Text below are quotes from email messages sent by Barrie in November and December 2022.
“S Barrie Walker has just been awarded a long service award by the British Standards Institution (BSI) for his services spanning over 50 years in connection with New Common Names for Pesticides. The BSI acts as Secretariat for ISO (International Organization for Standardization) in this area, the relevant ISO Committee is known as TC/81 (TC = Technical Committee). During his tenure on the Committee, he was Chair for 17 years and was involved in the preparation and passing of more than 600 new names covering this period of time. He deputised for Dr. John Silk on many occasions and then took on his position when he retired.
Barrie is a founding member of the CNA (UK) [Chemical Notation Assocation, a previous name for the CSA Trust. See CSA Trust History] and for many years ran the WLN (Wiswesser Line Notation) Tutorials with Wendy Ann Warr and Phil McHale.
Dr. John Silk was the inventor of The Silk Notation, a predecessor of WLN. The Silk notation was around in the 60’s and when what was then ICI (The forerunner of what is now AstraZeneca) first decided to computerise its chemical data there were two contenders, both linear notation systems, The Silk Notation and Bill Wiswesser’s WLN. The Silk Notation was more aimed at patents and Markush structures, not individual molecules, thus lost out to WLN. WLN then became the backbone on CROSSBOW (Computerised Registration Of StructureS Based On Wiswesser) launched in 1969, a WLN providing a unique identifier for each molecule and the main tool for registration of individual molecules. That’s where it all started until MDL’s MACCS system came along in 1980.”
Contact Information: S. Barrie Walker’s Profile, Directory of Consultants, Royal Society of Chemistry (Consultant in Chemical Information, Data & Databases)
Chemical Structure Association Trust 