The invention of the nicotine patch was partly the work of Murray Jarvik, who first become known in medical circles for his studies in psychopharmacology — in particular, the effect of LSD on memory and addiction. Always pragmatic, he was, in the Eighties, to follow up what was literally field research to create the patch.

From an early age he had shown an inclination towards experiment, and was not daunted by illness. Born in New York in 1923, the son of an upholsterer, Jacob, he attended George Washington High School, and took first prize in Westinghouse’s Science Fair by creating a working model — in wood — of an iron lung. This was shown at the American Museum of National History. He himself, aged 12, had endured rheumatic fever and his body was to be further burdened in his twenties by polio. All of this meant that, while studying medicine at City College, fellow students would pronounce the worst when putting stethoscopes to his heart. He survived, however, to work with the psychologist Kenneth Clark, and then at Rockefeller University.

By now he had become interested in experimental psychology, and transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles for a masters before going to Berkeley for a doctorate. His work came to involve primates, of whom he was fond but was, naturally to bring controversy when he later taught them to smoke. He also, after two years at Columbia, became an early student of LSD at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He recruited volunteers for studies of the drug’s effect upon perception, with some emphasis upon its ability to relax recipents into speaking the truth — this research was covertly funded by the CIA for potential Cold War use.

From there Jarvik moved in 1956 to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, at Yeshiva University in New York. The year before Jarvik had married a colleague, Lissy, a psychiatric student with a particular interest in the ageing process and such afflictions as Alzheimer’s. His future work was partly determined by the early years of their marriage, for she was a heavy smoker, and it puzzled him that she should take five difficult years to stop (his health had prevented his taking up smoking, and his experience of LSD was restricted).

They were to remain in New York until 1972, when he became professor of psychiatry and pharmacology in Los Angeles. Much of his work was published in journals, one of which he edited, along with a substantial text-book to which many specialists contributed.

In 1970 he made the crucial link between the nicotine element and cigarettes’ addictive power. Later, with a young colleague, Jed Rose, he became interested by reports of the “green tobacco illness” among farmhands harvesting the crops. This entailed nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness, which worsened with the season. Jarvik and Rose were prevented from conducting direct experiments upon such workers, and so rubbed leaves on their own skin, and found that their heart rates and adrenalin levels rapidly increased.

Paradoxically enough, this confirmed the idea of a palliative nicotine transdermal patch which had been mooted by Rose and his brother Dan during a car journey in 1981 (a polythene patch was already used to ease motion-sickness). His and Jarvik’s first piece about it followed in 1984, after which they made tests upon hundreds of subjects and, with the Swiss firm Ciba-Geigy, developed the patch to provide nicotine at the same rate as smoking as means to ease the addiction (an aerosol version was also used).

The first patent came in May 1990, and it became available by prescription in 1992, and over the counter four years later.

He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Murray Jarvik, inventor of the nicotine patch, was born on June 1, 1923. He died on May 8, 2008, aged 84