Corneliu E. Giurgea

Corneliu E. Giurgea was a Romanian psychologist and chemist.

In 1964, he synthetised Piracetam, which he has described as a nootropic.^[1]

Giurgea coined the term nootropic^[2][3] in 1972.^[4][5]

Nootropic characteristics

He stated that nootropic drugs should have the following characteristics:

1. They should enhance learning and memory.
2. They should enhance the resistance of learned behaviors/memories to conditions which tend to disrupt them (e.g. electroconvulsive shock, hypoxia).
3. They should protect the brain against various physical or chemical injuries (e.g. barbiturates, scopalamine).
4. They should increase the efficacy of the tonic cortical/subcortical control mechanisms.
5. They should lack the usual pharmacology of other psychotropic drugs (e.g. sedation, motor stimulation) and possess very few side effects and extremely low toxicity.

(note: section 5. of Giurgea's original definition has been gradually dropped by most researchers.)

Biography

He received a Ph.D. in medicine from the University of Bucharest, were he also taught for several years. He continued his research and specialisation at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in Moscow, under some of Ivan Pavlov's closest collaborators such as Pyotyr Kupalov. He was then a post-doc at the University of Rochester and subsequently a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and scientific counselor and researcher at the Belgian pharmaceutical company UCB.

Books and articles

• Le Vieillissement Cerebral: Normal Et Reussi, Le Defi Du XXIe Siecle 1993 ISBN 978-2-87009-539-3
• L'heritage De Pavlov: Un Demi-Siecle Apres Sa Mort 1986 ISBN 978-2-87009-279-8
• Fundamentals to a pharmacology of the mind 1981 ISBN 978-0-398-04130-4

• Articles: PubMed Central, Google Scholar.

Quotes

"Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain."

References