Leo Sternbach - Education and Career

Education and Career

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.

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.