A psychologist and pharmacologist, Jarvik was perplexed why his wife had such a hard time quitting smoking. “It is strange that people should go to such lengths to burn and then inhale some vegetable matter,” he once said. “We must find out what is rewarding about it.”
A non-smoker himself, “Murray was always asking, ‘Why do people smoke?’” said Richard Olmstead of the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program at University of California at Los Angeles. What Jarvik finally figured out was that nicotine, a key ingredient in tobacco smoke, was addictive. With that, “He was able to largely answer his question,” Olmstead said.
Jarvik started studying smoking in the 1960s at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and in 1972 moved to UCLA to continue his studies. He was intrigued that farmers who picked tobacco leaves by hand would have symptoms of smoking, even if they didn’t smoke. He theorized they were absorbing nicotine through their skin, which led Jarvik (with two other researchers) to invent what’s now one of the primary tools to help people stop smoking: the nicotine patch.
Jarvik, who suffered from heart ailments after contracting rheumatic fever when he was 12, died May 15 from congestive heart failure. He was 84.