Alex Karczmar

Karczmar was latterly professor emeritus of pharmacology at the Stritch School of Medicine. He died in Chicago at the age of 100 on August 17, 2017.

Karczmar published some 400 research papers, reviews and book chapters. He authored, co-authored or edited 7 books. His text, Exploring the Vertebrate Central Cholinergic Nervous System (Springer, New York, 2007) reviews the past and the present status of central cholinergicity, its physiology, pharmacology and biochemistry, its ontogeny and phylogenesis, and its role in functions, behaviors (including cognition), the "self" and such disease states as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's Disease; also, this text describes his own studies of these subjects.

He received many commendations and awards, including the VA Merit Citation (2002), City of Milano Medal (1969) and Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievement from the Council of the International Symposia for Cholinergic Mechanisms (2008). He is an honorary professor at Kurume University, Kurume, Japan; visiting professor at Université Laval, Quebec; visiting professor at Polish Academy of Sciences; visiting professor at INSERM, Paris; professorial lecturer at Actualites Pharmacologiques; and Carl F. Schmidt Honorary Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

He was a member of several NIH Study Sections, Illinois Krebiozen Committee, Toxicology Committee of the United States National Academy of Sciences and he is recipient of a Festschrift on neurobiology of acetylcholine, 1985. He was a member of editorial boards of scientific journals and magazines, including Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Neuropharmacology, European Journal of Pharmacology, Archives Internationales de Pharmacodynamie et de Thérapie, etc.

Karczmar organized many international symposia, including the Symposium on Brain and Human Behavior in Chicago, 1978 (with Sir John C. Eccles); Symposium on Interdependence of Neurotransmitter Systems in the CNS at the Seventh International Congress of Pharmacology (IUPHAR). Paris, 1978 (with J. Glowinski); Symposium on Inter-relationships Between Various Neurotransmitter Systems at the Tenth Congress of the Collegium Intern. Neuropsychopharmacologicum, Quebec, Canada, 1978; International Symposium on Aggressive Behavior, Florence, 1969 (with S. A. Barnett and S. Garattini); Symposium on Cholinergic Transmission, Annual FASEB Meeting, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1969; and Symposium on New Conceptual Approaches to Prophylaxis and Therapy of Organophosphorus Poisoning, Fort St. Lucie, Florida, 1984.

He is widely recognized for his experimental research, almost all of which is devoted to the cholinergic system, both central and peripheral, and its autonomic and mental functions, including its control of various human and animal behaviors. From the 1970s he explored the existence and the nature of the "self".

He maintains a particular link with the International Symposia on Cholinergic Mechanisms (1970–2016); he attended most of the fifteen ISCMs and served as the chair of the International Advisory Committee for several of them.

Since the 1970s Karczmar explored the "self" (the "I", the self-awareness, the self-consciousness; ); he traced the concept of the body-mind relation to the earliest history of mankind, millennia before the advent of Descartes' dualism. He stressed the need to differentiate the "self" from cognition and perception. While he is a reductionist, he suggests that the current neuroscientific and quantal stage of knowledge is insufficient to yield an intelligible and parsimonious explanation of the "I", and he speculates that with the future success of Einstein's quest for the single equation for all the forces of the universe the nature of "I" will become explainable, perhaps via multidimensional string theory.

Karczmar received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his studies on paradoxical sleep with Dr. Vicenzo Longo in the Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, and the Senior Fulbright Fellowship for his work on ontogenetic effects of anticholinesterases in primates with Dr. William McBride at Foundation 41 of Sydney, Australia. He was a member of the IBRO Workshop in Warsaw, Poland (1963). He was a charter fellow of the Sherringtonian Society (1969-) and founding member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Since the 1960s, Karczmar contributed to establishing the pre-eminent role of the central cholinergic system in functions such as respiration, behaviors such as aggression, perceptions such as nociception, learning, addiction, obsession and fixation, and sexual and motor activity, and in phenomena such as seizures, EEG rhythms, paradoxical sleep, and behavioral and EEG alerting; and he and his associates provided early neurochemical evidence for the interaction between the cholinergic and other transmitter systems.

