Prem Narain Saxena (15 October 1925 – 29 November 1999) was the Founder Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, India.
[2] Saxena was schooled initially in his home village but from the age of six or seven he went to Dehradun, where his father worked as an accountant in the Department of Irrigation.
Although he suffered from malnutrition and from illnesses such as rickets and typhoid, he was a very brilliant student and came first both in matriculation from AP Mission School and Intermediate from DAV College in Dehradun.
As a Professor Emeritus, he continued his active research in the Department of Pharmacology till late December 1994 but due to illness of his wife (suffering from cancer and ultimately died on 19 March 1996); he did not manage to visit the department regularly and discontinued all his academic services from 1995.
[citation needed] He is nationally and internationally known as a leading neuro-pharmacologist as he worked mostly in the field of neuroscience.
In London at the National Institute for Medical Research, he worked on mechanism of action of Pyrogen and in the field of thermoregulation, with Wilhelm Feldberg (1900–1993), a renowned German-British-Jewish pharmacologist and biologist.
Text taken from Late Professor P N Saxena: A teacher of excellence, Rahman, SZ; Khan, RA (Nov 2010), J Pharmacol Pharmacother.