JAMES BLACK

Apart from two periods of intense study, of music between the ages of 12 and 14 and of mathematics between the ages of 14 and 16, I coasted, daydreaming, through most of my school years.

The Wellcome Foundation offered me the chance to establish a small academic research unit, modestly funded, but with total independence. The real opportunity, however, came from King's College, London.

The outcome, the fourth in an issue of five boys born into a staunch Baptist home, meant that from the beginning I was taught to be respectful of others no less than myself, influencing ever since both my political and administrative attitudes.

My father, a mining engineer and colliery manager, gave his brood many advantages not least of which, for me, was his love of singing which gave music a central place in our lives.

I did help to set up an undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry and made progress in modelling and analysing pharmacological activity at the tissue level, my new passion.

I had found myself a new mission - and once more my recurring dilemma between corporate commercial needs and personal scientific ambitions was solved unexpectedly.

We paid off our debts, we learned some, made friends and returned in 1950 with a larger view of life. I had, however, no home, no income of any kind and no prospects whatsoever.

As analytical pharmacologists, what we are allowed to see of a new molecule's properties is totally dependent on the techniques of bioassay we use.

Myocardial oxygen consumption is determined by the work of the heart and is a function of arterial blood pressure and heart rate.

Half-jokingly, I asked what was wrong with me. So we made a deal: I would run his biological research provided I had a free hand to run my new project.

In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions.

Analytical pharmacology has got an important and exciting future.

In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.

Clinically, angina pectoris was known to be precipitated by anxiety and emotion just as well as by exercise.

I met Hilary Vaughan at a Student Ball in 1944 and we married in the summer of 1946, as soon as I graduated.

All I ever promised was that I was sure I could develop a new pharmacological agent which might answer a physiological question. Any utility would be implicit in that answer.

During my six years with them Dr Garnet Davey (subsequently Research Director) constantly supported me and, I have no doubt, fought many battles on my behalf to keep the initially controversial programme going.

I have never wanted to check out the family folklore that we could be traced back to a dominie at the hamlet of Balquhidder in the Scottish highlands.

No politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews – just highly motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment.

The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.

I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

I learnt, for the first time, the joys of substituting hard, disciplined study for the indulgence of day-dreaming.

[There is no shortage of scientific talent.] But [I am] much less optimistic about the managerial vision [of the pharmaceutical industry] to catalyse these talents to deliver the results we all want.

Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.