Roger Altounyan

A pleasant surprise to see Peter Altounyan and Denise Lewis sailing on Coniston Water on TV last night (on the BBC's Secret Britain). They were visiting the area where Arthur Ransome's famous children book 'Swallows and Amazons', published in 1930, is set.

Ransome and his friend Earnest Altounyan did sail on Coniston and the author used the names of his friend's children for characters in the book, notably Roger and Titty (poor girl!). Peter is Roger's son and you can see the likeness.

I met Dr Roger Altounyan in 1977 when I began working at the Fisons Pharmaceuticals R and D establishment in Loughborough. He worked as a flying instructor in the RAF during the Second World War and later became a clinician who had specialised in respiratory disease. In the 1950s he became involved with research into khellin, a chemical with smooth muscle relaxant properties which occurs in the plant Ammi visnaga, at Fisons in Cheshire. The idea was to synthesise compounds like khellin in the hope of finding a more potent bronchodilator.

The story goes that the programme was not going anywhere and the company made the decision to stop work on it, but Dr Altounyan and a couple of chemists continued to synthesise and test new compounds on the side. 'Testing' involved the doctor, who was an asthmatic, inducing asthma attacks in himself by inhaling a mist containing allergens from guinea pig hair - and seeing if the new compounds had any effect. Against the odds they discovered disodium cromoglycate in 1965 and this became a novel, effective treatment for asthma, Intal, the first non-steroidal treatment that prevented allergic reactions.

Intal has largely been superseded now but undoubtedly changed the lives of many asthmatic patients over two decades.

Though he was a eminent scientist, and a legend in the company, Roger Altounyan was supremely appreciative of the work of us lowly information officers. The scientists would ask for literature searches and we would use the tools at our disposal - manual and computer-based indexes - to locate anything relevant we could find. He always went out of his way to say thank you and complement a job done well.

The last time we spoke must have been at a dinner, perhaps someone's retirement, in the mid-1980s, long after he had stopped coming to the labs. By then he was confined to a wheelchair with an on-board oxygen bottle after a lifetime of lung disease. Even then he made a point of telling me how important the work we did was. What a gent. He died in 1987.