In Memoriam

on March 22, 2010. He was the fourth of five sons of a mining engineer and a housewife. His family could not afford to send him to university, but at the age of 15, on the advice of his high school mathematics teacher, he applied for and won a scholarship to nearby St Andrew’s University, where, under the influence of an older brother, he attended its medical school. His clinical training in med-ical school was at University Col-lege, which subsequently became the University of Dundee. (Black served as Chancellor of his alma mater later, vide infra.) He decided not to practice medi-cine because of what he perceived to be “insensitive ” treatment of patients that he had observed. Instead, on graduation, he joined the Physiology Department of St Andrews as an Assistant Lecturer and began his re-search career in Professor R. C. Gar-ry’s laboratory, where he studied the intestinal absorption of carbohy-drates. In 1947, Black and his new wife, the former Hilary Vaughan whom he had met at St Andrews, moved to Singapore, where he served for 3 years as a Lecturer in Physiology at the Kin