I Was Born on 2 March 1929 in Charsadda, Peshawar District in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Province of Pakistan
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I was born on 2 March 1929 in Charsadda, Peshawar district in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa province of Pakistan. I obtained a medical degree from King Edward Medical College, Lahore, Punjab in 1952. I had a year of house job in West medical ward with Professor Aslam Pirzada. I also spent six months training in tuberculosis ward in Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar with Dr Ali Gauhar Khan. I went to Edinburg in 1956 to work with Professor J.H. Gaddum. He had found 5-Hydroxy tryptamine in dogs' brains. He also found that the effect of this substance on smooth muscles was antagonized by LSD, which is hallucinogenic. Dr R.B. Barlow, who was working with Professor Gaddum had synthesized a number of analogues of 5-Hydroxy tryptamine and tryptamine. I was assigned to test these compounds on smooth muscles on rat uterus and guinae pig ileum. I participated in most of the six monthly meetings of the British Pharmacological Society in various cities in the UK and presented my results and also submitted papers to the British Journal of Pharmacology. My final theses of Ph.D. in Pharmacology in 1959 was entitled "drugs modifying the action of 5-Hydroxy tryptamine on smooth muscles". A copy of this theses has been kept in the library of Jinah Postgraduate Medical Center in Karachi. On return to Pakistan in 1959, I was posted as Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at the King Edward Medical College, Lahore. In 1961 I was posted at Khyber Medical College, in Peshawar as professor of pharmacology. Two years later, I was transferred to Karachi, at Jinah postgraduate Medical Center, Basic Medical Sciences Institute which was created in collaboration with the governments of USA and Pakistan. As a professor of pharmacology, I stayed there for six years and supervised 16 students who obtained Master of Philosophy degrees in pharmacology from Karachi University. Eight of these students were from East Pakistan and the other eight from West Pakistan. I followed my research on 5-Hydroxy tryptamine as well national problems in Pakistan under close supervision of Professor Salim Uzaman Siddiki, chairman of Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (PCSIR). PCSIR had laboratories in Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore. I presented many of the papers in scientific meetings in Pakistan, UK, Paris, USA, etc. These papers were published in the journals of Pakistan Medical Association and journal of Pharmacological associations in Pakistan as well abroad as listed in this paper. The government of Pakistan had created a National Institute of Health (NIH) at Islamabad in which I had taken care of the drug control laboratory. I was posted as a director at the NIH. 2 I had also convinced the Ministry of Health at Islambad to establish a committee of experts for the selection and control of drugs to be used in Pakistan. It was during my last week of staying in Islamabad that I was asked by the Minister of Health to be the chairman of this new drug committee but I could not accept this offer as I was leaving for Geneva to the World Health Organization (WHO). It was in January 1970 that I received a letter in Islamabad, redirected from Karachi, from Dr Hans Friebel, Chief, Drugs Safety Unit in the Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology, WHO headquarters. This letter which contained post description in Geneva for a position as medical officer. I was selected and reported at Geneva in 1970. I worked under the supervision of Dr Friebel for two years and later for another year in drug monitoring unit. In 1975, I was appointed as Chief of Narcotic and Psychotropic Drugs unit and later Chief Medical Officer under the Mental Health Division whose director was Dr Norman Sartorius. WHO had responsibilities under the United Nations to take care of treaties on narcotic and psychotropic drugs. These treaties were to recommend narcotic drugs and psychotropic drugs for use in countries. These were based on research and experiences on these substances around the world. The UN Commission on narcotic drugs had the final authority to take decision on these two categories of substances. The commission make final recommendations to the General Secretary of the UN based on the WHO recommendations. The UN Commission on narcotic drugs and the international narcotics control board were located in Geneva but later were moved to Vienna (Austria). After retirement from WHO in April 1990 I continued working with the WHO request for various projects and visited Pakistan, Kuwait, Yemen and the Palestinian camps - in a certain number of countries. I also wrote to his excellency the Pope in Rome regarding the role of religions in drug abuse control. A meeting with support by the UNFDAC and the International Council of Churches in Geneva recommended to provide information to religious institutions and the public on the religious point of view on this issue. I also worked for four months in 1990 with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and visited the refugees camps and evaluated drug and alcohol problems and their solutions. It was in 1990 that I visited Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza and Israel. I also visited the Peoples Republic of China and participated in a ceremony to celebrate the 10 th anniversary of a drug abuse control center in Beijing in which I had played a major role in the creation of the center. 3 In 1990, I was asked by the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Lausanne to assist them in a project by the Swiss government to investigate and to help in deaths by traffic accidents related to alcohol consumption. The Swiss government gave funds to all the institutes of Forensic Psychiatry in Lausanne, Geneva, Bern, Basel and Zurich, etc. I visited these institutions along with a staff member from the Institute in Lausanne and tried to find what can be done to reduce traffic accidents on the road. My recommendation to the Swiss government was to reduce the level of permitted alcohol in blood from 0,08% to 0,05%. It took the Swiss authorities about 8 years to implement this recommendation. The honours I received in my life was primary for my work in WHO I was honored as a honorary professor AYUB Medical College Abbotabad, Pakistan; University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Beijing Medical University, Republic of China and Honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, London and member of New York Academy of Sciences. When I retired from WHO in 1990 I had no detailed personal technical information about the articles which were published by the WHO and are contained in the annex. I know that reports of WHO expert committees are published as technical reports but how to obtain these papers as well as many other reports which I had contributed and were published by WHO. No proper efforts seems to be made today in WHO to guide others like me about these papers to enable others to publish them in a single article. I am very glad to have met Mr Tomas Allen, Librarian at WHO headquarters library who went out of his way and took time to update the list of articles I have published. I know now that Mr Allen is a very busy man and has a lot of responsibilities. He has helped me for which I am extremely grateful to share responsibilities in preparing the details of the publications included in this paper. I hope WHO will look into the needs of retired staff like me and offer guidance in the future. .