Lionel Opie

Lionel Henry Opie (6 May 1933 – 20 February 2020) was a South African cardiologist. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Cape Town, where he conducted both experimental and clinical research on heart disease and cardiovascular physiology, metabolism, and pharmacology. He was the founding director of the university's Hatter Institute for Cardiovascular Research and the founding editor of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. He also served as president of the International Society for Heart Research.

Early life and career Opie was born on 6 May 1933 in Hanover, a small town in the Karoo region of South Africa. He attended Bishops Diocesan College in Cape Town. He attended the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1955 with first-class honours. Thereafter, between 1956 and 1959, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he completed his DPhil. His doctoral dissertation was about the physiology of artificial respiration. That research culminated in another doctoral dissertation, this one on myocardial intermediary metabolism, which earned him an MD from the University of Cape Town in 1961. His clinical activities were based at the Groote Schuur Hospital, where he founded the Hypertension Clinic in the 1980s and led regular sessions in the hospital's Cardiac Clinic. and he was later appointed as international associate editor at Circulation. His central research interests were cardiovascular physiology, cardiovascular metabolism, and cardiovascular pharmacology; in particular, he worked on the metabolic mechanisms of ischemic heart disease and myocardial reperfusion, the cellular metabolism of calcium ions, the role of cyclic adenosine monophosphate in cardiac electrical instability and arrhythmia, and the use of β-blockers and cardioprotective mechanisms.

Opie's most famous book is Drugs for the Heart, which first appeared in serialisation in The Lancet in 1980; across eight volumes it became "the standard reference on the treatment of heart disease"

Personal life and retirement At the age of 80 Opie retired from clinical practice, He was ill for the last few years of his life and died of pneumonia on 20 February 2020 in Cape Town. In 2012 the University of Cape Town's Department of Medicine gave him a special award for his prolific and seminal research contributions. He was long rated as an A-level researcher by the South African National Research Foundation, a rare feat for a medical doctor, and he was upgraded to A1-rating in 2008; in 2014 he additionally received the NRF Lifetime Achievement Award.

Among other associations, Opie was a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology, the International Society for Heart Research, the Royal Society of South Africa, the Physiological Society of Southern Africa, and the College of Physicians of South Africa; and he served stints as president of the International Society for Heart Research, the South African Cardiac Society, and the South African Hypertension Society. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Stellenbosch. The Lionel Opie Preclinical Imaging Core Facility at the Hatter Institute, unveiled in 2015, is named after him.