Published Date: 23 March 2010 
 
 NOBEL prize-winning scientist Sir James Black has died at the age of 85. 
 
 
 
 
 
 • Sir James Black with his Nobel prize medal, awarded to him for his work on drug development, namely his invention of the beta-blocker drug propranolol. Picture: Neil Hanna 
 
 
 
 He was regarded as one of the world's outstanding scientists and his work is credited with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of heart patients. 
 
 
 
 Sir James, born in Uddingston, Lanarkshire, developed beta-blockers, revolutionising the treatment of many heart conditions. 
 
 
 
 Yesterday, his family said his death had followed a long illness. 
 
 
 
 Sir James was educated in Cowdenbeath, Fife, and studied medicine at the University of St Andrews. 
 
 
 
 During a career which spanned industry and the academic world, he established the physiology department at University of Glasgow and lectured at both University College and King's College in London. 
 
 
 
 Sir James's contribution to science was recognised at the highest level in 1988, when he won the Nobel prize for medicine for his work on drug development. 
 
 
 
 His invention of the beta-blocker drug propranolol is considered one of the major breakthroughs in pharmacology of the 20th century. When told he had won the Nobel prize, Sir James was heard to remark: "I wish I had my beta-blockers handy." 
 
 
 
 He also made significant discoveries in the development of drugs to treat heartburn and ulcers. 
 
 
 
 In 2000, he was given the Order of Merit, the highest honour that can be bestowed upon an individual personally by the Queen. 
 
 
 
 The scientist also enjoyed a lengthy association with the University of Dundee, where he was Chancellor from 1992 to 2006. The institution built a research centre in his name and he maintained regular contact with friends and colleagues in Dundee until the time of his death. 
 
 
 
 Professor Pete Downes, the principal and vice-chancellor of the university, said yesterday : "Sir James was known to many of us here over many years, and we will miss him greatly. 
 
 
 
 "During his time as chancellor, he served the university with commitment, wisdom, grace and distinction. 
 
 
 
 "He was a great scientist who took a keen interest in the development of our research here at Dundee, but he was also a great man to know. 
 
 
 
 "He inspired so many people, from students to senior academics and industrialists, right up until the last few months of his life." 
 
 
 
 Prof Downes added: "I am personally proud and immensely fortunate to have known him for many years." 
 
 
 
 Last April, Sir James visited the "Famous Scots" exhibition at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh, where his family history was displayed as part of a series to celebrate Homecoming Scotland 2009. 
 
 
 
 Records showed he descended from a long line of coal miners. 
 
 
 
 His father Walter, who was working at the coalface at the age of 13, attended night school after his shifts in order to qualify as a mine engineer. 
 
 
 
 He became pit manager and his strong belief in education encouraged his five sons to pursue other careers. 
 
 
 
 On his mother's side, Sir James had an ancestor who was a Perthshire parish schoolmaster, who married the daughter of a crofter and postman in 1819. 
 
 
 
 A university spokesman said Sir James's funeral would be held on Monday at St Columba's Church in London. 
 
 
 
 In his official biography written for the Nobel Organisation, Sir James wrote: "I chose to study medicine mainly under the influence of an elder brother, William, a graduate in Medicine at St Andrews some years earlier. 
 
 
 
 "In the cold, forbidding, greyness of St Andrews – with its dedication to 'causes purely spiritual and intellectual, to religion and learning' (Andrew Lang) – I learned, for the first time, the joys of substituting hard, disciplined study for the indulgence of day-dreaming. Undergraduate prizes seemed to confirm I was working harder than my colleagues in a love affair with knowledge. 
 
 
 
 "An important catalyst in my conversion to scholarship was my first year encounter with Professor D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, last of the great Victorian polymaths, author inter alia of the classic allometric study 'On Growth and Form' and an intellectual giant if ever there was one." 
 
 
 
 BREAKTHROUGH 
 
 
 
 SIR James Black created propranolol, a drug that successfully blocked the heart's adrenaline-responsive beta-receptors – hence the commonly used term "beta-blockers". 
 
 
 
 Beta-blockers are widely used to treat hypertension and angina by preventing stimulation of certain nerve endings. 
 
