Pharmacologist

A pharmacologist is a medical doctor who is involved in pharmacology—the study of how substances interact with living organisms and how this then leads of a change in function. There are many associations around the world involved in training and accrediting pharmacologists, the best known being perhaps the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Inc., founded in 1908, which publishes the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics each month; and the British Pharmacological Society, founded in 1931, which publishes the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology each month and the British Journal of Pharmacology twice monthly.

The earliest known pharmacologist is undoubtedly Crateuas who was a physician to King Mithradates VI of Pontus, his surviving drawings being the earliest known botanical pictures. Other prominent pharmacologists include Joseph Freiherr von Mering who also worked as an experimental pathologist; the American pharmacologist and physiological chemist John Jacob Abel; the Briton Sir Henry Dale who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1936 with the German pharmacologist Otto Lowei for their work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses; American biochemist and pharmacologist Julius Axelrod who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1970 with British biophysicist Sir Bernard Katz and Swedish physiologist Ulf von Euler for the identification of an enzyme that degrades chemical neurotransmitters within the nervous system; Earl W. Sutherland Jr. who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1971 for the isolation of cyclic adenosine monophosphate; the Scotsman Sir James Black; George H. Hitchings and Gertrude B. Elion who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for their development of propranolol and cimetidine; pharmacologist Alfred G. Gilman [Page 1369]who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1994 with biochemist Martin Rodbell for their work in discovering G proteins; and the Swede Arvid Carlsson who, along with Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for research that established dopamine as one of the main neurotransmitters in the brain.