Charles Walter Suckling CBE FRS[1] (24 July 1920 – 31 October 2013) was a British chemist who first synthesised halothane, a volatile inhalational anaesthetic in 1951, while working at the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Central Laboratory in Widnes.
He was born in Teddington, London in 1920,[2] the son of Edward Ernest and Barbara (née Thomson) Suckling, and educated at Oldershaw Grammar School, Wallasey and Liverpool University.
He liaised closely with clinicians, initially in setting target physicochemical properties for ideal agents and then later in evaluating the developed compounds.
Suckling first investigated halothane's anaesthetic action by experimenting on mealworms and houseflies, and then forwarded it to Jaume Raventos, a pharmacologist, for evaluation of anaesthesia in other animals.
This process of systematic study of chemical compounds with a set of pre-defined characteristics has been identified as one of the first examples of modern drug design.