Sir James Whyte Black OM. 14 June 1924—22 March 2010

Abstract

James Whyte Black was a Scottish pharmacologist who trained in medicine at St Andrews University and had a career in drug invention and academic pharmacology, moving several times between universities and the pharmaceutical industry. He was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his drug invention method, which was to build molecules around the structure of a natural chemical activator of a pathway involved in the aetiology of a disease. This produced two extremely useful drug categories, beta-blockers and histamine H 2 -antagonists, with huge impact on the previously intractable diseases of angina, hypertension and stomach ulcers. In 2000 he was awarded the UK's highest honour, the Order of Merit (OM). His ideas on analytical pharmacology had a significant effect on the development of the discipline in the late twentieth century.