Speaker Profile
Frank Milan Berger

Frank Milan Berger MD, MSc

Pharmacy and Medicine, Epidemiology
Ingelheim, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany

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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. 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 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
Frank Milan Berger was born on June 25, 1913, in Pilsen, West Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, and graduated in medicine from the University of Prague in 1937. Drawn to the lab early on, he conducted experiments in basic pharmacology as a student; and in 1939 fled Hitler’s troops and moved to England, where he worked for a time in a refugee camp, before continuing his investigations at a British drug firm
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