Richard Friary, Ph.D., is a synthetic organic and medicinal chemist employed by the Schering-Plough Research Institute. This institute forms the discovery and development arm of a fully integrated multinational pharmaceutical company. The author's combined experience in this company and CIBA-Geigy (now part of Novartis) spans nearly 30 years.As a senior principal scientist, the writer is an accomplished chemical researcher who discovered a safe and effective drug that relieves psoriasis and dermatitis. He was instrumental in steering the experimental medicine to clinical trials in human beings and in developing it afterward. Dr. Friary is among the few chemists ever to have made a drug that entered clinical studies in human beings, and among fewer still whose drug passed clinical trials. Eighteen patents and 31 articles name him as an inventor and an author.Born in 1942, Richard Friary is a native of Biddeford, Maine, and a graduate of Colby (B.A., 1964) and Dartmouth Colleges (M.A., 1966) and of Fordham University (Ph.D., 1970). He is a veteran of the R. B. Woodward Research Institute in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher from 1970 to 1973. There he learned medicinal chemistry by making cephalosporin C analogs as antibacterial agents, and organic synthesis through a total synthesis of prostaglandin F 2a. Only a few chemists ever wrote as many as two articles with the finest organic chemist of all time, the late R. B. Woodward, and Friary is one of them.