Leo Sternbach

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Leo Henryk Sternbach (born May 7, 1908 in Abbazia , Austria-Hungary , † September 28, 2005 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was an American chemist and pharmacist . He was best known as the inventor of the drug Valium .

Life

Memorial plaque in Opatija

The son of a Jewish Galician pharmacist and a Jewish Hungarian woman studied first pharmacy, then chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow , where he received his doctorate in 1931 and worked as a research assistant until 1936. In 1937 he moved to Switzerland , where he was initially assistant to Leopold Ružička at the ETH Zurich and then in 1940 he moved to the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel .

In 1941 he moved to the USA , where he continued to work for Hoffmann-La Roche. Sternbach developed more than 240 pharmaceuticals to maturity, the best known of which are Librium in 1960 and Valium in 1963 from the benzodiazepine class of substances . Every fifth Roche patent was named Sternbach.

In 1971 he received an honorary doctorate from the Vienna University of Technology . In 1979 he received the American Chemical Society's ACS Award for Creative Invention .

In 1973, Sternbach was retired, but he did research continues until a few years before his death in his laboratory in Nutley ( New Jersey ).

Movies

  • Leo Sternbach - A Love for Chemistry ( Rolf Lyssy , 1999)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ TU Wien: Honorary doctorates ( memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 26, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tuwien.ac.at
personal data
SURNAME Sternbach, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sternbach, Leo Henryk (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Abbazia (formerly Austria, now Croatia)
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 2005
Place of death Chapel Hill , North Carolina