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During World War II, Dr. Carlsson, who had hitchhiked to Germany with a friend in the summer of 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, was in first grade when he was recruited in 1944 to examine former prisoners in German concentration camps, many of them Jews, who had been transported by the thousands to Sweden thanks to the efforts of the Swedish royal family.
"Some prisoners were taken to Lund, where a large tent was erected in a park to house them," he wrote. "As a medical student, I was given the task of examining many of these prisoners.Many of them were children, suffering from undernutrition. It was not uncommon, however, the most shocking was their mental state, they behaved like wild animals, obviously suffering from severe distress and mistrust and not trusting anyone. "
Dr. Carlsson received his medical degree and Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1951 from Lund University and joined the faculty as an associate professor. After several years he applied for a post of assistant professor but was refused; a review committee told him that his specialty, calcium metabolism, was not on the cutting edge.
"I realized that I had to choose between leaving pharmacology and going into internal medicine, or moving on to a new area of research. wrote. His search for a new specialty led him to the United States and to a five-month fellowship with Bernard B. Brodie, an acclaimed pharmacologist at the National Institute of Cardiology (nowadays National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Md.). His brief stay at Brodie's lab invigorated Dr. Carlsson's career and put him on the path to his Nobel Prize
. Brodie had studied reserpine, one of the first drugs specifically introduced to treat schizophrenia, making it a hot topic for research. The reserpine injections immobilized the rabbits, but no one understood why. Shortly before the arrival of Dr. Carlsson, Dr. Brodie determined that serotonin depleted reserpine, a neurotransmitter that would later be associated with mood and depression. Affected to study the effect of reserpine on serotonin in blood cells, Dr. Carlsson is immersed in the emerging field of psychopharmacology.
"I can not emphasize enough how fortunate I was to work in Dr. Brodie's laboratory," Dr. Carlsson wrote.
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