In the Lyallpur district of undivided India, on 25 November 1928, a boy named Harkishan Singh was born into a family that valued learning. After Partition he made his way to Panjab University, where he earned his Bachelor of Pharmacy in 1950. He continued at Banaras Hindu University, completing his Master’s and then a Ph.D. in 1956, specialising in organic and medicinal chemistry.

He taught and researched at Banaras Hindu University, the University of Saugar and, for the greater part of his career, at Panjab University in Chandigarh, where he rose to Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and later Head of the Department. He also worked at universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, always returning with fresh ideas for Indian science.

His research group achieved something rare: the discovery of a clinically useful drug, Chandonium Iodide (HS-310), later given the international name Candocuronium Iodide by the World Health Organization. It was a synthetic muscle relaxant—the only new drug to emerge from an Indian university laboratory and reach clinical use. Over the decades he supervised nearly fifty master’s and doctoral students, published more than 350 papers and books, and secured fourteen patents. He also became a pioneering historian of Indian pharmacy, documenting the profession’s journey through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and played a key role in the founding of the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER).

One day a young researcher asked him, “Sir, why do you still spend hours writing the history of pharmacy when you could have focused only on new molecules?”

Harkishan Singh smiled. “Because a science that forgets its past cannot truly invent its future. Every tablet we make today rests on the shoulders of those who came before us.”

In 2017, at the age of eighty-eight, the President of India conferred upon him the Padma Shri for his contributions to medicine. He also received honorary doctorates from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and from Panjab University itself.

Professor Emeritus Harkishan Singh passed away on 20 March 2020. Yet the drug he helped create, the students he trained, the institute he helped build, and the history he carefully recorded continue to serve Indian pharmacy. From a Partition-era student to the quiet scholar who gave India a new medicine and a deeper understanding of its pharmaceutical heritage, his journey remains a luminous chapter in the story of science in the service of society.