G.W.A. Milne spent 36 years as a research chemist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA. Here he worked on the use of spectroscopy for structure determination of organic compounds, and on molecular modelling in the design of drugs for the treatment of cancer and AIDS. He has been active for many years in the fields of chemical information and chemical computation, and is the Editor of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences.