Sir James Black OM (1924-2010): notice of death

Sir James Black OM was Emeritus Professor of Analytical Pharmacology at King's College London. He received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1988 for the development of two major families of drugs: firstly, beta-blockers, used for the treatment of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure and heart failure, and secondly the anti-ulcer histamine receptor blocking drugs, including the best-selling Tagamet. He was born in 1924 and brought up in Fife, graduating from the University of St Andrews. After lecturing at the universities of St Andrews, Malaya and Glasgow, he worked in industry for ICI and Smith, Kline and French, and was Professor of Pharmacology at University College London. From 1978 he was Director of Therapeutic Research for the Wellcome Research Laboratories until he came to King's in 1984. Sir James is credited with introducing analytical pharmacology as a new way of thinking to the process of drug development. Whereas the starting point for creating new pharmaceutical therapies had generally been to chemically modify natural products and test the result, his approach was based on an understanding of how cells use messenger molecules to communicate with each other.