World War II and the Genesis of Psychopharmacology

Techniques from wartime nuclear research led to the creation of new drugs.

Updated May 23, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

This post is part 2 of a series.

In a previous blog, I described the relationship of World War II to the development of psychopharmacology , using the examples of Frank Berger (creator of meprobamate) and Heinz Lehmann (who promoted the clinical use of chlorpromazine). In this post, we will describe how nuclear weapons research in World War II played a role in the development of the inhalational anesthetic halothane, and then close with comments on the relationship of war to both neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

The discovery of halothane

By the 1930s, the limitations of ether and chloroform, discovered almost a century before, were more and more evident, as were those of agents designed to replace them. There was, then, a great need for a safer and more effective anesthetic. How this came about leads us to the story of Charles W. Suckling (1920-2013). Born in Middlesex in southeast England, he inherited a family tradition involving the chemistry of explosives. His maternal grandfather and great-uncle had both worked on gun cotton production in Alfred Nobel’s factory in Ardeer, Ayrshire, and later at the Royal Ordnance factory in Waltham Abbey, Essex, where his paternal grandfather was also employed.

He enrolled in chemistry at the University of Liverpool in 1939. During the early war years, the Liverpool area was heavily bombed; Suckling’s future wife was ‘bombed out’ twice, though not injured. He helped his brother Ted as a fire watcher, and on one memorable occasion, the brothers proudly entered a shelter to show off still-hot fragments of an exploded incendiary bomb; he was promptly scolded by his mother.

After graduating, the Ministry of Labor and National Service directed Suckling to work at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large company, at the time heavily involved in making war materials and pharmaceuticals. As it happens, it had extensive experience with the halogen chemical element fluorine, which was in compounds for aerosols and refrigerants; for this reason, Suckling was assigned to the Tube Alloys project, the code name for Britain’s secret efforts toward the construction of an atomic bomb. At the time, the emphasis was on a process to enrich the yield of uranium-235. This involved converting "yellowcake" uranium powder into a gaseous compound containing fluorine, which could then be separated from U-238 in a centrifuge. It was in the process of this research that Suckling developed the skills in fluorine chemistry, which later served him well in civilian life. In the meantime, in his off-duty hours, he served in the Home Guard and survived the bombing of the Tube Alloys facility at Merseyside, where work was rapidly resumed.

After the war, Suckling completed his PhD and, in 1949, returned to ICI. There was great interest at the time in finding applications for the new knowledge of fluorine chemistry. Both the management of the Manhattan Project and the Mallinckrodt Company had funded studies for developing anesthetics, without favorable results. Nonetheless, one of Suckling’s bosses, John Ferguson, was interested in the problem and in 1951 stimulated him to pursue it.

Suckling was aware that adding halogens to organic compounds reduced their flammability, and that fluorine in particular caused them to vaporize more easily. By 1953, he came up with halothane, which could be considered to be an ethane derivative containing fluorine and other halogens such as bromine and chlorine. It was easily vaporized and appeared to anesthetize insects and animals. The promising compound was turned over by ICI to the anesthesia group at Oxford for further study.

By the time the anesthesiologists at Oxford received halothane, they had established a long history of first testing medicines and procedures on themselves. They self-administered it some 40 times before being convinced it was safe enough to give to patients. After a series of systematic clinical studies, they published a paper in the British Medical Journal; halothane was soon on the market.

Halothane was not flammable or irritating to the airways, though it, too, had limitations, including potential liver damage. It is no longer on the market in the U.S., replaced by later related compounds. But its history is important, as it was one of the first examples of "rational pharmacology," that is, constructing a drug based on knowledge of the physiological effects of various chemical structures.

The war as a stimulus for discovery

Just as the wartime experiences of the discoverers were variable, so was the degree to which the needs of war stimulated neuroscience and pharmacology. The postwar clinical development of chlorpromazine (another example of the application of halogen chemistry) and lithium was done in the setting of military hospitals, though by rather independent individuals and not necessarily as part of an organized war effort (1). This happened in other areas of pharmacology as well, for instance, when studies of mustard gas as a chemical weapon led to the development of the first cancer chemotherapeutic drugs, the nitrogen mustards.

In more recent years, some have sounded alarms over what they see as the "militarization of neuroscience," pointing to contemporary studies of controlling weapons by human thought, or using the MRI for "brain fingerprinting" to search for terrorists at airports (2). Others have argued that the roots of neuroscience have always been both military and civilian, pointing to the role of facilities such as the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (3).

In summary, while some discoveries were made by organized wartime programs, others were the unplanned results of technologies developed for other purposes during the war. In still other cases, military hospitals provided the settings in which individuals pursued their goals , which were not specifically for military applications. Sometimes the clinical experience of wartime medicine influenced the thinking that led to later discoveries, or projects such as the Paralympic Games (4). In other cases, the need to do military service put off research, which could not be continued until after the war.

There was no single pathway to the growth of neuroscience and psychopharmacology during the wartime era. In a sense, it has the feeling of an organic process, influenced in many different ways by its environment and the personalities of the people involved. And of course, one could speculate on how many innovations were not made because their potential discoverers did not survive.

Portions of this article are excerpted from Nepenthe's Children: The History of the Discoveries of Medicines for Sleep and Anesthesia .

Mendelson, W.B.: The Curious History of Medicines in Psychiatry. Pythagoras Press, 2020. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083ZRMCW1
Gusterson, H.: The militarization of neuroscience. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 9, 2007.
Howell, A.: Neuroscience hasn't been weaponized – it's been a tool of war from the start. The Conversation, 2020. https://theconversation.com/neuroscience-hasnt-been-weaponized-its-been-a-tool-of-war-from-the-start-69097
Mendelson, W.B.: Trial by Fire: World War II and the Founders of Modern Neuroscience and Psychopharmacology. Pythagoras Press, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08X1MRVXJ

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Wallace Mendelson, M.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Pharmacology (retired) at the University of Chicago.

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