William A. Devane

d. 2018 · American · Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Mechoulam laboratory) at the time of the anandamide work; later Virginia Commonwealth University and NUI Galway

William Anthony 'Bill' Devane was an American pharmacologist who grew up in Chicago and did his graduate work with Allyn Howlett at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, where the 1988 radioligand binding study that established the existence of a cannabinoid receptor in rat brain came out of his dissertation. He then went to Raphael Mechoulam's laboratory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and with the visiting Czech chemist Lumír Hanuš isolated the first endogenous cannabinoid from pig brain in 1992; Devane proposed the name anandamide, from the Sanskrit ananda. He later worked with Julius Axelrod's group at NIH on the compound's biosynthesis, then held positions at the University of Wisconsin, Virginia Commonwealth University and, from 2006, NUI Galway. Ill health ended his research career in 2014 and he died on 11 October 2018; the International Cannabinoid Research Society named a young-investigator award after him.

Compounds credited overall: one compound — anandamide; his other landmark result was a receptor, not a molecule