Gábor Béla Fodor was a Hungarian chemist and medical research scientist.(He was born in Budapest Hungary, December 5, 1915 and died on November 3, 2000 in San Diego, California, United States.)
Graduating as a Magna Cum Laude and completing his Ph.D in chemistry, his lifetime work was dedicated to academia and to the research of antidotes, painkillers and derivatives of vitamin C and tropane alkaloids for the treatment and cure of cancer, strokes, Alzheimer's disease and other illnesses.
He worked for Budapest's Chinoin laboratories, where he isolated homatropine, which was needed during World War II, and he succeeded twice in escaping imprisonment during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. His father was Domokos Fodor from Hungarian Transylvannia, and his mother was Paola Maria Bayer from Budapest, a Roman Catholic of Jewish ancestry. He attended the University of Szeged, where he was a professor until 1957. In the 1960s, he joined Laval University in Canada from 1964 to 1968 as a Professor of Chemistry. He immigrated to the United States to join Department of Chemistry at West Virginia University, where he was Professor of Chemistry, a Centennial Professor ( 1969–1986 ), and an Emeritus Professor.[1] (when he was diagnosed with lung cancer). Late in his life he was active in collaborative work with several American laboratories, among them Forest Laboratories in New York.
His specialized field of research concerned tropane alkaloids. He conducted early studies of powerful drugs of this group found in natural sources. Such studies included an early configuration of cocaine and early studies of its medicinal uses, as well as numerous studies of other compounds. He worked with friend and fellow countryman Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1937), under whose direction he isolated new vitamins and derivatives using all the letters in the alphabet to name them. Their lifelong friendship had a profound effect in his successive work with Vitamin C derivatives.