Sir James Black was a leading physiologist and pharmacologist whose development of drugs to block beta receptors in the heart and histamine receptors in the gastro-intestinal tract led to a revolution in the treatment of patients with heart disease and ulcers. He was awarded a Nobel prize for his work. He was born in Fife, Scotland, one of five sons of a mining engineer and colliery manager. He was educated at Beath High School, from which he gained the Patrick Hamilton residential scholarship to study medicine at St Andrews. He graduated in 1946. He immediately entered a career in physiology and pharmacology. After junior appointments at St Andrews, where he worked under R C Garry, and in Malaya, he was appointed as senior lecturer and head of the department of physiology at the Glasgow Veterinary School, where he developed a prosperous department. At that time he worked closely with Adam Smith on the suppression of gastric secretion by serotonin and developed his ideas on the role of histamine in acid secretion, which would come to fruition later in his career. In 1958, he joined the Imperial Chemical Industries' (ICI) department of animal physiology at Alderley Edge, where he studied catecholamine receptors, and identified the existence of beta receptors on heart muscle cells to which the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline bind. He developed beta blocker drugs to suppress the action of the receptors. In 1964 he was appointed head of biological research at Smith Kline and French, where he produced drugs to block H2 receptors and control acid secretion in the gastro-intestinal tract. He returned to academic life as Professor of Pharmacology at University College, London, in 1973, and continued his work on receptors. He was appointed director of therapeutic research at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1978, a post he occupied for six years, before returning to academic pharmacology as Professor of Analytical Pharmacology at the Rayne Institute, King's College of Medicine in London. He retired in 1989. Sir James returned to Scotland, being appointed chancellor of the University of Dundee in 1991. Among innumerable awards and medals, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He was knighted in 1981 and was awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1988, sharing the prize with Gertrude B Elion and George H Hitchings. He met Hilary Vaughan at a student ball and they married in 1946. She predeceased him in 1986. They had one daughter, Stephanie. He married Rona Mackie in 1994. Sir James died on 21 March 2010.