John William Westley

Dr. John William Westley, 75, died December 12, 2011, at his home in Petaluma, California, after a brave and lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Westley was born on February 5, 1936, in the village of Sawston, seven miles south of Cambridge, England. He was the youngest child of Harold Sydney Westley and Daisy Victoria Sorrell. At the time of his birth, his brother Ivan Sydney was 11 years old and his sister Elma was 9. As a young man, he was an excellent student and cricket player. He attended, on scholarships, the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys and the University of Nottingham. He received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry with First Class Honors and the Jesse Boot Prize in 1958, and his Ph.D. degree in 1961, all from the University of Nottingham.

In July 1961, Dr. Westley, his wife, Angela, and one-year-old son, Nicholas John, moved from Nottingham to Palo Alto, California. There he worked in the Chemistry Department at Stanford University with Professor Carl Djerassi. After a brief collaboration with J.C. Craig at UCSF, he returned to Stanford to work on a NASA-funded project under the direction of Nobel Laureate, Joshua Lederberg, of the Genetics Department, to look for ways of detecting extraterrestrial life. In 1964, Dr. Westley and his wife had a second son, Peter Miles.

In 1968, Dr. Westley and his family moved to New Jersey, where he took a job as Associate Director of the Microbiology Department of the pharmaceutical firm, Hoffman-LaRoche. At Roche he and his department identified, solved the structures of, and biosynthesized antibiotics. In 1972, Chao-min Liu, a microbiologist from Taiwan and the University of Wisconsin, joined Dr. Westley at Roche. In their retirement years, John and Chao-min agreed that their work on Polyether Antibiotics, summarized in two volumes by the publisher Marcel Decker (1976-7), were the most successful collaborations of their scientific careers.

In 1985, Dr. Westley left Roche to join SKB, now known as Glaxo SmithKline, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. There he directed a natural products group of four senior chemists and their support teams, dedicated to the isolation of compounds with potential pharmacological activity from terrestrial plants and marine organisms. Dr. Westley had 110 publications and was awarded 32 patents during the course of his career. Some of the compounds patented improve cardiovascular function and one has potential as an anti-obesity agent.

During a summer tennis clinic at Glaxo in 1992, Dr. Westley met a charming young lady, Camille Dixon. He had always intended to retire to California, where both his sons lived. In 1996, John persuaded Camille to move with him to Northern California. They were married in the town of Sonoma on July 27, 2003.

Dr. Westley is survived by his wife, brother, two sons, their wives, Monica and Lisa, and four grandchildren, Aidan, Allison, Sydney, and Alexandra. John's love of life, work, family, and friends will be sorely missed by all who knew him. A memorial service will be held at the Adobe Creek Funeral Home on Tuesday, December 20.