Leslie Lars Iversen. 31 October 1937—30 July 2020

Abstract

Leslie Iversen was one of the most distinguished UK neuropharmacologists and neuroscientists. He led basic neuroscience research at Cambridge early in his career, in partnership with his wife Susan D. Iversen, directing the influential MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit, which spawned a remarkable generation of outstanding neuroscientists. He subsequently made what was then an unusual transition to the industrial sector, to lead a major new research unit of Merck, Sharp and Dohme at Harlow, taking up the difficult challenge of discovering new compounds to transform psychiatry and neurology. Throughout his career he made seminal contributions to the study of the chemical neurotransmitters of the brain, and thereby to the mechanisms of action of drugs now commonly used in psychiatry such as the so-called anti-depressants and the anti-psychotics. His early work focused on the catecholamines (noradrenaline and dopamine) and subsequently the amino acids (gamma aminobutyric acid and glutamate), later extending to an entirely new class of transmitters, the neuropeptides. This work also helped to redefine the very concept of ‘neurotransmitter’. Late in his career he chaired the important Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, as a veritable but discreet ‘Drug Tsar’, and contributed a number of scholarly monographs as a visiting professor at Oxford.