Bernard Beryl Brodie

Brodie died in 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia at the age of 81.

In 1967, Brodie received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his more than 30 years of extraordinary contributions to biochemical pharmacology. His work had a profound influence on the use of drugs in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, mental and emotional disorders and cancer.

Brodie was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1966 and held honorary memberships in numerous scientific academies both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Lasker Award, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1958, the Tollman award in Pharmacology in 1963, the National Medal of Science in 1968, and the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1970.

Bernard Beryl Brodie (7 August 1907 – 28 February 1989) was an English scientist. A leading researcher on drug therapy, he is considered by many to be the founder of modern pharmacology and brought the field to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a major figure in the field of drug metabolism, the study of how drugs interact in the body and how they are absorbed. A member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, Brodie was a founder and former chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology at the National Heart Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Born in Liverpool in 1907, to a Jewish family Brodie did his undergraduate work at McGill University and received a Ph.D. in chemistry at New York University in 1935. After his graduation from N.Y.U., he was an associate professor there until 1950, when he joined the National Institutes of Health. He headed the pharmacology laboratory there until his retirement in 1970 but remained active as a senior consultant with Hoffmann-LaRoche laboratories in Nutley, New Jersey and as a professor of pharmacology at Pennsylvania State University.