988, a position which he retains until statutory retirement at the end of 2002. I might add, that many of the top Universities in South Africa were vying for James at that time. The record of James's research career and outputs was shaped to a large extent by the influences of his early training. The Oxford experience proved to be decisive, and kindled a lifelong fascination in the interplay between organic synthesis and conformational analysis, a theme which recurs frequently in his subsequent research career and outputs. His DPhil investigation entailed development of a general stereoselective method for converting steroidal ketones into nitro compounds via nitration -oxidation of oximes, followed by reductive monodenitration, and application of spectroscopic and chiroptical methodology in structural and stereochemical analysis, the latter through collaboration with two of the pioneers in these techniques, William Klyne and Günther Snatzke. During the initial stage of his NCRL career, he enjoyed a fruitful period of collaboration with Piet Enslin, in a study stimulated by the configurational analogy of the cucurbitacin family of tetracyclic triterpenoids with a class of progesterone analogs derived from lumisterol. This entailed extensive skeletal and functional group modification of selected cucurbitacins, in attempts to mimic the functional group patterns of steroidal hormones in templates of unnatural backbone configuration. Although this phase of the project was eventually terminated in favor of synthetic approaches to lead compounds, it contributed new insights into remote functionalization methodology, molecular rearrangements, ring aromatization, and chiroptical analysis, and set the scene for delineating the most promising structural features of the natural product family for incorporation into synthetic targets. Early successes included the first total syntheses of 9-methyl-9β,10α-analogs of 19nortestosterone and 19-norprogesterone. The absence of bioactivity in these analogs proved to be significant, since it hinted at a new interpretation of structure-activity in 9β,10α-steroids. Based upon conformational adaptability, a hypothesis was formulated that led to a total synthesis of a series of 14α-methyl-9β,10α-19-norsteroids, in which bioactivity could be correlated with susceptibility to conformational deformation of the cis-fused central rings. A tangential finding, that certain 14-methyl estradiols of natural configuration display favorable affinity toward the