It may be "only rock and roll," but Glimmer Twins Mick and Keith hit the nail squarely on the head with their lyrical description of Valium.  Indeed it was "mother's little helper."  And was considered the Holy Grail among those in pharmaceutical circles searching for a barbiturate replacement.  Yet it wasn't discovered as much as found by Doctor Alec Jenner, a young and ambitious psychiatrist in England.  More accurately, he read about it in the newspaper.

It was the local Daily Mirror.  And it was a story telling of an animal trainer using benzodiazepine as a tiger sedative.  Though none of Jenner's patients displayed ferocities near that of a tiger, some were quite impervious to available treatments.  Perhaps it was those he had in mind when suggesting to colleagues how the tiger sedative "could work on the people of Sheffield," a local psychiatric hospital.  They thought he was kidding.

He wasn't.  Doctor Alec Jenner sensed an opportunity and, seeking it, wrote Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann La Roche.  His correspondence proffered the idea benzodiazepine could be beneficial to humans with anxiety issues, and made the case for his carrying out patient trials.  Always on the lookout for the "next big thing" in drug therapy, Hoffmann La Roche agreed to sponsor Doctor Jenner's patient trials.  When the trials proved encouraging, Roche developed Valium.  And a star was born.