| Yusuf Hamied | |
|---|---|
| Born | Vilnius, Lithuania |
| Institutions | Cipla |
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge |
| Influences | Alexander Todd[1] |
| Notable awards | Padma Bhushan |
Yusuf Khwaja Hamied is a leading Indian scientist who serves as chairman of Cipla, a socially conscious generic pharmaceuticals company founded by his father Khwaja Abdul Hamied in 1935.[2]
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, Yusuf Hamied was raised in Bombay (now known as Mumbai). His Indian Muslim father and Russophone Jewish mother met in Berlin, where they both were graduate students. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Christ's College, Cambridge.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay. Affectionately called Yuku by his close friends, Hamied is fond of Western Classical music and has been close friends with the world-famous conductor Zubin Mehta since boyhood.
Hamied is best known outside India for defying giant Western pharmaceutical companies in order to provide generic AIDS drugs and treatments for other ailments primarily affecting people in poor countries. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2005.
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. -- Donald G. McNeil, Jr., New York Times, December 1, 2000
Hamied has led efforts to eradicate AIDS in the developing world and to give patients life-saving medicines regardless of their ability to pay,[3] and has often been characterized as a modern-day Robin Hood figure[4][5][6][7] as a result.
In September 2011, in a piece about how he was trying to radically lower costs of biotech drugs for cancer, diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases, The New York Times wrote of Hamied:
Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of the Indian drug giant Cipla Ltd., electrified the global health community a decade ago when he said he could produce cocktails of AIDS medicines for $1 per day — a fraction of the price charged by branded pharmaceutical companies. That price has since fallen to 20 cents per day, and more than six million people in the developing world now receive treatment, up from little more than 2,000 in 2001.[8]
In 2009 the Yusuf Hamied Centre was opened at Christ's College, Cambridge.[1][9]
Yusuf Hamied has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Time (magazine), The Guardian, Le Monde, The Economist, Financial Times, The Times (London), Corriere della Sera, Der Spiegel, Wired and numerous other leading publications, as well as on television outlets such as ABC News, BBC, CNN and CBS ("60 Minutes").