Joseph Knoll

* Košice, May 30, 1925 – / physician, pharmacologist, university professor, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; ; Graduated from high school in Budapest in 1943. He began his studies at the Faculty of Medicine of the Pázmány Péter University in 1945 and obtained his medical degree in 1951 at the faculty that was transformed into the Semmelweis University of Medicine in Budapest in the meantime. As a student, he worked at the university's Institute of Pharmacology from 1949, and after graduating, he began his academic career as an assistant professor. In 1958, he became an associate professor, in 1963, a university professor and director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy. He retired in 1995, and has been a professor emeritus since 2004. His research field is psychoneurophysiology and pharmacology. Based on the analysis of the physiological mechanisms of drive-based behavior, he created a new theory for the reflex interpretation of complex behavioral reactions. He first wrote a monographic summary of his experiments entitled The Theory of Active Reflexes. An Analysis of Some Fundamental Mechanisms of Higher Nervous Activity in 1969, and then supplemented it with the results of his new studies in The Brain and its Self. A Neurochemical Concept of the Innate and Acquired Drives. He published it in 2005 (in Hungarian: Agy és tudata, 2006). He created a new family of analgesic, anti-inflammatory pyrimidine-based compounds, of which the substance with the brand name Rymazolium (Probon) became a drug in 1976, but the painkillers belonging to the azidimorphines are also associated with his name. He also produced deprenyl, which is used worldwide in the treatment of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, as well as depression. He also managed to discover a similar but significantly more effective compound, the development of which into a drug has not yet been completed. He reported on this in the following publication: (-)l-(Benzofuran-2-yl)-2-propylaminopentane, [(-)BPAP], a selective enhancer of the impulse propagation mediated release of catecholamines and serotonin in the brain (co-author), 1999. His textbook Pharmacology has gone through seven editions since its first publication (1965). He was an editor, collaborator, and member of the editorial board of numerous Hungarian and international pharmacological and neurophysiological journals. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member in 1970, and a full member in 1979. In 2003, he was awarded the Széchenyi Prize.