 
 
 They are considered one of the most important contributions to clinical medicine and pharmacology in the 20th century. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ||||| Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist James Black, whose breakthrough beta-blocker drugs help treat millions of heart patients and save thousands of lives, has died at age 85, his former university said Monday. 
 
 The University of Dundee in Scotland, which Black served as chancellor from 1992 to 2006, said the scientist died Sunday but gave few further details. 
 
 Black's discovery of the drugs propranolol and pronethalol _ which work by blocking the body's own response to stress hormones _ in the early 1960s revolutionized how doctors helped heart patients. 
 
 Dr. Clyde Yancy, the president of the American Heart Association, said the drugs' discovery was "one of the few things that really deserves the moniker: 'Landmark.'" 
 
 "Easily millions of patients have been helped with beta-blocking therapies," he said, adding that the family of drugs that grew out of Black's work remain "the standard of care" despite being discovered nearly half a century ago. 
 
 Beta-blockers are so called because they block beta receptors, one of two families of receptors present in organs such as the heart and the lungs. The receptors react to hormones such as adrenaline, so blocking them can have a calming effect on the heart muscle, insulating it from stress. 
 
 Studies have shown that the use of beta-blockers in heart attack patients dramatically decreased mortality rates, and drugs based on Black's work are still used to tackle a variety of other cardiac conditions, from abnormal heart rhythms to angina, anxiety, headaches and high blood pressure. 
 
 Although it's his work in the field of heart treatments for which he is best known, Black also made significant discoveries in the development of drugs to treat heartburn and ulcers. 
 
 He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his achievements in 1988 and was awarded Britain's Order of Merit _ a rare honor bestowed by the queen _ in 2000. 
 
 Black was the fourth of five children born in to what he described in an autobiographical sketch as "a staunch Baptist home" in Uddingston on the outskirts of the Scottish city of Glasgow. Awarded a scholarship to study at Scotland's St. Andrews University when he was only 15, Black applied himself to the study of medicine, meeting his future wife Hilary Vaughan at an undergraduate ball in 1944. 
 
 Saddled with debt after graduation, he spent three years teaching in Singapore, moving to London in 1950 with what he said was "no home, no income of any kind and no prospects whatsoever." But a chance meeting with an old colleague on Oxford Street led to a job with the University of Glasgow Veterinary School, where he said he "slowly learned, like a primitive painter, how to be an effective experimenter." 
 
 It was there that Black explored his interest in how to engineer the body's reaction to hormones. Convinced by British pharmaceutical chemical company ICI, who gave him his own laboratory, Black went to work creating beta-blockers during what he would later remember as one of the most exciting periods of his life. 
 
 He would later help discover cimetidine, which turned peptic ulcers from a potentially life-threatening disease into a far more manageable condition. 
 
 In addition to his chancellorship at Dundee, Black has held a variety of other leadership posts, including at University College, the Wellcome Foundation, and King's College _ all in London. In an interview with Scotland's The Sunday Herald in 2004, Black, the son of a mining engineer, said that his main passion was "making tools." 
 
 "I call myself a pharmacological toolmaker," he said. 
 
 Yancy said those tools have proven particularly durable. 
 
 "There've been other drugs that have been as good, but nothing has stood out as being better," he said. "They really have stood the test of time." 
 
 The university said Black's funeral would be held next Monday at St. Columba's Church in London. Black's wife, Hilary, died in 1986.
– James Black, the Nobel prize-winning scientist whose invention of beta-blocker drugs is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, has died after a long illness. The Scotsman's discovery of propranolol and pronethalol revolutionized the treatment of heart patients and was "one of the few things that really deserves the moniker 'landmark,'" the chief of the American Heart Association tells AP. Black, who also pioneered treatments for heartburn and ulcers, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine in 1988 and was Chancellor of the University of Dundee from 1992 to 2006. "He was a great scientist who took a keen interest in the development of our research here at Dundee, but he was also a great man to know," the university's vice-chancellor told the Scotsman. "He inspired so many people, from students to senior academics and industrialists, right up until the last few months of his life."