Or Is This Our National Hero?; James Black, Nobel prize-winner and

Sunday Herald, The, Jan 25, 2004 by Alan Taylor

THE only reason you're here," says Sir James Black, "is because I've had a couple of successes." The successes to which he refers, I presume, are the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which he received in 1988, and his appointment in 2000 to the Order of Merit, a club with a maximum of 24 members and the highest honour the Queen can bestow. No other living Scot has been so honoured. "Here", meanwhile, is the Sir James Black Foundation, an unlovely modern building in the south London suburb of Herne Hill.

Black, who will be 80 next year, is in the process of moving office. His sleeves are rolled up, his tie is askew and his face glows ruddily from the exercise of moving books. "I'm changing my room, and I'm changing my life," he explains. "I'm passing the baton on to my youngsters." It was not an easy decision. While his heart told him not to do it, his head said he must. As a scientist he had little option but to throw his lot in with the latter.

In fact, he is merely moving downstairs, where he will be doing "different" things. "I have an agenda," he says mischievously. Has he always had one? "I would say yes. Not a precise one. I know where I want to get to. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get there."

Black is most famous for developing the beta-blocker, a drug which revolutionised the treatment of heart problems. Produced and marketed by ICI, who had given him his own laboratory, it was instrumental in the growth of the UK's pharmaceutical industry. It certainly made ICI a lot of money. That, though, was never Black's primary concern. What he was trying to do was find a way of answering a question. How do you adapt a natural hormone to turn it into something which would block its action? His answer was propranolol, a wonder drug which could be used to treat abnormal heart rhythms, angina and high blood pressure, prevent migraine attacks and alleviate symptoms of anxiety. In short, it makes adrenalin flow more slowly. "My main passion," reflects Black, "is making tools. I call myself a pharmacological toolmaker."

In the kind of research Black does there is, alas, no "eureka moment". The work is painstaking, time-consuming and expensive. Once the initial breakthrough is made the result is virtually inevitable. The way he describes it, it sounds humdrum, but that belies the excitement, energy and enthusiasm which Black exudes and which led, in 1972, to him and his colleagues making another breakthrough, this time in the treatment of ulcers. Though he is too modest to say so himself, he is following in the tradition of scientists such as Newton and Pasteur and Sir Alexander Fleming (one of very few fellow Scots to have been given a Nobel prize), all of whom were essentially loners and "inappropriately trained". In contrast to scientists who work in big teams, they made "big league" discoveries, things which fundamentally changed people's lives.

"They came with a mental tabula rasa," says Black. "They didn't come with the baggage of having had to digest and accept the norms. Generally speaking, the people who're going to do something new are individuals." These days, however, it is difficult even for someone of Black's standing to get funding as an individual. Apparently, even the Medical Research Council won't fund individuals. Why? "Today, most funding bodies seem to believe that progress in science is best achieved by groups of scientists. I am not against groups of scientists co-operating on an objective, but I hope that loners don't get squeezed in the process."

For all his establishment credentials, Black is an unreconstructed iconoclast who from his teens has appreciated the value of irreverence. He was born in Uddingston on the outskirts of Glasgow and brought up in Cowdenbeath in Fife where his father was a mining engineer. His earliest memories are impressionistic. The hill to Lochgelly. Travelling on the open top deck of a tram in all weathers. His school, now gone, which had to be propped up on one side to prevent it sinking into a mine shaft. The sense of community. Doors never locked at night.

He was the fourth of five children, all boys, two or three years between each of them. Was his mother disappointed not to have had a girl? "I don't know. There you are. That tells you something straight away. My mother and I were never intimate. Now maybe that's the price of a big family." Only on a few occasions, he recalls, did his mother allow him a glimpse of her inner self, once when he came upon her crying in his room after the death of her own mother. "There was a brief exchange of intimacy," he says. "But there wasn't a lot of that, I recall."

The family lived in various places in Fife, wherever his father's job demanded, always amongst miners. Throughout the interview, he keeps returning to the word "trust", the lack of which he believes is pervasive today at all levels of society. But when he was growing up it was taken for granted, the glue that held communities together. Miners especially, given the nature of their work, knew all about trust.