[msb-alumni] Oleh Hornykiewicz, 93, a Pharmacologist Who Discovered a Treatment for Parkinson's Died on May 26, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:20:02 -0400
BlankOleh Hornykiewicz, 93, a Pharmacologist Who Discovered a Treatment for
Parkinson's By Sam Roberts.
His research into dopamine led to the mainstay treatment still used today to
treat
millions of people with Parkinson's.
Oleh Hornykiewicz, a pharmacologist whose breakthrough research on Parkinson's
disease has spared millions of patients the tremors and other physical
impairments it
can cause, died on May 26 in Vienna. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his
longtime colleague, Prof. Stephen J. Kish of the University of Toronto, where
Professor Hornykiewicz (pronounced hoar-nee-KEE-eh-vitch) taught from 1967
until his
retirement in 1992.
Professor Hornykiewicz was among several scientists who were considered
instrumental
in first identifying a deficiency of the neurotransmitter dopamine as a cause
of
Parkinson's disease, and then in perfecting its treatment with L-dopa, an amino
acid
found in fava beans. The Nobel laureate Dr. Arvid Carlsson and his colleagues
had
earlier shown that dopamine played a role in motor function.
Drawing on that research, Professor Hornykiewicz and his assistant, Herbert
Ehringer,
discovered in 1960 that the brains of patients who had died of Parkinson's had
very
low levels of dopamine. He persuaded another one of his collaborators, the
neurologist Walther Birkmayer, to inject Parkinson's patients with L-dopa, the
precursor of dopamine, which could cross the barrier between blood vessels and
the
brain and be converted into dopamine by enzymes in the body, thus replenishing
those
depleted levels.
The treatment alleviated symptoms of the disease, and patients who had been
bedridden
started walking. The initial results of this research were published in 1961
and
presented at a meeting of the Medical Society of Vienna.
The "L-dopa Miracle," as it was called, inspired Dr. Oliver Sacks's memoir
"Awakenings" (1973) and the fictionalized movie of the same name in 1990.
(Sacks' book "Awakenings," along with many others, are on Bookshare.)
Professor Kish, who heads the Human Brain Laboratory at the University of
Toronto's
Center for Addiction and Mental Health, said L-dopa, or Levodopa as it is also
called, is today "the mainstay treatment for Parkinson's disease -- no drug is
more
efficacious."
"Hornykiewicz," he added, "reminds us that before L-dopa, persons with
Parkinson's
disease were bedridden, crowding chronic hospital wards, and the doctors were
powerless to do anything. His discovery changed all that; it was a miracle."
As a therapy for Parkinson's, L-dopa was further refined by other scientists,
including George C. Cotzias and Melvin D. Yahr. But it was Professor
Hornykiewicz,
defying colleagues who had argued that post-mortem brain studies were
worthless, who
is credited with the critical breakthroughs.
His findings spurred the establishment of human brain tissue banks, research
into
dopamine, and treatments of other diseases caused by low levels of
neurotransmitters.
"Today, it is generally agreed that the initiation of the treatment of
Parkinson's
disease with L-dopa represented one of the triumphs of pharmacology of our
time,"
Professor Hornykiewicz wrote in "The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography,
Volume
IV" (2004). "This provided, apart from the benefit to the patients, a stimulus
for
analogous studies of many other brain disorders, both neurological and
psychiatric."
He received several distinguished awards, including the Wolf Prize in Medicine
in
1979 and the Ludwig Wittgenstein Prize of the Austrian Research Foundation in
1993.
In 2000, when Dr. Carlsson, of Sweden, and others were awarded the Nobel Prize
in
Physiology or Medicine for discovering dopamine and 'allowing for the
development of
drugs for the disease,' as the Nobel committee wrote, more than 200 scientists
signed
a petition protesting that the prize had not also been awarded to Professor
Hornykiewicz.
Oleh Hornykiewicz was born on Nov. 17, 1926, in the village of Sychow, near
Lviv, in
what was then southeastern Poland and is now western Ukraine. His was a
fourth-generation family of Eastern Orthodox Catholic priests.
His father, Theophil Hornykiewicz, ministered to the village's several dozen
parishioners and taught religion; his mother, Anna (Sas-Jaworsky) Hornykiewicz,
managed the affairs of the village's 300-year-old wooden church. When the
Soviet
Union invaded in 1939, the family fled to Austria, his mother's ancestral home,
with
whatever belongings they could carry. Oleh knew no German but learned it by
reading
Hitler's "Mein Kampf," which was readily available in Vienna.
He suffered from tuberculosis and, when the war ended, decided to follow his
eldest
brother and become a doctor. He received his medical degree from the University
of
Vienna in 1951 and began his academic and research career in its pharmacology
department. He held a British Council Research Scholarship at the University of
Oxford from 1956 to 1958.
Beginning in 1967, he headed the psychopharmacology department at the Clarke
Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto (now the Center for Addiction and Mental
Health),
where he established the Human Brain Laboratory in 1978. He was named a full
professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto in 1973
and, in
1976, appointed to head the newly founded Institute of Biochemical Pharmacology
of
the University of Vienna. He held both posts concurrently. He is survived by
his
daughter, Maria Hentosz; three sons, Nikolaj, Stephan and Joseph; six
grandchildren;
and one great-grandchild. His wife, Christina (Prus-Jablonowski) Hornykiewicz,
died
before him.
"He was a pharmacologist, biochemist and neurologist who wanted to find out how
the
brain works and how dopamine was involved," Professor Kish said. "And he wanted
to be
known also as a philosopher."
Despite being snubbed by the Nobel committee, Professor Hornykiewicz was
philosophical about what he had accomplished and the degree to which it had
been
credited.
"I am surprised to see that I have achieved everything I could have wished
for," he
wrote in 2004. "The support and recognition I received for my work, I have
accepted
with gratitude, as a charming reminder to do more and better."
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