Sir John Vane (1927 - 2004) received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries that reach into the medicine cabinet of almost every home. For generations, we have known that aspirin relieves pain, but how and why it works remained a baffling mystery until 1971, when Dr. Vane determined that aspirin blocks the syntheses of certain prostaglandins, hormone-like substances that occur throughout the body and affect a wide variety of functions. Vane and his associates also learned that a specific prostaglandin called prostacyclin prevents blood clotting of the kind that often leads...