Dr. Murray E. Jarvik, the UCLA pharmacologist who showed that nicotine was the addictive factor in tobacco and invented the nicotine patch for smokers trying to quit, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica.
He was 84 and had been struggling for some time with congestive heart failure, according to UCLA spokesman Mark Wheeler.
"Murray was always asking, 'Why do people smoke?' " said UCLA psychiatric researcher Richard Olmstead. "I would say that Murray's greatest impact was advancing the proposition that nicotine was the key addictive component in tobacco. . . . He was able to largely answer his question."
A nonsmoker, Jarvik grew interested in the subject when he observed the great difficulty encountered by his wife, Dr. Lissy Jarvik of UCLA, in kicking the habit.
"I realized then that it was an addiction, and I said so in an article I published in 1970," he later told the journal Addiction.
Beginning in the late 1960s, while he was a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Jarvik taught monkeys how to smoke and demonstrated the links between nicotine and addiction, and exploring the effects of medications on the response. He took the monkeys with him when he moved to UCLA in 1972 and continued his work, experimenting with nicotine gum in animals and humans, and showing that it could reduce the craving for cigarettes.
Beginning in 1984, Jarvik and his student Jed Rose, now director of the Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research at Duke University, began investigating the possibility of introducing nicotine through a transdermal patch.
Their interest was piqued, in part, by their knowledge of "green tobacco illness," which affected farmhands harvesting the crop in the South. They suspected that nicotine in the tobacco was being absorbed through the workers' skin, creating their symptoms.
When they initially could not obtain permission to test their idea on experimental subjects, Jarvik later said, they decided to test it on themselves. "We put the tobacco on our skin and waited to see what would happen," he recalled. "Our heart rates increased, adrenaline began pumping, all the things that happen to smokers."
They patented the concept and assigned the patent to the University of California, which licensed it to Ciba-Geigy, now Novartis. The first prescription nicotine patch reached the market in 1992, and four years later, it became available over the counter.
