Editorial

As the pace of scientific development continues to increase it becomes ever more of a problem to maintain an overview. This is particularly true of the study of natural products and its position and role in the development of organic chemistry as a whole, and what came to be known as bioorganic chemistry and now increasingly as chemical biology. With this in mind we took the opportunity provided the millennium to commission a series of ‘Millennium Reviews’ from leading authorities in the field. The remit was to provide overviews of the development of the major areas of natural products, and while the balance was left to the individual authors, we asked them to consider the early origins of the area and milestones and highlights on the way to the present state-of-the-art. The idea was also to bring the subject to life, and to convey to, for example, present day graduate students, something of what it was like in earlier times, just who were the personalities and to put flesh on the bones of the names that they see associated with the major development of ideas and indeed controversies that have enlivened and continue to make natural products the vibrant area that it is. I would like to thank all of our authors for the extent to which they have amply fulfilled the difficult and nebulous brief with which they were provided!

Ideally we would have liked to collect the individual reviews into a single volume, but that proved not to be practicable. Instead, and I hope this will prove to be an attractive alternative, they have been assembled into a ‘virtual issue’ accessible from the NPR homepage (www.rsc.org/npr). The full set is listed on the following pages. I trust that this will provide an interesting and worthwhile venture for all our readers, young and old alike!

We are pleased to note that NPR continues to maintain its unique position amongst the many primary and secondary journals and its premier place amongst those dealing with natural products, with an impact factor of 5.30. The next year will see several changes in the Editorial Board and indeed a new Chairman. The Board will remain, as ever, receptive to the views and comments of our valued readership and will welcome ideas and suggestions on how the scope of the journal can be increased or changed to meet the needs of our loyal readership and also those new ones we wish to attract.

The second quarter of 2002 will see the launch of an RSC chemical biology website. This is a joint venture between RSC Publishing and the Chemical Biology Forum. The intention is to provide a valuable resource for the chemical biology community, a major component of which will be a virtual journal, bringing together links to all the RSC's published material in chemical biology. This will of course include the whole content of NPR, and will provide NPR readers with easier access to relevant primary content in RSC journals.

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