Sir James Black was a distinguished pharmacologist who developed not only beta-blockers but also cimetidine, which transformed the management of peptic ulcer. He was born on 14 June 1924, in Uddingston, Strathclyde, the fourth of five sons of a mining engineer from whom he inherited a love of music and singing. He was educated at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath, where he at first studied music and then later mathematics. At the age of 15 he won the Patrick Hamilton residential scholarship to St Andrews University, and then followed an elder brother into medicine, qualifying in 1946. He then became an assistant lecturer in physiology, and a year later went to the University of Malaya in Singapore as a lecturer, returning as a senior lecturer to Glasgow Veterinary School in 1950. From 1958 to 1964 he worked for ICI Pharmaceuticals and then went on to Smith Kline & French Laboratories, before being appointed as professor of pharmacology at University College, London. He was director of therapeutic research at Wellcome Research Laboratories (from 1978 to 1984) and was then appointed as professor of analytical pharmacology at King’s College Medical School, a post he held until he retired in 1993. Between 1992 and 2006 he was chancellor of the University of Dundee. The university built the Sir James Black Centre in his honour. In 1988 he won the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for his work on the discovery of beta-blockers. In 2004, he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Society. He was knighted in 1981 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. In 1993 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of our College. He married first, Hilary Vaughan, who predeceased him, and secondly Rona MacKie in 1994. He died on 22 March 2010, leaving his second wife and a daughter from his first marriage.