Calvin L. Stevens
Calvin Lee Stevens was an American organic chemist who joined Wayne State University in 1948 after a Wisconsin doctorate and an MIT postdoc, became a full professor in 1954, and later served as chemistry chair, vice president for research and interim provost. Working as a consultant to Parke-Davis, he synthesised 2-(o-chlorophenyl)-2-(methylamino)cyclohexanone in 1962 as part of a search for a shorter-acting alternative to phencyclidine; the compound entered Parke-Davis testing as CI-581 and became ketamine. He is the sole named inventor on the resulting patent, US 3,254,124, filed on 29 June 1962. He also co-founded the contract pharmaceutical chemistry company Ash Stevens with Arthur B. Ash, and his own research programme was largely in carbohydrate and aminosugar chemistry rather than in psychoactive compounds.
Compounds
1 credited across 1 class · 1 with a page here
- Arylcyclohexylamines
- Ketamine C13H16ClNO first synthesis, 1962 source
Sole named inventor on US 3,254,124 (filed 29 June 1962), which claims and exemplifies 2-methylamino-2-(o-chlorophenyl)cyclohexanone; ketamine is Example 15. Parke-Davis coded it CI-581. Stevens made the compound; the human pharmacology was Edward Domino and Guenter Corssen's work in 1964–65, and the term 'dissociative anaesthesia' came from that trial, not from him.
Reading
- US Patent 3,254,124 — Aminoketones and methods for their production (Calvin L. Stevens, assigned to Parke-Davis; filed 29 June 1962, granted 31 May 1966) · archive
- Happy 50th Anniversary Ketamine (CNS Neurosci Ther, 2013) · paper
- Taming the ketamine tiger — Domino's first-hand account of the 1964–65 human studies of CI-581 (Anesthesiology, 2010) · paper