Kabay

János

Life

János Kabay was born on the 27^th of December, 1896, in Bűdszentmihály. He graduated high school in Hajdúnánás, and in 1915 began his studies in chemical engineering at the University of Technology of Budapest. He had to leave the university after half a year because he had to enlist in the army, but after the First World War, he started to work as an intern in his brother’s pharmacy. He enrolled at the Pázmány Péter University, where he obtained his degree in pharmacy in 1923 and took the oath a year later.

Kabay then started working at the Herb Experimental Station, where he and his wife, Ilona Kelp, developed the industrial method of morphine extraction. This was later improved, and the dry process was developed, which was patented in ten countries. This marked the beginning of the industrial production of morphine as we know it today.

János Kabay continued his research to make morphine production even more economical, but in 1936, after a hernia operation, he died unexpectedly of blood poisoning at the age of 39.

Work

János Kabay became known worldwide as the “father of morphine production in Hungary”. Morphine is still produced from poppy straw according to his method.

His first major discovery is known as the “green process”, through which in 1925 he succeeded to extract morphine from the still green poppy plant by avoiding the opium phase. He later patented his method and founded the Alkaloida Chemical Factory in 1927. However, at the beginning, the factory had financial difficulties due to the costs of morphine production, so Kabay began to look for a more economical method.

In 1931, he and his wife developed the so-called “dry process”, which revolutionized the production of morphine. The new method enabled the factory to produce more and more morphine from the previously worthless, threshed poppy straw. His invention became a world sensation, solving a problem that persisted for hundreds of years in wealthy, well-equipped French and German laboratories.