John Vane

Sir John Robert Vane was a British pharmacologist, born in 1927, who was instrumental in understanding how aspirin relieves pain and inflammation, and whose work led to new treatments for heart and blood vessel disease and to the introduction of ACE inhibitors. An early interest in chemistry led him to study the subject at the University of Birmingham in 1944, and he completed his doctorate at Oxford in 1953. He then worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University before returning to the United Kingdom. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for discoveries concerning prostaglandins.