In 1956, Karczmar moved to Loyola University of Chicago Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois, where he served from 1956 to 1986 as professor and chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and as the senior director of the Institute for Mind, Drugs and Behavior from 1964 to 1986; he was also associate dean for research and graduate education from 1981 to 1986. He was acting medical director of Foundation 41, in Sydney, Australia, from 1988 to 1989. He also served from 1956 to 2008 as senior consultant, Research Services, VA and as consultant to the Surgeon General, US (1987-). At present he is a trustee and secretary of the Chicago Association for Research and Education in Science (1987-).

Karczmar and Steve Thesleff demonstrated in the 1950s the phenomenon of desensitization (receptor inactivation) at the neuromyal junction, and Karczmar described the reciprocal process, sensitization which is inducible by several drugs such as oxamides and NaF, and which, today, is ascribed to an allosteric receptor change. Karczmar pioneered also the studies of the structural nature of central cholinergic receptors by demonstrating the structural similarity between peripheral and central muscarinic receptors.

With Kyozo Koketsu, Syogoro Nishi and Nae Dun Karczmar identified in the 1950s and 1960s the three ganglionic receptor sites (nicotinic, muscarinic and peptidergic) and their potentials; they described their ionic mechanisms and the contribution of second messengers to ganglionic transmission.

Karczmar was naturalized as an American citizen in January 1946. After his emigration to the United States, he entered Columbia University, New York, Graduate School, where he earned his M.A. degree in zoology in 1941 and his Ph.D. degree in biophysics in 1947, his doctoral mentor being the well-known biophysicist and explorer of the quantal nature of vision, Professor Selig Hecht. During this time period he was also a Columbia University teaching fellow and he worked as an American Philosophical Society doctoral fellow on limb regeneration with Professor Oscar E. Schotte, of Amherst College, Massachusetts, and on neuromyal relaxation latency with Professor Alexander Sandow of New York University.

Upon his graduation, he was successively (1946–1953) assistant and associate professor at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., in Theodore Koppanyi's Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Professor Koppanyi introduced him to the cholinergic field. He became a fellow at Sterling Winthrop Research Institute, Rensselaer, New York from 1953 to 1956, where he was a member of a team which developed Ambenonium (Mytelase), a drug still used in the treatment of myasthenia gravis, and the vasodilator amotriphene (Myordil).

His scientific contributions are as follows. In the 1940s Karczmar proposed the existence of a nerve growth factor on the basis of his demonstration of the quantitative effects of partial ablations of the urodele limb innervations on their post-amputation regeneration (Karczmar, 1946). Beginning in the 1940s Karczmar pioneered the studies of anticholinesterase agents (antiChe's), discovering (with Theodore Koppanyi; see Koppanyi and Karczmar, 1951) the direct synaptic effects of organophosphorus (OP) antiChEs which are independent of their enzymic block, their morphogenetic (teratologic) effects and their postnatal behavioral actions resulting from their prenatal application. He also demonstrated that the OP antiChe's damage the blood–brain barrier. These studies contributed to the understanding of the role of cholinesterases as morphogens and "transport" or "scavenger" enzymes (Karczmar et al., 1951).

Alexander George Karczmar (May 9, 1917 – August 17, 2017), was a Polish-American neuroscientist and academic. He was tenured for 30 years (1956–1986) as professor and chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at Loyola University of Chicago Medical Center, and director of its Institute for Mind, Drugs and Behavior.

Karczmar was born on May 9, 1917, in Warsaw, Poland. His parents were Stanislas (Szmaya) Karczmar, a businessman, and Helena (Hendla) Karczmar-Billauer. He received his primary education at Collegium High School, Warsaw, from which he graduated with the highest honors in 1934. His subsequent studies in biological and medical sciences at the Józef Piłsudski University of Warsaw were interrupted temporarily by several anti-Semitic outbursts and ultimately, in 1939, by World War II.