Roger Edward Collingwood Altounyan

Physician and medical pioneer, born in Syria of Armenian–English extraction. He spent his summer holidays with his four sisters in the Lake District, where they met the author Arthur Mitchell Ransome and became the real-life models of the children in his Swallows and Amazons series of adventure books. He qualified as a doctor, later joining a pharmaceutical company, where he developed the drug sodium cromoglycate to combat asthma, from which he was himself a sufferer. A pilot and flying instructor during the war, he developed the Spinhaler device to inhale the drug, based on the aerodynamic principles of aircraft propellers.

Roger Edward Collingwood Altounyan (1922­-1987) was a Syrian-born Armenian physician and pharmacologist who pioneered the use of sodium cromoglycate as a remedy for asthma.

Starting with khellin, a traditional Middle Eastern remedy for asthma, he discovered in 1965 that khellin's active ingredient was sodium cromoglycate.

He has been voted as one of the top 1000 scientists of all time in the book Top 1000 Scientists: From the Beginning of Time to 2000 AD by Philip Barker.