C. B. Purves was born in Scotland, and received his B.Sc. (1923) and Ph.D. (1929) from St. Andrew's University. As a Commonwealth Fund Fellow, he conducted postdoctoral research in Washington on his special area of interest, sugar metabolism. After a period as a research fellow at Aberdeen University he received an appointment at the U.S. National Institute of Health in 1931. From 1936 until 1943, Purves was Associate Professor of organic chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was there that his research interest shifted to the chemistry of cellulose and wood. In 1943 he was appointed E.B. Eddy Professor of Industrial and Cellulose Chemistry at McGill and chief of the Wood Chemistry Division of the Pulp and Paper Research Institute, where he made fundamental advances in the isolation of lignin. From 1947 until 1949, Purves was Chairman of the Physical Sciences Group of the Faculty of Arts and Science, and from 1961 until his sudden death, he served as Chairman of the Chemistry Department.