V. Craig Jordan, Who Discovered a Key Breast Cancer Drug, Dies at 76

V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells opened up a whole new class of drugs and helped save the lives of millions of women, died on June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76.

Balkees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Dr. Jordan and was his caregiver for several years, said the cause was renal cancer.

Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous, even obsessive researcher, a quality demonstrated in his work on tamoxifen. The drug was first synthesized in 1962, though it was discarded after not only failing to prevent conception but, in some cases, promoting it.

But Dr. Jordan, then still a doctoral student at the University of Leeds in Britain, saw something that no one else did. It had long been known that estrogen promoted breast cancer growth in postmenopausal women — and he suspected that tamoxifen could help stop it.

Cancer of all kinds had long been seen as an unconquerable foe, treatable only with blunt, dangerous tools like chemotherapy. But the early 1970s saw a new wave of research, fueled in part by President Richard M. Nixon’s “war on cancer” campaign, which over the next 30 years would lead to a revolution in oncology.