Flower R J
Department of Biochemical Pharmacology, The William Harvey Research Institute, Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6BQ.
Br J Pharmacol. 2006 Jan;147 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S182-92. doi: 10.1038/sj.bjp.0706506.
The formation of the British Pharmacological Society coincided almost exactly with a series of ground-breaking studies that ushered in an entirely new field of research--that of lipid mediator pharmacology. For many years following their chemical characterisation, lipids were considered only to be of dietary or structural importance. From the 1930s, all this changed--slowly at first and then more dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of the prostaglandins (PGs), the first intercellular mediators to be clearly derived from lipids, in a dynamic on-demand system. The PGs exhibit a wide range of biological activities that are still being evaluated and their properties underlie the action of one of the world's all-time favourite medicines, aspirin, as well as its more modern congeners. This paper traces the development of the PG field, with particular emphasis on the skillfull utilisation of the twin techniques of bioassay and analytical chemistry by U.K. and Swedish scientists, and the intellectual interplay between them that led to the award of a joint Nobel Prize to the principal researchers in the PG field, half a century after the first discovery of these astonishingly versatile mediators.
英国药理学会的成立几乎与一系列开创性研究同时发生，这些研究开创了一个全新的研究领域——脂质介质药理学领域。在脂质的化学性质被确定后的许多年里，人们一直认为脂质仅具有饮食或结构上的重要性。从20世纪30年代开始，一切都发生了变化——起初变化缓慢，然后在20世纪70年代和80年代随着前列腺素（PGs）的出现而发生了更为显著的变化，前列腺素是首个在动态按需系统中明确源自脂质的细胞间介质。前列腺素具有广泛的生物活性，其活性仍在评估之中，而且它们的特性是世界上最受欢迎的药物之一阿司匹林及其现代同类药物作用的基础。本文追溯了前列腺素领域的发展历程，特别强调了英国和瑞典科学家对生物测定和分析化学这两种技术的巧妙运用，以及这两种技术之间的知识互动，正是这种互动使得前列腺素领域的主要研究人员在这些极其多功能的介质首次被发现半个世纪后共同获得了诺贝尔奖。
