Daniel Bovet

Daniel Bovet was born in Fleurier, Switzerland, in 1907, a native Esperanto speaker who took his doctorate from the University of Geneva in 1929. He joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris that year and worked there until 1947, the stretch in which he discovered antihistamines and pressed into chemotherapy, sulfa drugs, and the pharmacology of curare. He moved to Rome's Istituto Superiore di Sanità in 1947, won the Cameron Prize in 1949, and collected the Nobel eight years later. In 1965 he led a study concluding that smoking cigarettes raised intelligence - he told the Times the goal was to help "the less-endowed individual" reach better development. He became a professor at Sassari in 1964, ran a psychopharmacology lab for the National Research Council from 1969 to 1971, then taught at La Sapienza in Rome until his retirement in 1982.