Elwood Jensen - Telegraph Initially such tests were used to determine which patients would benefit from the surgical removal of oestrogen-secreting glands. However Jensen's work also led to the development of drugs such as Tamoxifen that inhibit the effects of oestrogen by blocking the hormone from attaching itself at the receptor sites, removing the need for surgery. Jensen summed up what such discoveries might mean in a piece of doggerel: "A lady with growth neoplastic/ Thought surgical ablation too drastic./ She preferred that her ill/ Could be cured with a pill,/ Which today is no longer fantastic." Elwood Vernon Jensen was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on January 13 1920, and read Chemistry at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio. He went on to do graduate research at the University of Chicago where, during the Second World War, he became involved in America's chemical weapons programme, synthesising poison gases. After the war Jensen won a Guggenheim fellowship to study steroid hormone chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. While there, and despite having no experience as a mountaineer, he climbed the north east face of the Matterhorn. In 1947 Jensen joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of surgery, working closely with Huggins, whom he eventually succeeded as director of the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research. After his own retirement, in 2002 he moved to the University of Cincinnati where he continued to work in his laboratory until last year. Jensen's work led to the establishment of biochemical "receptors" as a new field of scientific research, leading to many more medical breakthroughs, and as a result he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology many times over. The fact that he never won the prize surprised his colleagues, though in 2004 he won the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research - a prize known as America's Nobel. Jensen's first wife, Mary, died in 1982. He is survived by his second wife, Peggy, and by a son and daughter. Elwood Jensen, born January 13 1920, died December 16 2012