Yusuf Hamied

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Yusuf Khwaja Hamied is chairman of Cipla, a company founded by his father Khwaja Abdul Hamied.

Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, Yusuf Hamied was raised in Bombay. He is a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Christ's College, Cambridge. He fought large pharmaceutical companies to be able to provide generic AIDS drugs to people in poor countries. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2005. He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Cannon School. He is fondly called Yuku by his close friends. He is fond of Western Classical music and is close friends since boyhood days with internationally-famous conductor Zubin Mehta.

"Mr. Hamied comes by this mix of motivations -- profit, social conscience and nationalism -- by birthright. His father was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi's brand of Indian nationalism whose family chipped in to send him to study chemistry in England, India's colonial master, in 1924. Instead, he changed ships and went to Germany, then the world's leader in chemicals. On a Berlin lake, he met a Lithuanian Jewish socialist -- Mr. Hamied's mother. They fled as Germany was shifting into Nazi hands, and the Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories, later known as Cipla, was founded in 1935." -- Selling Cheap 'Generic' Drugs, India's Copycats Irk Industry, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., New York Times, December 1, 2000

Hamied has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts to eradicate AIDS and to give patients to life-saving medicines regardless of their ability to pay. For this he has been attacked, threatened and vilified by multinational drug companies eager to avoid setting precedents which might dent their profit margins on remedies for life-threatening diseases, indifferent to the suffering of millions which invariably results.