Corneliu E. Giurgea

Corneliu E. Giurgea (6 January 1923, Bucharest – 30 December 1995, Brussels)^[1] was a Romanian psychologist and chemist. In 1964 he synthesised Piracetam, which he has described as a nootropic.^[2]

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Giurgea coined the term nootropic^[3][4] in 1972.^[5][6]

He stated that nootropic drugs should have the following characteristics:

1. They should enhance learning and memory.
2. They should enhance the resistance of learned behaviors/memories to conditions which tend to disrupt them (e.g. electroconvulsive shock, hypoxia).
3. They should protect the brain against various physical or chemical injuries (e.g. barbiturates, scopalamine).
4. They should increase the efficacy of the tonic cortical/subcortical control mechanisms.
5. They should lack the usual pharmacology of other psychotropic drugs (e.g. sedation, motor stimulation) and possess very few side effects and extremely low toxicity.

He received a Ph.D. 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 St. Peterburg, under some of Ivan Pavlov's closest collaborators such as Pyotr 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 UCB.