When was valium created

The saga began in when Wallace Pharmaceuticals brought out an anti-anxiety drug called Miltown that was then thought -- wrongly, it was learned later -- to be free of the many adverse side effects that afflicted barbiturates, the most widely used drugs for anxiety at the time.

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. Because he was not supposed to be working on anti-anxiety drugs, Sternbach sat on the discovery for six months.

The drug was Librium, which went on the market in The words are a social commentary on benzodiazepines, which had just hit the market a few years prior and become wildly popular, particularly among American housewives. Since the late s, drug manufacturers had been hunting for a new, non-addictive anti-anxiety medication. Previously, patients were given opiates — with predictably disastrous results. Then came barbiturates, which were also written off as too addictive.

After that, doctors began prescribing anti-psychotic drugs known as phenothiazines, but those drugs triggered severe side-effects such as uncontrollable facial movements. In the s, the late Leo Sternbach — a research chemist — began tinkering with an unknown class of compounds: the BZDs, or benzodiazepines. Over several years, he tested some 40 BZDs but all proved ineffective. Finally in , after adding methylamine a colourless gas derived from ammonia to one compound, he produced a white powder that made mice sleepy and calm.

My wife doesn't let me take it. Sternbach was born in in Opatija, a town in modern day Croatia but at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a Hungarian Jewish mother and a Polish father, who ran a small pharmacy in the town. 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.