Abstract
Professor Salvador Moncada was born in Honduras. He received a medical degree in El Salvador and came to London in 1971 to do a PhD on the mode of action of aspirin-like drugs at The Royal College of Surgeons. He joined the Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1975 where he worked on the unstable metabolites of arachidonic acid. He obtained a DSc in 1983 and in 1986 was appointed Director of Research at Wellcome. In 1988 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1994 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians as well as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In the last decade his major research interest has been the biology of nitric oxide, a substance that he discovered in the cardiovascular system in 1987. In 1995 he became Director of the Cruciform project for Strategic Medical Research at UCL. He has published over 700 papers and edited a number of books on nitric oxide.