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George Constantin Cotzias was a Greek-American scientist who together with his coworkers developed L-Dopa treatment, currently the most commonly used treatment for Parkinson's disease.
Cotzias was born in Chania on the island of Crete, Greece on 16 June 1918. He was son of the two-times mayor of Athens, Costas Cotzias. He started his medical studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, but fled to USA with his father when German troops invaded Athens. He was accepted at Harvard Medical School and two years later he graduated cum laude. He then trained as an intern in pathology at Brigham Hospital, as an intern in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was a resident in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He then worked in the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and in the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In 1957 Swedish scientist Arvid Carlsson demonstrated that dopamine was a neurotransmitter in the brain and not just a precursor for norepinephrine, as had been previously believed. He developed a method for measuring the amount of dopamine in brain tissues and found that dopamine levels in the basal ganglia, a brain area important for movement, were particularly high. He then showed that giving animals the drug reserpine caused a decrease in dopamine levels and a loss of movement control. These effects were similar to the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Arvid Carlsson subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 along with co-recipients Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.
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