John Vane

Origins and early life

John Vane was born on 29 March 1927 at Tardebigge in Worcestershire, the youngest of three children, and grew up in suburban Birmingham. His father, Maurice Vane, was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire; his mother Frances came from a Worcestershire farming family.

Work and career

He went to a village school at five and then to King Edward's School in Edgbaston, and an early interest in chemistry led him to read the subject at the University of Birmingham in 1944 — a subject he soon found he disliked, though he still loved doing experiments. The way out came when his professor was asked to send a student to Oxford to learn pharmacology; Vane took the place, found under Harold Burn the enthusiasm chemistry had not given him, and finished a doctorate there in 1953.

After a spell at Yale he came back to the University of London, where he stayed eighteen years and became professor of experimental pharmacology at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1966. Aspirin had been in use for seventy years without anyone knowing how it worked. Vane's answer, published with Priscilla Piper in 1971, was that it blocks the enzyme that makes prostaglandins — the local signalling molecules behind pain, fever and inflammation — and that single mechanism explained the drug's benefits and its stomach damage at once, and opened the way to the whole modern class of anti-inflammatory drugs and to daily low-dose aspirin for the heart.

Later years

He shared the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson, was knighted in 1984, founded the William Harvey Research Institute in 1985, and died in Kent on 19 November 2004.