Foundations and Future of Molecular Pharmacology

Abstract

A symposium designed to highlight some of the recent advances in molecular pharmacology was organized to honor Sir Arnold Burgen, a founder and important contributor to the development of this discipline. Sir Arnold Burgen’s career is marked by notable achievements on both sides of the Atlantic. Upon returning from McGill University to the United Kingdom in 1962 as Sheild Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, Professor Burgen began plans for a molecular pharmacology program. The group was supported by the Medical Research Council as a formal Research Unit in 1965. As director of the Medical Research Council from 1972–1982, the Unit remained under his direction at the Mill Hill laboratories in London. The discipline of molecular pharmacology as conceived by him involved the use of physicochemical techniques to study the true working macro-molecules of pharmacology which encompass receptors, sites of antimetabolite action, membrane lipids, membrane lipid-protein interfaces and other proteins and nucleic acids critical to drug action and disposition [1]. These initial developments in molecular pharmacology actually preceded the application of recombinant DNA technology in biology by nearly a decade. The field of molecular biology has popularized the modifier “molecular” and perhaps diverted a meaning originally intended by investigators in several disciplines to encompass the study of protein and macromolecular structure in relation to function.