Joshua Harold Burn

Joshua Harold Burn FRS

The Nobel Laureate John Vane claimed "If anyone can be said to have moulded the subject of pharmacology around the world, it is he".

Life Burn was born in Barnard Castle, County Durham, England. He was educated at Barnard Castle School. His tutor was Frederick Gowland Hopkins. After receiving his BA he was awarded a research grant by Emmanuel College and a Michael Foster Studentship by the university. The next 18 months were spent in research with Joseph Barcroft. Other figures in physiology at Cambridge at the time were Keith Lucas and the Nobel Laureates Archibald Hill and Edgar Adrian. In January 1914 Burn went to work for Henry Hallett Dale in London.

In October 1914, Burn enlisted in the army as a Signals Officer with the rank of corporal. By the end of 1917 he was required to return to England to finish his medical training. From 1920 to 1926 he worked with Henry Dale at the National Institute for Medical Research in Hampstead. His work involved the standardisation of medicines. In 1925 he was appointed director of the Pharmacological Laboratories at the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, again involved in the standardisation of medicines. Between 1926 and 1937 Burn had 44 co-workers, of which 30 came from overseas. From 1933 he worked closely with Edith Bülbring who was an exile from Nazi Germany. Over the years he had 162 academic staff, including John Robert Vane (1927–2004), one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982. Burn also recruited chemist Harry Raymond Ing FRS (1899-1974) in 1939 and pharmacologist Hugh Blaschko FRS (1900-1993) in 1944 who was a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany.

Burn was an honorary Doctor of Yale University, the University of Mainz and the University of Bradford. He was an honorary member of the British Pharmacological Society, the German Pharmacological Society and the Czechoslovak Medical Society of Jan Evangelista Purkyně and a member of the Leopoldina and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1942) .

Publications Methods of Biological Assay, 1928; Recent Advances in Materia Medica, 1931; Biological Standardization, 1937; Background of Therapeutics, 1948; Lecture Notes on Pharmacology, 1948; Practical Pharmacology, 1952; Functions of Autonomic Transmitters, 1956; The Principles of Therapeutics, 1957; Drugs, Medicines and Man, 1962; The Autonomic Nervous System, 1963; Our most interesting Diseases, 1964; A Defence of John Balliol, 1970