Louis S. Goodman (1906-2000) was born August 27 in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from Reed College in 1928, earned his medical degree at the University of Oregon in 1932 and interned at Johns Hopkins Hospital before moving to Yale University to study and later teach pharmacology. During World War II, while investigating chemical warfare, Goodman and fellow Yale scientist Dr. Alfred Gilman discovered the effectiveness of nitrogen mustard as an anticancer chemotherapy, a breakthrough which led to chemotherapy's role as a major cancer treatment.

In 1943, Goodman left Yale for the University of Vermont, and, in 1944 he moved to Salt Lake City to become the founding chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Utah's School of Medicine. There, he supervised experiments in anesthesia with the paralyzing muscle relaxant, curare, once used by South American Indians as poison.

A particular authority on drugs for treating both cancer and epileptic seizures, Goodman created the journal, Pharmacological Reviews for the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics in 1949 and co-authored the seminal textbook, Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, first published in 1941 and now well in to its tenth edition. He retired from the Department of Pharmacology in 1971 and passed away 19 November 2000 at the age of ninety-four.