Word: wurtman
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...Wurtman says he and other MIT professors discovered in 1971 an amino acid called which small doses, secretes the hormone serotonin and thereby induces sleep. He says he thought this would be a good cure for insomnia and widely published the results...
...Wurtman says that since MIT did not patent the drug, no one else was allowed to do so, since only inventors can patent a product. A consequence of the lack of a patent, Wurtman says, was that no one could perform safety studies on the amino acid...
...Wurtman says health food stores began selling tryptophan as a nutritional supplement and sold it for 15 years without approval from the Food and Drug Administration...
...Wurtman says, a Japanese company made a new bacteria to synthesize tryptophan, but the bacteria also produced a new toxin. Thus, when the drug was sold in health food stores about a month later, 45 people were killed by a disease caused by the new toxin...
...patented the drug, some company would have developed it and it would have needed FDA approval, Wurtman says. Then, when the manufacturer changed to the Japanese company, the FDA would have done new tests on the drug...