Dr. Glen, the recipient of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, is only the second veterinarian to win a Lasker in 73 years, according to the foundation.

A pharmaceutical career was an unlikely path for Dr. Glen, but the fact that he was interested in anesthesia was no surprise: for years, he had taught the subject to students at Glasgow University’s veterinary school. “I was anesthetizing dogs, cats, horses — whatever animals came around,” Dr. Glen said in an interview. Once he used anesthesia on a pelican to fix its beak.

When he arrived in the 1970s at ICI Pharmaceuticals, later acquired by AstraZeneca, Dr. Glen had turned his attention to humans and was on the hunt for a replacement for thiopentone, a widely used anesthetic that quickly put patients to sleep but often made them groggy afterward.

In lab tests on mice, he and his colleagues discovered that one of the company’s existing compounds, propofol, seemed to work as well as thiopentone but wore off quickly, without the hangover effect of the earlier drug. Propofol was approved in 1986 in the United Kingdom and in the United States three years later.