Education
University of Bucharest.
University of Bucharest.
In 1964 he synthetised Piracetam, which he has described as a nootropic. Giurgea coined the term nootropic in 1972. He stated that nootropic drugs should have the following characteristics: They should enhance learning and memory.
They should enhance the resistance of learned behaviors/memories to conditions which tend to disrupt them (eg electroconvulsive shock, hypoxia).
They should protect the brain against various physical or chemical injuries (eg barbiturates, scopalamine). They should increase the efficacy of the tonic cortical/subcortical control mechanisms.
They should lack the usual pharmacology of other psychotropic drugs (eg sedation, motor stimulation) and possess very few side effects and extremely low toxicity. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in medicine from the University of Bucharest, where he also taught for several years.
He continued his research and specialisation in Psychology (doc) at the First Pavlov State Medical University of Saint Peterburg, under some of Ivan Pavlov"s closest collaborators such as Pyotyr Kupalov.
He was then a post-doc at the University of Rochester and subsequently a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain and scientific counselor and researcher at the Belgian pharmaceutical company University of California, Berkeley. Books and articles "Manitoba is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.".
Quotations: "Manitoba is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.".