Ralph Alexander Raphael (1 January 1921 – 27 April 1998) was a British organic chemist, well known for his use of acteylene derivatives in the synthesis of natural products with biological activity. Early life and education Ralph Raphael was born in Croydon, London on New Year's Day 1921, the son of master tailor Jacob ("Jack") Raphael (1889-1978) and his wife, Lily (née Woolf; 1892-1956). He attended secondary school at Wesley College, Dublin and then Tottenham County School, where a chemistry master, Edgar Ware, introduced him to the subject that would become Raphael's lifetime passion. In 1939 he won scholarships to study at Imperial College, graduating BSc with a first-class degree in 1941 and winning the Hofmann Prize for practical chemistry. During the Second World War both the undergraduate and PhD courses at Imperial College were of two year's duration and Raphael completed the latter in 1943. His doctoral work, aimed at the synthesis of vitamin A, was published in five collaborative papers on the chemistry of acetylenes and that topic became a hallmark of his subsequent research career. Career As a new PhD, Raphael was allocated to the wartime effort on the antibiotic penicillin, working from 1943 to 1946 at the May & Baker laboratories. After the war, he obtained an ICI fellowship (for 1946–1949) that allowed him to return to Imperial College to pursue independent research: an early highlight was his synthesises of penicillic acid, the major product of acid degradation of penicillin (although not containing its characteristic β-lactam substructure). Another was his collaboration with Franz Sondheimer on natural products including an insecticide extracted from Zanthoxylum clava-herculis (a diene then called herculin, now systematically named as (2E,8E)-N-isobutyl-2,8-dodecadienamide); work which led to Raphael's award of the Meldola Medal in 1948. In 1949, Raphael was appointed to his first permanent job, as a lecturer at Glasgow University. During this period he developed his teaching skills and his prodigious work rate can be judged by the fact that he also completed nine chapters in one volume of what would become a classic chemistry text. In 1954, Raphael moved to Queen's University, Belfast as its first Professor of Organic Chemistry. There he published an important book on acetylene chemistry, building on his broad experience of these compounds. In 1957, Raphael returned to the University of Glasgow as the Regius Professor of Chemistry,. In 1960 he finished work on a text-book for undergraduates, which