Michael Schachter
BMJ 2020; 370 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3667 (Published 22 September 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;370:m3667
- Peter Sever
Michael Schachter (“Mike”) was born in, Budapest, Hungary, the youngest of three children (he had two older half sisters). His parents had survived the Holocaust, receiving help from Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian. In 1956 after the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, his father left Hungary to move with his wife and Mike to north London where he set-up as a GP.
Michael was a pupil at William Ellis School and then went to University College London, where he studied medicine. After a succession of house officer and senior house officer posts he worked at King’s with Marsden and Parks on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, and at Oxford, where he worked on serotonin with Graham-Smith.
He arrived in the department of clinical pharmacology at St Mary’s Hospital in October 1984, with splendid scientific credentials.
His colleagues rapidly became …