Jacqueline K. Barton (born May 7, 1952 New York City, NY), is an American chemist. She worked as a professor of chemistry at Hunter College (1980–82), and at Columbia University (1983–89) before joining the California Institute of Technology. In 1997 she became the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and from 2009 to 2019, the Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech. She currently is the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry.
Barton studies the chemical and physical properties of DNA and their roles in biological activities. The primary focus of her research is transverse electron transport along double-stranded DNA, its implications in the biology of DNA damage and repair, and its potential for materials sciences applications such as targeted chemotherapeutic treatments for cancer. Among many other awards, Barton has received the 2011 National Medal of Science and the 2015 Priestley Medal.
Early life and education
Jacqueline Ann Kapelman was born on May 7, 1952, in New York City. Her father served in the Assembly for nearly a decade before serving as a trial judge in the New York Supreme Court next two decades. Her father was one of the trial judges in the Son of Sam serial murder case.
Jacqueline Kapelman attended Riverdale Country School for Girls in Riverdale, New York, where her math teacher, Mrs. Rosenberg, insisted that she be allowed to take calculus at the boys' school. Her interest in chemistry began at Barnard College, where she studied physical chemistry with Bernice Segal. She loved laboratory work and chemical transformations and found Segal an inspiration as a teacher. During her last year at Barnard she married first year medical student Donald J. Barton, receiving her B.A. from Barnard College as Jacqueline Kapelman Barton, summa cum laude, in 1974.
She then studied inorganic chemistry at Columbia University under the supervision of Stephen J. Lippard. While at Columbia she began studying transition-metal complexes and their possible applications to chemotherapy. She earned a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry in 1979, addressing The structure and chemical reactivity of a blue platinum complex: the interaction of antitumor platinum drugs and metallointercalation reagent with nucleic acids.
Career and research
After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1979, Barton held post-doctoral appointments at Bell Labs and Yale University, where she worked with Robert G. Shulman. She used nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technology to examine the metabolism of yeast cells. Barton became a professor of chemistry at Hunter College from 1980 to 1982, and began to develop her own laboratory, the Barton Research Group. While at Hunter, she studied the interactions of zinc ions with DNA, and later the interactions of ruthenium(II) and cobalt(III) complexes with DNA. This enabled her to roughly model complexes on a DNA helix and to begin studying the photophysical and photochemical properties related to enantiomers.
In the 1980s, she moved to Columbia University where she taught from 1983 to 1989. She became a full professor in 1986 and was the first woman to receive tenure in the chemistry department at Columbia. Her research focused on the use of organo-ruthenium complexes to examine the physical structure of DNA. With Nicholas Turro and Vijay Kumar she studied the interactions of ruthenium phenanthroline complexes and DNA and was able to design binding molecules targeted to specific DNA sequences. Photosensitive ruthenium complexes would glow brightly when they attached to the DNA double helix. When rhodium complexes were attached to the DNA, they would attract the electron causing the glow, and "turn off" the effect. During her time at Columbia, Barton obtained two patents for this method of analyzing DNA structure.
In 1989, Barton moved to Caltech, where her research has focused on charge transport in DNA. By using specially-designed chiral metal complexes as probes of DNA she has been able to study how DNA is damaged and repaired. In DNA-based diagnostic tests, complexes are used to determine whether electrons can flow across the DNA. If an electron could not move along the DNA, the DNA would continue to glow, indicating that there was damage in the DNA genetic molecule.