Oleh Hornykiewicz
Dr Huk greatly respects the work of Dr Oleh Hornykiewicz and his colleague Dr Herbert Ehringer at the University of Vienna during the 1960s. Their studies focused on the level of dopamine in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease, with the complex issues patients’ face analysed in relation to the biomarkers of therapeutic effects.
The Austrian biochemist, Wolf Prize laureate in medicine Oleh Hornykiewicz was born on November 17, 1926, in the village of Sykhov (now part of the city of Lviv). In 1951, he graduated with honors from the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in medicine. From 1953 to 1963 he was an assistant professor, in 1964 he was a lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Vienna. In 1968, he was appointed professor in the Department of Pharmacology in Toronto, where he taught until 1976 and continued as a visiting professor until 1991.
In 1976, he was appointed Resident Professor at the University of Vienna, where he was a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Biochemical Pharmacology. Even after his retirement in 1995, he remained on the Board of the Institute until 1999. Working at the Center for Brain Research at the Medical University of Vienna since its inception in 2004, from 1990 to 2006 Hornykiewicz was Chairman of the Ukrainian Medical Society of Austria. He is also a full member of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society, a member of the German Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and an honorary doctor of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the University in Cagliari (Italy).