Science Quote by James W. Black

A lot is smuggled into that modest, almost offhand sentence: the autobiography of a scientist who helped invent modern drug design, still framing his work as practical scaffolding and a “new passion” rather than a personal triumph. James W. Black isn’t performing genius here; he’s performing craft. “Help to set up” is a deliberately de-centered verb phrase, the kind of understatement you expect from someone whose breakthroughs (beta-blockers, H2 antagonists) reshaped medicine but who remained suspicious of hero narratives. It casts science as institutional labor: courses built, tools shared, a field made teachable.

Then the sentence pivots from pedagogy to epistemology. “Modelling and analysing pharmacological activity at the tissue level” signals a historical shift in mid-20th-century pharmacology away from observational physiology and toward mechanistic, quantifiable explanations. Black is pointing to the moment when the messy business of bodies becomes something you can represent, test, and refine - not in the abstract, but at the in-between scale where drugs actually earn their keep: receptors, tissues, functional responses. The tissue level is where medicine meets math without pretending the body is a clean system.

The subtext is a scientist describing desire. “My new passion” lands almost oddly intimate after the procedural nouns, and that contrast is the point. It’s the emotional engine of applied science: the thrill of finding a model that finally fits, of turning symptoms into solvable problems. In a single line, Black binds education, method, and motivation into one credo: progress happens when curiosity is disciplined enough to be taught.