It is particularly sad for me that James Black, the Nobel prize winning chemist, should have died in the same week that my latest book, Obliquity, is published. I am indebted to Black for helping to frame the idea – and for proposing the term “obliquity” to describe it.
A young lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Black was recruited just after the second world war to be one of the first of ICI's pharmaceutical researchers. Britain's leading chemical company had shifted from dyes and explosives into fertilisers and petrochemicals. After the war, the company's executives recognised the contribution drugs – notably penicillin – had made to the allied war effort. They conjectured that the most exciting new business applications of chemistry would be in pharmacology.
ICI's decision was prescient, but slow to pay off: the pharmaceutical division lost money for 20 years. Markets today would not tolerate unrewarding and risky investment on this scale. But Black and his group eventually discovered beta blockers, the first effective treatment for high blood pressure, and a therapy still used every day by millions of people around the world. The pharmaceutical division quickly moved into profit, and when it was floated off from the parent company as Zeneca, it came to command a higher market capitalisation than the company that gave birth to it.