This finding was not confirmed (if it were true, there would have been a cancer epidemic) and Valium is safe for cancer patients. The safeness of tranquillisers has prevented many deaths by suicide. Valium is listed as an essential drug by the World Health organisation and is safe for everyone except babies under six months, and some glaucoma patients.Sternbach’s tranquillisers were in a chemical class called benzodiazepines, and he had helped synthesise them while he was a postdoctoral student in Poland, 20 years earlier Their biological activity was unknown. (It is now number 189 in the US medicinal hit parade.)Librium, the first tranquilliser, was welcomed because it was less sedating than the existing phenothiazine drugs. Valium, which followed, was so popular that the Rolling Stones wrote a song, “Mother’s Little Helper”, about it.

Later, there was a backlash against it, but now, 45 years later, Valium and closely related drugs are regarded as an indispensable short-term treatment for acute anxiety – the treatment of choice for alcohol withdrawal symptoms – as well as being used for pre-operative sedation and to relieve muscle spasms, including that of back pain.In 1981, sales plummeted after a report that Valium promoted cancer-cell growth in a test-tube. He also synthesised the vitamin biotin and developed a drug that reduced bleeding during brain surgery.
He was primarily a chemist, who used classic scientific procedures, combined with doggedness, teamwork, serendipity and intuition He worked for the Roche drug company for 33 years. From 1965 to 1972, Valium was the most-prescribed drug in the United States, and it was in the UK’s top five. Leo Henryk Sternbach, chemist: born Abbazia, Austro-Hungarian Empire 7 May 1908; research chemist, Hoffmann-La Roche, Basle 1940-41; group chief, Hoffmann-La Roche, Nutley, New Jersey, senior group chief 1959-65, section chief 1965-67, director of medicinal chemistry 1966-73, consultant 1973-2003; married 1941 Herta Kreuzer (two sons); died Chapel Hill, North Carolina 28 September 2005. Leo Sternbach was one of history’s most prolific drug designers. He invented modern tranquillisers including Librium and Valium, a sleeping pill called Mogadon, and drugs for epilepsy and muscle spasms He synthesised radically new molecules.

There were standard, popular editions of I Me Mine and Postcards from the Boys, but this only happened rarely. Oddly, when Roylance did design a book for the mass market – The Beatles Anthology (2000) – it did not look as good as it should have done.. Roylance took similar care with projects on Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Queen, The Who, Pink Floyd and Ravi Shankar. Outside the music world, he published a book on Liverpool Football Club, This is Anfield (2002), and on the British Lions, The Lions (2005).In many ways, Roylance’s mailing list was as important as his celebrity contacts. His books occupied a niche market and were never seen in the shops.

I know from personal experience that libraries were unwilling to buy them. This exclusivity is unfortunate as the historical information and previously unpublished photographs are seen by relatively few people, that is, just the purchasers and their friends. In 1993 it published a lavish Live in Japan! book and record set as an expensive souvenir of George Harrison and Eric Clapton’s joint tour of 1991. He created a market for limited edition books of rock’n'roll photographs and unquestionably his books are the leader in the field.The Beatles’ biographer Mark Lewisohn says:I don’t really know of anyone who has produced similar books of the same standard, and, when I open one now, I will think of his friendship. He was a most affable, amiable man and had time for everyone. Obviously, he must have been a keen businessman as these books involved huge injections of capital, but he never gave that impression and he had a real relish for what he did.Roylance’s imprint Genesis also published music autobiographies, including Derek Taylor’s Fifty Years Adrift (1984) and George Martin’s Playback (2003) as well as Ringo Starr’s collection of correspondence from the other Beatles, Postcards from the Boys (2003). I’m not in the book.Whether by accident or design, Roylance had found a new market for books on popular culture.

Many of his books centred on the Beatles, such as Bob Gruen’s photographs of John Lennon Sometime in New York City (1995), and the stark black and white photographs of the Beatles in Hamburg from Astrid Kirchherr, J?n Vollmer and Max Scheler. His books on the paintings of the fifth Beatle, Stu Sutcliffe, have included complete reproductions of his sketchbooks.”Brian was a dear friend to me,” says Ulf Kr?, who worked with him on several projects involving German photographers:I had never seen anything like them before and I have loved them all. In his book, which is purportedly this clarity of vision of his influence on each song he wrote, he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. Taylor agreed and they went to see George Harrison, who could not believe that anyone would “seriously consider having these trivial bits of paper dignified in this way”.