Sir James Black places his walking stick on one side, eases himself into a plump yellow sofa at the Royal Society of Medicine's headquarters in London and begins to talk in a soft voice. But he is soon working himself up into a passion.

He becomes agitated when discussing a Harvard Business Review article from 2008 by Jean-Pierre Garnier, the former chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, on the future of drug development. He agrees with the prognosis, but is fundamentally at odds over the prescription for change.

"In this time of gloom, the pharmaceutical companies ought to be doing extremely well," he says in his Scottish lilt. "There is no market as unique as drugs; when people are distressed, their desire for relief pre-empts all others; and the industry has a reputation for being good at development. The trouble is that it keeps making promises."

Still working, debating and writing in his 83rd year, long after most of his peers have quietly retired, Sir James has plenty of recommendations for improvement in an industry that has suffered from a flagging product pipeline, and still more thoughts on what has gone wrong.

He has no time for classic industry clichés such as "blockbuster" medicines; no truck with the modern approach to peer review; and no patience with any re-writing of history to suggest a more complex contemporary era of drug discovery has replaced one of "lowhanging fruit" in the past.

This is no idle chatter from an armchair pontificator, nor an academic divorced from the pressures of business. He is a distinguished scientist, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988, not to mention a Royal Medal and an award from the Lasker Foundation. But his rare skill - reflected late last year in the lifetime achievement award he received from Medical Futures, a British organisation established to commercialise doctors' medical ideas - is to have bridged the divide between university and business.

He was pivotal in the development of two of the most successful blockbuster medicines that the pharmaceutical industry has ever developed: propranolol, the first beta-blocker to treat hypertension; and cimetidine for stomach ulcers. Both transformed the lives of millions of patients and saved health systems enormous costs.

Raised in Fife, the fourth of five boys in a "staunch Baptist home", Sir James says he was a daydreamer in school, and it was only in the "forbidding" atmosphere of St Andrew's University, where he studied medicine, that disciplined study took over.

He researched and taught in Singapore and then Glasgow, but was soon drawn into industry after a friend working in ICI's marketing division suggested that he contact the chemical company's pharmaceutical unit to co-operate in his research on beta blockers. To his astonishment, they invited the academic outsider on a site visit to their new laboratories in Alderley Edge. "They said it would be much easier if I did the work in their labs. They were just heaven compared with anything I'd worked in before."

His approach highlighted one aspect that he believes is key to successful drug development: entrepreneurial teams of up to about 25 people, allowed to operate at arms' length from the rest of the company. "Lab researchers have an insatiable appetite for growth. But we were small. I had a chemist and a technician, and off we went. I had to fight, but I could chat up the head of R&D. We knew everyone by their first name."

He raises his eyes skywards when he discusses last week's $68bn (£48bn) takeover by Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical group, of Wyeth, and says the restructuring to come will sap both teams. "Will they never learn? They will completely exhaust each others' energies for two years."