John S. Burley Papers. Arnold Arboretum Library of Harvard University.

Born in 1950, John S. Burley grew up in Brighton, England and attended university at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. There he earned a Bachelor of Science in 1982, as well as his Ph.D. in systematic botany in 1986. Burley was simultaneously a research associate in the Program for Collaborative Research in Pharmaceutical Science (a partnership with the University of Chicago) and a taxonomist for the National Cancer Institute’s program to screen Southeast Asian rainforest plants for anti-cancer and anti-AIDS properties. Burley coordinated many of the NCI collection expeditions to the Philippines and Indonesia. In 1987, as part of a NCI mission, Burley collected a sample from a tree in a swamp forest in Sarawak, Borneo. Researchers found that an extract from this sample essentially halted the replication of HIV-1. In 1991, Burley became research director and spearheaded the Arnold Arboretum’s partnership with the Global Environment Facility of the World Bank and the Indonesian government to overhaul the facilities of the Herbarium Bogoriense in Bogor, Indonesia. Unfortunately, the project was cut two years short in September 1998 due to escalating civil unrest in Indonesia. At this point, Burley ended his time at the Arnold Arboretum.

Electronic finding aid available http://arboretum.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/II_A-15_JSB_2012.pdf

Inventory available in library; folder level control.