Gábor Fodor

Gábor Béla Fodor was a chemist and medical research scientist, born in Hungary, December 5 1915 died in San Diego, California. November 3 2000.

Magna Cum Laude Ph. D. Sc. dedicated his life to the search of antidotes, painkillers and derivatives of vitamin C and tropane alkaloids for the treatment and cure of cancer, strokes, Alzheimer's disease and other modern ailments.

He worked for Budapest's Chinoin laboratories where he isolated homatropine that was needed during time of war escaping twice imprisonment during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. He was a devoted Christian. His mother was Paola Maria Bayer a Jewess Catholic from Budapest, his father was Domokos Fodor from Hungarian Transylvannia. He attended the University of Szeged were he taught until 1957. He moved to Canada in the late 1960s where he was a Professor of Chemistry at Laval University 1964–1968 and later to West Virginia University where he was Professor of Chemistry, Centennial Professor 1969–1986 and kept his office as Emeritus Professor until April 2000 and his research laboratories until 1999 having worked in collaboration with several national laboratories.

His field of research, tropane alkaloids, took his research to specialized fields. Early studies of some powerful drugs that are in this group are found from natural sources. Such studies include early configuration of cocaine and early studies of its medicinal uses as well as numerous other compounds from this elements. He worked with friend and country fellow Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1937) under whose direction he isolated new vitamins and derivatives using all the letters in the alphabet to name them. Their life long friendship had a profound effect in his successive work with Vitamin C derivatives.