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James Black - The importance of cell physiology (33/33)

202 views · Published 27 June 2017 · 1:55 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of James Black’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T40sQxRoDwA&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxj8rsp51ptesTyqLBftzPD

The late Scottish pharmacologist Sir James W Black (1924-2010) revolutionised medical treatment of hypertension and angina with his invention of propranolol, the first ever beta blocker. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1998. [Listener: William Duncan; story recorded: 2006]

TRANSCRIPT: The industry has espoused genomics, then transcriptomics, this RNA world, and then proteomics and then something else, and now they're into what's called systems biology. And, this is attempting, all at the subcellular level, to make sense of all these interactions which are occurring inside cells. Now, disease rarely begins inside cells. Cancer, for example, is seen as a disease of the genome – an abnormal division – but many people now regard it as a process which is driven from outside. Many cancers, for example, derive out of an inflammatory state or a viral infection, or over-production of a hormone that the... the actual initiation of the cancer may well come from outside the cell, but it's regarded by everybody in the business that it's an intracellular phenomenon. So my obsession is physiology; how cells talk to each other. We have 1000's of messenger molecules which have never been explored, really, from the point of view of controlling how the system talks to each other, so I want to go back to physiology, to messenger molecules, taking the cell as a given, and the... the system I want to analyse is the physiological system by making analogues of natural occurring molecules which we can use as tools to explore physiology.

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