Charles Suckling

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Charles Walter Suckling CBE FRS (24 July 1920 – 31 October 2013) was a British chemist who first made halothane, a powerful inhaled anaesthetic, in 1951 while working at ICI’s Central Laboratory in Widnes.

He was born in Teddington, London, the son of Edward Ernest and Barbara Suckling. He studied at Oldershaw Grammar School, Wallasey, and Liverpool University. Suckling worked for ICI from 1942 to 1982, rising through the company from research chemist to senior leadership roles, including Deputy Chairman of the Mond Division (1969), Chairman of the Paints Division (1972), and General Manager of Research (1977–1982). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1978. In his personal life, he married Eleanor Margaret Watterson in 1946, and they had two sons and a daughter. He died on 31 October 2013.

At the time, common inhaled anaesthetics were chloroform and diethyl ether, both with serious drawbacks. Ether was highly flammable, posing dangers in operating rooms, and chloroform could damage the liver. Suckling’s work on halogenated, especially fluorinated, hydrocarbons showed they could be volatile without being flammable. He developed several fluorinated compounds and worked with clinicians to test and refine them for anaesthesia. He began by testing halothane’s effects on insects, then sent the results to Jaume Raventos for broader animal testing. After Raventos confirmed its pharmacology, Michael Johnstone, an anaesthetist in Manchester, carried out the first clinical trial in 1956. This careful, target-driven approach to discovering a new drug is seen as one of the early examples of modern drug design.