James Black (pharmacologist)

Sir James Whyte Black was a Scottish physician and pharmacologist, born in Uddingston in 1924 and dead in 2010, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings for pioneering strategies of rational drug design. After graduating in medicine at St Andrews in 1946 and teaching in Singapore and Glasgow, he joined ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1958, where he developed propranolol, a beta blocker for heart disease. Later, at Smith, Kline and French, he developed cimetidine, an H2 receptor antagonist for stomach ulcers, launched as Tagamet in 1975. He held posts at University College London, the Wellcome Research Laboratories and King's College London, founded the James Black Foundation in 1988, and served as chancellor of the University of Dundee.