• Allergic lung disease
• asthma
• asthma guidelines
• asthma mechanisms
• asthma pharmacology
• cough/mechanisms/pharmacology
• eosinophil biology
• exhaled airway markers

A wonderful clinical scientist, great friend and mentor to many in the field of respiratory medicine, Frederick E Hargreave (known to everyone as Freddy), died suddenly on 15 June 2011. Freddy was born in Hong Kong and completed his medical school training at the University of Leeds. After completing his initial clinical training, Freddy moved to London to work as a house officer in respiratory medicine with Dr EJ Moran Campbell at the Hammersmith Hospital. A short while later, Moran Campbell accepted the position as the founding chair of the Department of Medicine at the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, a move that was to change Freddy's life both personally and professionally. Subsequently, Freddy began his research training with Professor Jack Pepys at the Brompton Hospital. During this time, Freddy described a new clinical entity, bird fancier's lung disease, a type of allergic alveolitis caused by the inhalation of bird antigens.1

In 1969, Freddy Hargreave joined the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, at the behest of Moran Campbell and Norman Jones (who was the first division director for respiratory medicine at McMaster). Shortly after arriving in Hamilton, he started what was to become a lifelong collaboration and close friendship with Dr Jerry Dolovich and their focus turned to understanding the mechanisms and treatment of asthma. Within 10 years, the studies led by Freddy Hargreave had changed the way that asthma was diagnosed and had paved the way to future studies that have revolutionised its treatment. In particular, Dr Don Cockcroft (who was Freddy's first clinical fellow), who described the methodology for the measurement of airway hyper-responsiveness in asthma,2 had demonstrated that this …