John T. (Jack) Edward

John T. Edward graduated from the Town of Mount Royal High School, Quebec, in 1935 and from McGill in 1939 with an honours degree in chemistry. He obtained a PhD in organic chemistry from McGill in 1942 for research on the high explosive, RDX.

After ten months of postdoctoral work at Iowa State on the synthesis of antimalarial drugs, he joined the Experimental Explosives Division of the National Research Council in Ottawa in 1943. In 1945 he was transferred to Valcartier, Quebec, and at the end of the war joined the Department of Chemistry of the University of Manitoba.

In 1946 he became a Science Scholar of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and entered the laboratory of Sir Robert Robinson in Oxford, England, where he worked on the constitution of the alkaloid strychnine (D. Phil. 1949). In 1949 he was appointed Imperial Chemical Industries Research Fellow of the Department of Chemistry of the University of Birmingham, England, and in 1952 Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at Trinity College, Dublin.

He returned to McGill's Department of Chemistry in 1956, and was promoted through the ranks, becoming Macdonald Professor of Chemistry in 1973. He has been a visiting research worker or sessional lecturer at the Carlsberg Laboratory, Copenhagen (1953), Université Pierre-et-Marie Curie, Paris (1972-1973 and 1979-1980), the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, Prague (1977), the University of São Paulo (1978) and Umeå University, Sweden (1980, 1982).

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada, a member of the Order of Chemists of Quebec (Vice-President 1971-1972), of the American Chemical Society, and of various other scientific societies. He retired in 1986 and became Emeritus Professor the same year.

His publications dealt with topics in the fields of alkaloids, terpenes, steroids, amino acids and peptides, carbohydrates, heterocyclic compounds, stereochemistry, conformational analysis, molecular volumes, ion mobilities, paper electrophoresis, dipole moments, electrostatic effects, acidity functions, acid-catalyzed reactions, solvent effects, and graph theory.

His "invention" of what is widely known as the anomeric effect or the Edward-Lemieux effect is one of his most important scientific legacies. He was active throughout his long career, publishing over 200 peer-reviewed articles, including one in The Canadian Journal of Chemistry which came out about a month after his passing. In addition he graduated over two dozen PhD and M.Sc students.

Professor Edward is survived by his wife, Dierdre, and their three sons, Valentine, Jeremy and Julian. The members of the Department of Chemistry and the Faculty of Science extend their sincere condolences to the family. His wit and insights will be missed.