Oleh Hornykiewicz
Oleh Hornykiewicz ( born November 17, 1926 in Sychow, Ukraine) is a pharmacologist in Vienna. He is considered a pioneer in the field of research into Parkinson 's disease and the role of dopamine in it.
Life
Hornykiewicz studied after the Second World War in Vienna. From 1964 he was a lecturer at the pharmacological institute of Vienna University. From 1968 to 1976 he was a professor at the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Toronto. From 1976/1977 onwards he was a full professor at the University of Vienna ( retiring in 1995 ) and Chairman of the Institute of Biochemical Pharmacology of the University (until 1999). As Emeritus since 2004 he is the Medical University of Vienna, Center for Brain Research, assigned. His research led him to the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Scientific Life
Herbert Eringer and Oleh Hornykiewicz presented as the first reduced dopamine content in the basal ganglia of the brain stem from deceased Parkinson's patients notes. Walter Birkmayer, then head of the neurology department at the hospital Lainz, and Oleh Hornykiewicz then treated for the first time in Vienna 20 patients intravenously with L- dopa. On November 10 1961 she published their findings in the clinical Viennese weekly:
" The effect of a single intravenous L -DOPA administration in Parkinson 's disease was, in short, especially in the utter abolition or substantial reduction of akinesia ( immobility ). Patients who do not put up from lying down, get up from a sitting position, from standing could not start to leave, those benefits brought light into existence after L -DOPA doses. They went with normal associated movements, could even run and jump [ ...] This DOPA effect lasted about three hours at full strength and then gradually disappeared usually within 24 hours. He could as often [ ... ] are reproduced. Rigor (rigid ) and tremor (shaking ) were not significantly affected by our previous experiences by a single dose. "
As, received in 2000 the Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson, who had also worked on the elucidation of the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine " for discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system " caused the protest of the Nobel Committee. decision Oleh Hornykiewicz, more active emeritus professor at the Institute for Brain Research in Vienna, was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel prize - usually together with the prize winner Arvid Carlsson of the University of Gothenburg. Both Carlsson and Hornykiewicz worked independently in the 50s of the last century. Avid Carlsson had found in the laboratory that the lack of dopamine causes Parkinson's symptoms in rabbits and mice. However, it was the Viennese group around Oleh Hornykiewicz, who has performed the essential research on the human brain, which were crucial for the development of drugs. Initiator of the protest, because of the potentially wrongly awarded the Nobel Prize: Ali Rajput, a neurologist at the University of Saskatchewan. He could win the support of about 230 colleagues.