Bernard Halpern

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Bernard Naftali Halpern (born November 2, 1904 in Tarnoruda , Ukraine , † September 23, 1978 ) was a Russian-born French immunologist and pharmacologist.

Halpern came from a Jewish family who was exiled to Siberia by the Tsarist regime in 1905 and went to Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. From there Halpern came to Poland at the age of 16 and to France in 1926, where he studied medicine in Nancy and from 1928 in Paris . In 1936 he received his doctorate. Even as a student, he turned to experimental biology in Gautrelet's laboratory. Since he had not been a French citizen for a long time, he was initially denied an academic career and went into industry for the chemical company Rhône-Poulenc . There he dealt, among other things, with the development of antihistamines for the treatment of allergies, which were first discovered by Nobel Prize laureates Daniel Bovet , Ernest Fourneau and Anne-Marie Staub from the Pasteur Institute in 1933. After the German occupation he went to the unoccupied part of France and worked as a general practitioner in a village in the Ardèche until the Vichy regime prohibited him from doing so. He then worked again from 1942 at Rhone Poulenc in Lyon , where he developed the first antihistamine that was used therapeutically during the war (Antergan, Phenbenzamine, Phénergan). It came from the group of the ethylenediamines . Since this drew the attention of the German occupiers, he temporarily went to Switzerland. He stayed with Rhone-Poulenc until 1945 and went to the laboratory for immunology at the Hospital Broussais in Paris. From 1948 he was research director of the CNRS and professor at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). From 1961 to 1975 he held the chair for experimental medicine (the old chair of Claude Bernard ) at the Collège de France .

In 1964 he became a member of the Académie des sciences , and he was a member of the Académie nationale de médecine . In 1971 he received the CNRS gold medal . At the College de France, symposia in immunology are named after him and a prize.

literature

  • OL Frick A tribute to Bernard N. Halpern , Allergy Proc., Volume 12, 1991, p. 417

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Developed together with Bovet. Bovet's predecessor products, such as F 929, were toxic to humans. Gustav Ehrhart (1894–1971) independently synthesized the antihistamine fenpipran in 1939. The successor preparation Neo-Antergan ( mepyramine , from 1944) is still produced today. A. Edwards History of Allergy in Pawankar, Holgate, Rosenwasser Allergy Frontiers: Diagnosis and Health Economics , 2009, p. 16. Rudolf Schmitz, Christoph Friedrich Geschichte der Pharmazie , Govi ​​Verlag, 2005, p. 485
  2. ↑ Ulrich Meyer Is there an allergy behind it? , Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft 2002, p. 76
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter H. Académie des sciences, accessed on November 22, 2019 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Halpern, Bernard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Halpern, Bernard Naftali (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French immunologist and pharmacologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Tarnoruda
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1978