V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that the failed birth control pill tamoxifen could stop the growth of breast cancer cells led to the creation of an entirely new class of drugs and saved the lives of millions of women, died June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76.
Researcher Balkis Abderrahman, who worked closely with Dr. Jordan and was his caregiver for many years, determined that the cause was kidney cancer.
Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous and even obsessive researcher, a trait that was demonstrated in his research on tamoxifen, a drug that was first synthesized in 1962 but was abandoned because it not only failed to prevent pregnancy, but in some cases promoted it.
But Dr. Jordan, then a PhD student at the University of Leeds in England, saw something no one else had: Estrogen has long been known to promote breast cancer growth in postmenopausal women, and he suspected that tamoxifen might help block it.
Cancer of all kinds has long been considered an invincible enemy, treatable only by blunt and dangerous tools like chemotherapy. But in the early 1970s, a new wave of research, partly fueled by President Richard M. Nixon’s “War on Cancer” campaign, emerged that revolutionized oncology over the next three decades.
Dr. Jordan was the leader of that revolution. After decades of research, he was able to show that when tamoxifen was given to patients with early-stage breast cancer, it blocked estrogen receptors and prevented tumor growth. In his words, it was an “antiestrogen.”
Tamoxifen, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1999, was the first of a new class of drugs called selective estrogen receptor modulators. This drug and others are now prescribed to women around the world and are credited with helping millions of patients.
Tamoxifen isn't perfect. It only works for 65-80% of postmenopausal women and 45-60% of premenopausal women. And while Dr. Jordan was the first to show that tamoxifen slightly increased the risk of a type of uterine cancer, he argued that the benefits for breast cancer patients were still overwhelming.
In 1998, Dr. Jordan, working with aging expert Stephen R. Cummings of the University of California, San Francisco, showed that another estrogen blocker, raloxifene, improved bone density in postmenopausal women and reduced their risk of breast cancer by up to 70 percent.
Dr. Jordan was an old-school researcher in many ways. He insisted that drugs be investigated for all potential uses, not just those that would make money or get to market the fastest. And he believed that scientists should be transparent about side effects, even if it meant making a drug less appealing. He called his work “a conversation with nature.”
Virgil Craig Jordan was born on July 25, 1947 in New Braunfels, Texas. His British mother, Cynthia Mottram, and American father, Virgil Johnson, met while his father was serving in England during World War II and returned to their home in Texas after the war.
They divorced shortly after Craig was born, and he and his mother moved to her home in Bramhall, near Manchester, where he grew up. She later married Geoffrey Jordan, who adopted Craig as his son.
Craig was, by his own account, an average student. The only subject he excelled in was chemistry, which his mother fostered by allowing him to build a laboratory in his bedroom.
“The experiment often got out of hand, and I ended up throwing the smoking beer out the window onto the lawn below, setting the curtains ablaze,” he wrote in the Endocrine Journal in 2014. “The lawn naturally died.”
Because his grades were poor, he figured he would go straight to work after high school and work as a lab technician, probably at a nearby plant run by Imperial Chemical Industries (now part of the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca).
However, his mother persuaded his teachers to allow him to study for another year to prepare for university, and he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Leeds. He received his BA in 1969, his PhD in 1973, and his PhD in science in 1985, all in pharmacology.
He also enlisted in the College Officers' Training Corps, and then served in the British Army and Army Reserves until his mandatory retirement at age 55, most of which was in the Special Air Service, a special unit of the U.S. Navy.
While at Leeds, he began research on tamoxifen, an interest that led him to work at several institutions including the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern University, Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Georgetown University, and, since 2014, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Dr. Jordan's three marriages ended in divorce. He leaves behind two daughters from his first marriage, Alexandra Noel and Helen Turner, and five grandchildren.
He was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer in 2018, an earth-shattering diagnosis that he nonetheless spoke about publicly, and which he battled and overcame in the last years of his life.
“I’m in a state of flux, but I’m not afraid of dying,” he told the oncology publication ASCO Post in 2022. “I was the most likely person not to make it to 30 because of the stupid things I did when I was young.”