Adventures and excursions in bioassay—the stepping stones to prostacyclin

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Abstract
Summary: Physiology has spawned many biological sciences, amongst them my own field of pharmacology. No man has made a more important contribution to the fields of physiology and pharmacology than Sir Henry Dale (1875-1968, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine in 1936). Dale had a great influence not only on British pharmacology in general but also on my own scientific endeavours. Indeed, I can put forward a strong case for considering myself as one of Dale’s scientific grandchildren. My early days as a pharmacologist were influenced not only by Dale himself but also by his own school of colleagues, including Burn, Gaddum and von Euler. It was Burn who taught me the principles and practice of bioassay. Some of Gaddum’s first publications were on the development of specific and sensitive methods for biological assay and he maintained a deep interest in this subject for the rest of his life (1). In 1964 he said “the pharmacologist has been a ‘jack of all trades’ borrowing from physiology, biochemistry, pathology, microbiology and statistics—but he has developed one technique of his own, and that is the technique of bioassay” (2).