Oleh Hornykiewicz (1926-2020): Sixty Years since the Pioneering L-DOPA Application - One Year since the Death of the Pioneer.

Oleh Hornykiewicz was born on November 17, 1926 in Lamberg, Ukraine. After completing his studies in July 1951, he moved to the "Pharmacological Institute of the University of Vienna". In 1958, he started his research on centrally acting drugs at the same institute and came up with the idea of linking laboratory observations with animals with the basal ganglia of the human brain. Soon, Hornykiewicz initiated a new question: L-DOPA as a therapy for Parkinson's disease? Fortunately, after administration of this new drug, patients were able to perform motor activities which could not be prompted to any comparable degree by any known drug. In the following decades, initial fiction became an unavoidable fact. Dopamine, adapted and combined with carbidopa or benzerazide, has evolved into a drug that no longer recognizes the borders of countries and continents. Distinguished emeritus prof. Oleh Hornykiewicz died on May 26, 2020 at the age of 93 in Vienna, Austria. Unfortunately, despite everything he has done and deserved, the Nobel Prize was not received.