2022/07/09 by Hans‐Jürgen Möller · 1 citation
Chemistry · Medicine · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Chemical synthesis and alkaloids #Cholinesterase and Neurodegenerative Diseases #Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors Study
paper · doi:10.1093/ijnp/pyac039
openalex publication_date 2022/07/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
We bid farewell to our friend Tom Ban, who passed away on February 4, 2022 at the age of 92. We mourn the loss of a great man who was among others for many, many years the chairman of the history committee of the CINP and since 2013 the chairman of the International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN), an important organization, cooperating with CINP and ACNP, to collect and publish documents related to the history of psychopharmacology. Tom Ban devoted the last years of his life to preserving this history for posterity. Thomas A. Ban (November 16, 1929 – February 4, 2022) was born in Budapest Hungary where in 1954 he graduated from Medical School in Budapest (known as Semmelweis Medical University today). He was resident psychiatrist at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology from 1954-1956. Due to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising he emigrated to Canada where he completed his training and began his career at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. This is when he began a close collaboration with Dr. Heinz E. Lehmann, first as his resident and then eventually working his way up to becoming, in 1961, his co-principal investigator with their Montreal branch of the US Public Health Service Early Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (ECDEU), which was involved in the North American research of most psychotropic drugs in the 60s and 70s. Over an 18-year period they documented their findings in 211 articles. The h-index impact worldwide had a profound and lasting effect on this emerging field. In 1969 it led him to write the first textbook in the field “Psychopharmacology” (Williams and Wilkins). Consequently, he was an early and ardent supporter for a biologically based psychiatry in a time when in North America the psychoanalytic therapy was seen as a very important approach to treat patients suffering from mental disorders.