Hans Kosterlitz and his colleague John Hughes are the first scientists to identify enkephalins, later called endorphins.
These are the pain killing substances the brain produces at the time of severe injury and what gives people the “buzz” they get from hard exercise.
The work is carried out in the unit for addictive drugs Kosterlitz set up following his retiral at the age of 70 from the chair of pharmacology at Aberdeen. Its work is considered sufficiently important to attract grant funding from the USA as well as the UK.
Kosterlitz had left Nazi Germany in 1934 for Aberdeen to study physiology under the Nobel prize winner JJR MacLeod.