In 2015, Boots UK sold an average of one packet of ibuprofen every 2.92 seconds. Across all UK retailers, the sales figures for the medicine reached over ￡150m in the same year. Despite this, however, Stewart Adams, the pharmacist who led the team that discovered one of the world's most popular painkillers, says the achievement has had no effect on his lifestyle whatsoever. "People assume that I must be a very rich man because of the success of ibuprofen but I can assure you that neither John [Nicholson, Adams' scientific partner] nor I received any financial reward for the success that we did have," says Adams, now 92 years of age, who worked for Boots for 54 years. It took 16 years of tireless research before Adams finally made his breakthrough discovery. But it began not with a quest to find a general painkiller, but to produce a new drug for rheumatoid arthritis.
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