Alim Louis Benabid, born in 1942, studied at Grenoble Joseph Fourier University where he obtained , while working in parallel at the Medical School where he gained his Medical MD Thesis (1962 ) in Neurosciences, mostly in the Movement Disorders field and at the Basic Sciences Faculty where he gained his PhD Thesis in Physics (1970), after which he was nominated Full Professor of Biophysics. He spent a sabbatical year at the Salk Institute in San Diego with Floyd Bloom and Roger Guillemin. Back in France, he created and activated an INSERM Research Unit, where he discovered and developed as a surgical therapy the inhibitory properties of High Frequency Deep Brain Stimulation (HF DBS) in the basal ganglia (Thalamus VIM, Pallidum GPi and Subthalamic Nucleus STN) and other cortical and sub cortical structures. This led to the development of this method , applied first to the treatment of Parkinson's disease related symptoms (tremor and akinesia) , but soon to the movement disorders at large, including Dystonia and Essential Tremor, and then to psychiatric related diseases such as Depression. Extension to various nuclear targets, allowed to control and treat other diseases such as epilepsy, and some forms of depression. For these achievements, he was awarded several Prizes such as the Lasker Prize and soon after the Breakthrough Prize. During this period of time he created and developed the Clinatec Research Institute within the Grenoble Research Institute at the Atomic Energy Center (CEA).
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Sunday, May 3, 2026
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