John A. Oates, MD, was an internationally known physician at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and considered among the founders f the discipline of Clinical Pharmacology, Dr. Oates, the Thomas F. Frist Sr. Professor of Medicine, founded the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt in 1963 as a joint division of the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology, and he chaired the Department of Medicine from 1983 to 1997. In the laboratory, Dr. Oates made fundamental contributions to current understanding of the effects of aspirin on prostacyclin and thromboxane and platelet function. His publications have been cited more than 36,000 times. A native of North Carolina, Dr. Oates earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Wake Forest College (now Wake Forest University) and his medical degree from the college’s Bowman Gray School of Medicine in 1956. He received clinical training at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and research training at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was a clinical associate and senior investigator. In 1959 he and his colleagues observed that a drug called methyldopa appeared to lower blood pressure. At the time there were no effective treatments for severe hypertension, which increases the risk of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure. Methyldopa, developed and marketed as Aldomet by Merck, became the first. Among Dr. Oates’ many discoveries, those in the field of prostaglandin biology are most noted. Prostaglandins are members of a large family of molecules called eicosanoids that are derived from fatty acids, predominantly arachidonic acid, and which have varied and profound physiological and pathophysiological effects. He died in Nashville, July 30, 2019.

Excerpted from VUMC REPORTER August 1, 2019 https://news.vumc.org/2019/08/01/oates-recalled-as-iconic-leader-physician-scientist/