lit a candle 19h agojust read that Washington Post piece of his again last week, the one about business success not being enough to run a country. strange to see it come up in my feed now for a different reason. 96 years old, from Belgrade to a garage lab in California to a country's premiership. that's a life.
Their story
Milan Panić was born in Belgrade on 20 December 1929, into a middle-class family in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His father, a government official, died when Milan was three, leaving his mother to raise him and his sisters through the shortages of the 1930s and the Nazi occupation. As a…
Milan Panić was born in Belgrade on 20 December 1929, into a middle-class family in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His father, a government official, died when Milan was three, leaving his mother to raise him and his sisters through the shortages of the 1930s and the Nazi occupation. As a boy he grew vegetables to help feed the household, waking before dawn to wait for the sun so he could work. At fourteen he joined Josip Broz Tito's partisan resistance against the German occupation. After the war he studied at the University of Belgrade, first in medicine and then in biochemistry, while rising as a competitive cyclist to national champion and international level.
In August 1955, while traveling to a cycling tournament in the Netherlands, Panić and his wife Jelica defected. They sought asylum in West Germany, lived for a time in a refugee camp, and reached Fontana, California, in early 1956 with little money and two suitcases. He worked in laboratories at Kaiser Steel and the University of Southern California, then in 1959 launched International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation (ICN) from a garage near Los Angeles with a few hundred dollars in startup capital. The firm synthesized compounds for research labs, marketed a generic L-Dopa for Parkinson's disease, and moved from Pasadena to Costa Mesa as it grew. ICN listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967.
In 1972 ICN chemists helped discover ribavirin, an early broad-spectrum antiviral. Under the name Virazole it won FDA approval in 1985 for respiratory syncytial virus in children, and later became a cornerstone of hepatitis C therapy when combined with interferon. Panić built ICN into a multinational with hundreds of products and annual sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars across dozens of countries. The ride was not without controversy. In the late 1980s the FDA challenged claims about Virazole's reach, including AIDS-related marketing, and ICN later settled SEC and other disputes. Sexual-harassment suits and board conflict marked his final years at the company. He retired as CEO and chairman in 2002; ICN later became Valeant and eventually part of Bausch Health. He then led MP Biomedicals, spun from an ICN life-science unit, until selling it to China's Valiant Fine Chemicals in 2015.
Politics pulled him back to the Balkans at the darkest hour of Yugoslavia's breakup. In July 1992, at the invitation of federal president Dobrica Ćosić and with the initial assent of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, the American pharmaceutical executive became the first prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and its first civilian defence minister. He arrived as a U.S. citizen speaking of peace, elections, and market reform while UN sanctions and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia crushed daily life. In August 1992 he played a central role at the London Conference and offered a twelve-point peace plan. In September he addressed the UN General Assembly. That December he challenged Milošević for the Serbian presidency as an independent backed by the DEPOS opposition, winning roughly a third of the vote in an election international observers and journalists said was skewed by state media and irregularities. He left the premiership in early 1993.
Panić stayed in the peace conversation. He corresponded with President Bill Clinton about a Balkan summit and later wrote that Clinton's team told him of the Dayton Conference that ended the Bosnian War in November 1995. In essays for USA Today and The Washington Post he argued that peace is always an option and that business skill alone does not make a head of government. He lectured at Chapman University, USC, and George Washington University, backed scholarships and the Los Angeles Opera, and published Prime Minister for Peace with Kevin C. Murphy in 2015. Mark Axelrod's authorized biography Big Thoughts Are Free framed the same improbable arc: partisan teenager, refugee cyclist, Orange County tycoon, and short-lived peacemaking premier.
He married Jelica Narandžić in 1954 (she died in 1976), Sally Taylor in 1976 (divorced 1998), mezzo-soprano Milena Kitić in 2006 (divorced 2011), and Alexandra Novak in 2019. He is survived by Alexandra and by children Dawn, Vickie, Spencer, Tim, and Alex, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Milan Panić died in Pasadena, California, on 24 September 2026, at the age of 96. Colleagues remembered a demanding, humorous, larger-than-life mentor; Serbian memorials recalled the brief 1992 surge of optimism when a California immigrant tried to sell peace to a country at war.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (Milan Panić); family memorial (online-tribute.com); RTS; BBC News Serbian; N1; Chapman Newsroom; USA Today; Washington Post; LA Times archives.
In their own words
“Peace is always an option. Perhaps the most important lesson from Dayton is that peace is never impossible, even when the respective sides are extremely far apart.”
USA Today opinion essay, 19 November 2015
“I was a CEO-turned-prime minister. Business acumen isn't enough to run a country.”
Washington Post essay title and thesis, 9 February 2016
“Don't send bombs. America is so strong. We don't need to use the bombs to change the world. We use our ideas.”
Chapman University panel, October 2015, reported by Chapman Newsroom
“Statistically, I should be dead.”
Joke to Chapman audience about surviving war, illness, and politics, October 2015
“My first goal is to stop the fighting and to work for real and lasting peace.”
On becoming Yugoslav prime minister, July 1992 (contemporary U.S. press)
“Who has health has hope, and who has hope has everything.”
Favorite saying he posted at ICN headquarters (quoted via LA Times / N1)
“This is not a battle between two men, this is a struggle between two systems, the old and the new.”
1992 Serbian presidential campaign rally language, recalled in BBC Serbian obituary
“There is no doubt that everyone bears guilt. The most important thing is that people there stop shooting at each other.”
1992 interview on Balkan violence, cited by N1
Photos
1Milan Panić in 2015
Oct 2015 · by People Forever
the ribavirin work alone would be enough for most people, and that was just one chapter for him