text: Heinz Otto Schild (1906–1984) held the Chair of Pharmacology from 1961 to 1973.
  He was born in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), in 1908, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He qualified in medicine in Munich and then worked with Straub, the leading German pharmacologist of the time. By good fortune, Schild had been accepted as a visiting worker by Sir Henry Dale and was in England when the National Socialists came to power in Germany. He decided to stay in Britain and became an assistant in the Department of Pharmacology in Edinburgh, then headed by A.J. Clark. When J. H. Gaddum was appointed to the chair at UCL, he invited Schild to join him as a Demonstrator. So began his long association with UCL, interrupted only by his bizarre internment on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’ at the outbreak of the Second World War. Following his release (greatly aided by F.R Wintons and Sir Henry Dales appeals to the Home Office) he returned to his work in the department, then based in Leatherhead, and in 1961 became Winton's successor as Head of Department and Professor of Pharmacology.
  Schild made major contributions to receptor pharmacology, to the understanding of the mechanism of histamine release and to bioassay. Like Gaddum and Clark, he used quantitative approaches whenever possible. His name is immortalised by the Schild equation.  He built on the work of Clark and Gaddum on competitive antagonism, by realising that the null method was key to extraction of physical equilibrium constants  from simple functional experiments. Rather than looking at the depression by antagonist of the response to a fixed agonist concentration, he measured the dose-ratio, the factor by which the agonist concentration had to be increased in order to restore a given response in the presence of the antagonist. By measuring the dose-ratio as a function of antagonist, it was possible to estimate the dissociation equilibrium constant for the combination of the antagonist with its receptor. Crucially the estimate is not dependent on the nature of the agonist.  Although Schild's derivation used the simplest possible model, it was subsequently shown that his equation is valid under much more general conditions.
  A.J. Clarks textbook was continued by Schild as Clarks Applied Pharmacology by Wilson & Schild.
  Heinz Schild was a generous and kindly Head of department. He appointed the third female member of academic staff, Dr M. Maureen Dale, a co-author of Rang & Dales Pharmacology. He oversaw the planning and introduction of a three-year B.Sc. course in Pharmacology which began in 1967 and continues to this day. Medical students were able to enter its final year and Schild, who never lost sight of the roots of the subject in medicine, was delighted that many took this opportunity.