Modern pharmaceutical chemistry is born. William Knowles (Nobel Prize winner in 2001) synthesizes L-dopa (levogira), made famous by the film “Awakenings.” Knowles administers the drug to his catatonic patients in New York in 1969, who had been suffering from encephalitis lethargica since the 1920s. For a few days, the patients seem reborn, sometimes even in the grip of a hyperkinetic state, which they say they prefer to the hell they’d endured for decades.
