David Horrobin

David Frederick Horrobin, physiologist and pharmaceutical manufacturer: born Bolton, Lancashire 6 October 1939; Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford 1963; founder, MTP Press 1969; Professor of Medical Physiology, University of Nairobi 1969-72; Reader in Physiology, Newcastle University 1972-75; Professor of Medicine, University of Montreal 1975-79; Director, Efamol Research Institute 1979-84; managing director, Efamol Ltd 1984-87; chief executive, Scotia Holdings 1987-97; chairman, Laxdale 1998-2003; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Edinburgh 1 April 2003.

David Horrobin will be remembered for founding the drug company Scotia, and for convincing the public that evening primrose oil can cure any number of ills.

He was 40 years old in 1979 when he set up the Efamol Institute, which researched and marketed evening primrose oil. He had earlier become interested in a group of hormones called prostaglandins. Some of these have beneficial effects and are derived from gamma linolenic acid (GLA). These belong to a group of chemicals called essential fatty acids and are a normal part of the diet. Horrobin reasoned that GLA therefore had medicinal uses and looked for plants whose seeds were high in GLA. Evening primrose proved perfect: a high yield of GLA, a pretty flower and a nice name. Tormentil and Viper's bugloss would hardly have had the same appeal. He based the institute in Nova Scotia, a depressed area where start-up funding was available for new businesses.

He found it hard to make much profit on over-the-counter sales because of the competition, and realised the benefits of breaking into the prescription drugs market; but for this he needed to do clinical trials that proved the efficacy of his products in different conditions. In 1987 he raised further capital and turned the company into Scotia Pharmaceuticals, based in Nova Scotia, Scotland and Surrey; he even persuaded Sir James Black, the Nobel prizewinning master of drug design, to speak at the London press launch.

The company tried to gain official approval, in the form of product licences, of evening primrose formulations for a number of complaints, but succeeded in only two. These were Epogam, for allergic eczema, and Efamast, for the breast pain associated with premenstrual syndrome. But these licences were withdrawn; Epogam is believed to be the only product ever to have been withdrawn because there was evidence that it didn't work.

Scotia also courted controversy some years ago when they advertised in the medical press for doctors to do clinical trials on evening primrose oil in chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as ME or myalgic encephalomyelitis; this, too, came to nothing.

Earlier this month, the General Medical Council found a doctor guilty of research fraud. He had falsified the results of a clinical trial for Scotia in 1991; he had been promised a royalty of 0.5 per cent of sales revenue if the stuff came to the market. This financial arrangement was described as "highly unusual". The product was, yet again, Efamol, the trial was for the nerve damage of diabetes, and the case throws light on Scotia's way of doing things.

Among the products that never really took off was Olibra, a supposedly appetite-reducing product that could be incorporated into yoghurt, but despite huge publicity the project came to little. Scotia had also purchased the rights to another product, a cancer palliative called Foscan, and the company's future hinged on its success. However, it initially failed to gain official approval in the United States and Europe and in 1998 Scotia's collaborator, Boehringer Ingelheim, pulled out.

At Scotia Horrobin made enemies by installing his second wife, Sherri Clarkson, who was not a scientist, as research manager. In 1996 he was listed number 212 in the Sunday Times's list of the richest people in Britain, with a fortune of £70m, but a year later was ousted from Scotia in a boardroom coup. In 2001 the company collapsed after a three-year plunge in its stock- market value from £550m to £16m.

When Horrobin left Scotia he established a "boutique" company called Laxdale Ltd in another depressed area, the Isle of Lewis. His interest had moved to the possible role of essential fatty acids – this time, evening primrose and fish oils – for use in schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases, and clinical trials are under way. He had the backing of the Scottish Association of Mental Health and was President of the Schizophrenia Association (though not the National Schizophrenia Fellowship, the main recognised support group for sufferers).

Horrobin's first commercial venture had been in 1969, when, with his brother Peter, he founded a medical and technical publishing house, MTP Press. He quickly wrote several competent titles – Science is God (1979), Principles of Biological Control (1970), A Guide to Kenya and Northern Tanzania (1971, for which his wife Nefisa took the superb photographs) and The International Handbook of Medical Science (1972), followed later by Practical Physiology (1979). He was popular with the staff, of whom I was one; I found him straightforward, charming, considerate and bright.

The son of a Methodist minister, Horrobin went from King's College School, Wimbledon, to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Medicine, and on the way picked up several scholarships and prizes, a First in Physiology, and a DPhil in Neurophysiology. He married an Iraqi princess, Nefisa, while at Oxford. He was elected to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, where he also taught. He was chairman of the Junior Common Room at Balliol, did vacation work with the Flying Doctor Service in Kenya, and led a university expedition to Nepal to study human blood groups. He did his undergraduate clinical work at St Mary's Hospital, London, teaching and researching there at the same time, and qualifying in 1968.

In 1969, at the time he set up MTP Press, he was appointed Professor and Chairman of Medical Physiology at Nairobi University. In 1972 became Reader in Medical Physiology at Newcastle, and in 1975 was appointed Professor of Medicine at Montreal University. He left academic life when he formed the Efamol Institute.

In an article in the British Medical Journal in 1985, I made a passing reference to evening primrose oil as a panacea. Horrobin saw the article, sought me out and tried to persuade me of the error of my ways over dinner. By the time the pudding came I was still unconvinced by the argument, but satisfied that I couldn't face the consequences of making the same comment again.

He had thousands of friends and followers. He also had enemies, who described him as unethical and given to escaping his responsibilities; a "rotter". He was handsome, charming, well-read, bubbling with ideas and seemed effortlessly prolific. He had a gift for getting grants, raising money and generating publicity. He wrote or edited over a dozen books, including a lay person's guide advocating evening primrose oil for premenstrual syndrome, The PMT Solution (1985). His most recent book, The Madness of Adam and Eve: did schizophrenia shape humanity? (2001), written after he set up Laxdale to investigate fatty acids in schizophrenia, argued the case for these fatty acids in curing the disease.

He founded and edited two journals, Medical Hypotheses and Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids. He published 800 articles and papers, many, it must be said, in his own journals. The best, which included a chapter in the second edition of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (1987) on having an imaginative approach to new ideas, were original and thought-provoking.

In 2001 he developed lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. In February this year he published a personal paper in The Lancet, "Are Large Clinical Trials in Rapidly Lethal Diseases Usually Unethical?", while an essay in The Guardian, "Not All in the Genes", argued vehemently that we are spending money on genome research to the detriment of other aspects of medicine, and claimed, with some truth, that there have been few great advances in medicine since this started to happen in the mid-1960s.

Horrobin was a maverick who introduced dozens of fresh ideas to refresh the stuffy and authoritarian institution of medicine, but he will probably be remembered mostly for his role as snake-oil salesman. Evening primrose oil deserves a place in history as the remedy for which there is no disease.

Caroline Richmond