Leo Henryk Sternbach (May 7, 1908 – September 28, 2005) was a Polish-Jewish chemist who is credited with discovering benzodiazepines, main class of tranquilizers.[1]
He was born in Opatija, then in Austria-Hungary and now part of Croatia. He received his doctoral degree in organic chemistry from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He worked for Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland, which helped him to flee to the United States in 1941 to escape the Nazis. His work on drugs was done while working for Roche in Nutley, New Jersey.
Sternbach is credited with the discovery of chlordiazepoxide (Librium), diazepam (Valium), flurazepam (Dalmane), nitrazepam (Mogadon), flunitrazepam (Rohypnol), clonazepam (Klonopin), and trimethaphan (Arfonad). Librium, based on the R0 6-690 compound discovered by Sternbach in 1956, was approved for use in 1960. In 1963 its improved version, Valium, was released and became astonishingly popular: between 1969 and 1982 it was the most prescribed drug in America, with over 2.3 billion sold in peak year of 1978. With Moses Wolf Goldberg, Sternbach also developed "the first commercially applicable" method for synthesizing biotin.[2]
Sternbach held 241 patents, and his discoveries helped to turn Roche into a pharmaceutical industry giant. He didn't become wealthy from his discoveries but he was happy: he treated chemistry as a passion and said that "I always did just what I wanted to do". He went into the office until he was 95.
Sternbach was a longtime resident of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, from 1943 to 2003. He then moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he died in 2005.[3][4]
A book "Good chemistry: The life and legacy of valium inventor Leo Sternbach" was published by McGraw-Hill in 2004.
Sternbach's uncle Leon Sternbach, the brother of Sternbach's father Michael, was a professor of classical philology at Jagiellonian University. He was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by Gustav Sorge in 1940.
He is present in the New Jersey Inventor's Hall of Fame; and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in February 2005, a few months before his death.[5]