Bob Stembridge, bob.stembridge@thomson.com, Customer Relations, Thomson Scientific, 77 Hatton Garden, EC1N 8JS London, United Kingdom, and Gez Cross, gez.cross@thomson.com, Editorial Operations Group, Thomson Scientific, EC1N 8JS London, United Kingdom

Peter Norton is recognized for a career devoted to enhancing access to chemical information via systematic indexing. Starting as a synthetic organic chemist at the Aspro-Nicholas pharmaceutical company, Peter soon became involved in information research and found himself searching a new punchcard system for patent information. In 1963 Peter joined Derwent where he was responsible for the creation of the Derwent Manual code, Fragmentation Code and Plasdoc Code systems. Later in his career he was a member of the team that created the Markush DARC chemical structure-based indexing and retrieval system used as the basis for the Merged Markush Service. This paper will review the work of this “renaissance information professional” and his contributions to the field of chemical information search and retrieval.