John Vane

John Robert Vane ( born March 29, 1927 in Tardebigg, Worcestershire, † November 19, 2004 in Farnborough, London ) was a British biochemist and Nobel laureate in medicine. He was the discoverer of the functioning of aspirin.

Life

His father Maurice Vane was the son of Russian immigrants; his mother, Frances Vane came from a British peasant family. He went to the King Edward XIV High School in Birmingham. At twelve, he got from his parents a chemistry set and started experimenting. He studied from 1944 at the University of Birmingham. There, he was initially disappointed by the lack of opportunities to experiment. He then studied from 1946 at the University of Oxford Pharmacology at Harold Burn, where he received his doctorate in 1953 after an interval with teaching at the University of Sheffield in Geoffrey Dawes. From 1953 he was assistant professor at Yale University. He then taught from 1955 at the Institute for Basic Medical Science, University of London at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, first as Senior Lecturer, then as Reader and finally as Professor of Experimental Pharmacology. In 1973 he was head of research at the Wellcome Foundation. From 1985 he was at the William Harvey Research Institute at the Medical College of St. Bartholomew 's Hospital in London.

He received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1982 along with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for discoveries in regard to prostaglandins and related biologically active substances. The late 1960s and early 1970s, he discovered that aspirin affects synthesis via the suppression of prostaglandin. He also worked with the Brazilian Sérgio Henrique Ferreira pharmacologists, also in the field of early development of ACE inhibitors (which led to the development of captopril 1974 Squibb ).

In 1977 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and in 1989 with the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, of which he was a Fellow since 1974. In 1984 he was knighted. He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (1983). He was more honorary doctorates (Mount Sinai Hospital Medical School in New York, Krakow, Paris, Aberdeen). In 1980 he was awarded the Peter Debye Price and 1981 he was Dale Medallist.

Vane was married and had two daughters.