Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 206-209. (Budapest, 2009)

KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK —COMMUNICATIONS - Székely, József I.: Szabálytalan gyászbeszéd az utolsó szocialista gyógyszerkutató mammutvállalat (a Gyógyszerkutató Intézet, a korábbi Gyógyszeripari Kutató Intézet) kimúlása alkalmából

IRREGULÄR OBITUARY TO THE DEATH OF THE LAST SOCIALIST DRUG RESEARCH MAMMOTH (INSTITUTE FOR DRUG RESEARCH, FORMERLY RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMISTRY, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY) JÓZSEF I. SZÉKELY Being probably the biggest pharmaceutical research facility in communist world, this defunct institution surely deserves a necrology. An honest obituary for the sake of the historians in the future who will probably ask: why was it created at all, what was its task and why was the bigger part of its life actually a long, protracted, painful agony. The author of this "memoir" is not a histórián, but a fonner long-time coworker of this institution. So this paper can not be considered an in depth historic analysis, rather a kind of a subjective witnessaccount. The original name of this institution was Research Institute for Pharmaceutical Chemistry then it was stupidly changed to Institute for Drug Research (IDR) by executives who were not genuine Professionals either in English or in research. The latter awkward, ainbiguous name fails to reveal whether it was an academic institute or a true industrial research facility or eventually a contract research venture. The problem is that we ourselves, who spent our best years there, we too are unable to teil it, even in retrospect. Thus was it a kind of non-existent species of research institutions doomed to extinction? Or a freak as the reader may conclude. But freaks do not live for 58 years (from 1950 till 2008) and they are not so productive as IDR was particularly during the first decades of its existence. It has produced 11 original drugs, two of them are still on the market. Its main original research ideas include combining sugár molecules with cytotoxic radicals to obtain good anticancer drugs, large-scale production of hirudin (a natural antithrombotic drug), developing the predecessor molecule of omeprazole, the best selling anti-ulcer drug in the world, the synthesis of oxytocin a pituitary hormoné indispensable for obstetricians, the total synthesis of ACTH (another pituitary hormoné used in the medical practice), discovery of the analgesic action of beta-endorphin (a morphine-like polypeptide produced by the organism itself), development a new class of potential agents for the treatment of epilepsy, etc. All these discoveries prove that this freak was quite productive. To total number of patents developed there + the regulär research papers published by its coworkers amounts to almost four thousands. Add about twenty books written by its coworkers and published in the USA (an encyclopaedia of antibiotics and a series about the endorphins) and remember that many Hungárián scientists, four members of the Hungárián Academy of Sciences, many university Professors and CEO's of several national agencies started their carrier there. Thus though IDR was not a university, it proved to be an excellent school of (drug) research. Quite a Performance particularly if taking into account that these research feats were only byproducts of its main activity at least in the first decades of its existence. Namely its original