J Murdoch Ritchie was Higgins Professor Emeritus of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine, and a major figure in neuropharmacology in the second half of the twentieth century. With a BSc in mathematics & physics from Aberdeen University(1944), he became a research physicist under A V Hill at the Telecommunications Research Establishment, subsequently following Hill to University College London (UCL) in 1946. Murdoch received a BSc in physiology (1949), while working on the dynamics of skeletal muscle contraction. He soon moved to the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, receiving a PhD and DSc in biophysics (1952, 1960). He began work on the control of blood pressure by unmyelinated nerves with Bill Douglas, eventually following him (1958) to Al Gilman’s new Department of Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. Influential papers on nerve and on local anaesthetics followed. Appointed Professor of Pharmacology at Yale (1968), he directed the pharmacology course there for second year medical students for 30 years. He became Director of the Yale Division of Biological Sciences (1975–1978), championing the establishment of its first core facility providing technical support for scientific and biomedical computing. He was also co-Director of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (1993–1999). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976 and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London) in 1997.

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