Friday, March 21, 2008

Frank Berger, 94, Miltown Creator, Dies

Dr. Frank M. Berger, who helped start the modern era of drug development with his invention of Miltown, the first mass-market psychiatric drug and a forerunner of medical and cultural phenomena like Valium and Prozac, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 94.



The cause was cardiac arrest after a fall, said his wife, Alma Christine Spadi Berger.

Dr. Berger was working at a Yorkshire, England, laboratory, trying to find a preservative for penicillin, when he noticed that a chemical agent he was working with had a calming effect on laboratory animals including mice, rats and guinea pigs.

He described this “tranquilizing” action in a now classic 1946 article in The British Journal of Pharmacology.

He was intrigued, he said later, by the way that anxiety seemed to come and go in people without apparent reason: “These people are not insane; they simply are overexcitable and irritable, and create crisis situations over things that are unimportant. What is the physiological basis of this overexcitability?”

READ MORE @ NY TIMES