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RIP James Black

black.jpgChemist James Black has died at the age of 85, the University of Dundee, where he served as chancellor until 2006, has announced.

Black received the Nobel prize in 1998 for his work on beta-blockers. He invented the widely used drug propranolol, which is still taken by many patients with heart problems.

“Easily millions of patients have been helped with beta-blocking therapies,” Clyde Yancy, the president of the American Heart Association, told AP. He added that the discovery of beta blockers was “one of the few things that really deserves the moniker ‘landmark’.”

His work on beta-blockers relied on the principle that blocking beta-receptors in heart-muscle would block the action of stress hormones and lower blood pressure. Black developed the first clinically useful beta-blockers in 1962.

Chemist Derek Lowe remarks on his In the Pipeline blog, “Keep in mind that earlier in his career, many people thought of the concept of a ‘receptor’ as an abstract placeholder, not necessarily something with any physical meaning. We’ve come a long way since then, and his work is one of the big reasons why.”

Black also developed “a fundamentally new approach to the treatment of peptic ulcer”, notes Folke Sjöqvist of the Karolinska Institute in the speech delivered at the 1998 Nobel prize presentation.

See also

Autobiography from Nobelprize.org

Image: University of Dundee.

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