Botanist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who collected the original plant samples that led to the development of the cancer-fighting drug Taxol. Arthur Barclay was born in Minneapolis and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His parents taught at the University of Tulsa, from which he graduated. He received a master's degree and a doctorate in botany from Harvard University, going on to join the New Crops Research Branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (at Beltsville, Maryland) in 1960. He made his first collections for the organisation in South Africa, alongside Howard Gentry, followed by fieldwork in the south-western U.S. in pursuit of oilseeds. In particular the team collected Lesquerella and Barclay also collected farther south, in Mexico.
It was in 1962, while leading a small team collecting in the western U.S. for the National Cancer Institute (N.C.I.), that Barclay filled a bag with material from the Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia Nutt.). There was no special reason for him to choose this tree; the N.C.I. programme screened some 35,000 plants in all for anticancer activity. The following year, Monroe Wall at the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina discovered that extracts of the yew's bark possessed the anti-tumour properties they were looking for. In 1967, with Mansukh Wani, he isolated the active ingredient and the pair announced their findings. However, the source of the chemotherapy drug was an extremely unsustainable one: the bark of a 40-foot Pacific yew tree, which may have taken 200 years to reach that height, yielded barely half a gram of the drug. A related compound was eventually isolated from the common English yew, Taxus baccata L. and Taxol (the trademark name for Paclitaxel) was finally brought to the market in 1993, being used as an effective treatment for ovarian cancer, breast cancer, certain forms of lung cancer and other cancers.
Sadly, Barclay was forced into retirement at the age of just 49 due to an illness for which there was no miracle cure. After a 21-year career at the U.S.D.A., during which he travelled frequently as part of the government's 'shotgun strategy' toward plant exploration, collecting in Colombia and Chile as well as North America and South Africa, he was afflicted with a debilitating neurological disorder. Rehabilitation treatment helped him to overcome the disease, however, and he moved to Florida in 1999 with his wife, Janet McCutcheon Barclay. He died in Orlando in 2003 following a heart attack.
Sources:
Anon., 2003, "USDA Botanist Arthur Barclay Dies", Washington Post Nov 16, 2003: C.11
J. Goodman and V. Walsh, 2001, The Story of Taxol: 50-51
M. Jacoby, 2005, "The Top Pharmaceuticals That Changed The World", Chemical and Engineering News, 83(25).
