When was valium invented

National Inventors Hall of Fame. His uncle Leon was a professor of classical philology at the Jagiellonian University and his father had graduated from pharmaceutical faculty at the same university. Another uncle, Edward, ran a large law practice in the city. In Leo took up a scholarship in Vienna after working as an assistant in the Organic Chemistry department at the Jagiellonian University. Three years later he moved to Zurich where he started working for Hoffman-la Roche.

Instead, he followed a hunch about some compounds he had studied as potential dyes years earlier in Poland. Their structures, he reasoned, could interact favorably with the human nervous system. But two years of research proved fruitless, and his bosses told him to drop the project and switch to the development of antibiotics.

Sternbach began working on the germ-killers, but he kept tinkering with the dyes. Within two years, he and his colleagues -- especially chemist Earl Reeder -- had discovered the first benzodiazepine. As they did with other potential anti-anxiety drugs, they tested it on mice that were placed at the bottom of a steeply inclined screen. Normal mice climb the screen easily. Drugged mice relax and slide back down, where they mingle in a group torpor.

With the new drug, the mice also relaxed and slid back down. But even at the bottom, they were awake and alert, a remarkable thing. Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business.

Share this —. Follow NBC News. Tolerance to the drugs is thought to develop because benzodiazepines weaken the response of receptors in the brain. The drugs are also non-specific: they act on multiple subunits of GABA, which govern different actions, such as anxiety, restfulness, motor control and cognition.

So even if a person goes on the drugs to alleviate social anxiety, they are invariably altering how they think, sleep and even move. That, in turn, explains why a person coming off benzodiazepines may experience wholly new symptoms, such as panic attacks and seizures.

He initially assumed that most people on the drugs had ramped up their dose to such a degree that they had become hooked; instead, he found that users had largely remained on the prescribed dosage. In the s, Lader and a team of researchers issued one of the earliest warnings against long-term benzodiazepine use.