An Argentine physiologist, Bernardo A. Houssay was the first Latin American to be awarded a Nobel Prize in the sciences, in 1947 for his work on the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating blood sugar in animals.
Houssay was born on April 10, 1887, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Dr. Albert and Clara Houssay, immigrants from France. As a child, Houssay was enrolled at the private Colegio Británico (British School) and so was fluent in French, Spanish, and English by the time he graduated high school at the age of 13. Pursuing a career in medicine, he graduated from the pharmacy school of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (University of Buenos Aires) in 1904 and from the school of medicine in 1907. He became interested in the role of the pituitary gland while doing clinical work in 1908. Houssay taught himself how to harvest and analyze pituitary tissue and isolate the physiologically active substances in pituitary extracts. This formed the basis of his doctoral thesis, and he was licensed as a medical doctor in 1910.
Houssay’s first position was as a professor at the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. He also opened a private practice and served as an assistant physician at a hospital. By 1913, he was working as a chief physician at Alvear Hospital and by 1915 was the chief of the experimental pathology section at the National Public Health Laboratories. Having experience in both clinical work and research, Houssay decided to focus his efforts on research. In 1919 at the age of 32, he became the chair of the physiology department at the medical school of the University of Buenos Aires and took measures to transform the department into an active research center as the Institute of Physiology at the University of Buenos Aires medical school. Over the course of his research career, Houssay wrote over 500 articles or publications covering the endocrine, respiratory, and circulatory systems, neurology, and immunology. In 1920, he married Dr. Maria Angelica Catan, a chemist. Eventually their family included three sons.
In 1921, a surgeon and a medical student at the University of Toronto in Canada isolated insulin from the pancreas of dogs, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1923. Houssay began to experiment with dogs, as well. As the Canadians had found, when the pancreas is removed from a dog, the dog develops hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and diabetes. Houssay instead removed part of the pituitary gland from dogs and found that the dogs developed hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). On the other hand, by injecting substances extracted from the pituitary gland into normal dogs, researchers could induce diabetes in those dogs. These experiments indicated that the hormones from the pituitary gland act in opposition to insulin and, thus, blood sugar levels are not based only on insulin but the combined impact of insulin and pituitary hormones. This discovery helped shift endocrine research in the direction of clarifying the feedback loops among different hormones.
Houssay remained as a professor and the director of the Institute until 1943. In that year, following a coup d’etat that installed Juan Perón as president of Argentina, Houssay was removed from his position at the university because of his opposition to the dictatorship. Because of his international reputation, Houssay could have gone into exile and establish a successful career abroad. Instead, he organized sufficient funding to open a private research center, Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine) in 1944.
In 1947, Houssay received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his discovery of the role played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar. That year, Carl and Gerti Cori (originally from Czechoslovakia) also were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.
In addition to research, Houssay dedicated himself to the education of medical students, encouraging them in their careers. In 1945, he cowrote Fisiología Humana with two of his students. This work became a standard physiology textbook throughout Latin America and was translated into several languages (as Human Physiology in 1951). One of his graduate students, Luis F. Leloir, went on to receeve the Nobel Prize himself, in 1970.
After the regime of Juan Perón came to an end in 1955, Houssay was able to return to his position at the University of Buenos Aires. He also was instrumental in the establishment of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, known as CONICET) in 1958 and was its first director. CONICET supports the advancement of scientists in their careers. Houssay also contributed to the scientific field throughout his career by participating in or leading several other scientific organizations and publications, such as Acta Physiologica Latinamericana (starting in 1950). He continued working at the University of Buenos Aires until his death in 1971.
Sources:
http://www.Wikipedia.com “Bernardo_Houssay”
http://www.NobelPrize.org. “Bernardo Houssay – Biographical”
http://www.britannica.com “Bernardo Housay”
Tan, Yong Tan and Ponstein, Nathaniel. “Bernardo Houssay (1887-1971): Endocrine physiologist and Nobel laureate” in Singapor Med J (2016) Jan 57(1):1-2. Accessed online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
http://www.famousscientists.org “Bernardo Houssay”
http://www.nytimes.com. “Dr Bernardo A. Houssay Dead; Won ’47 Nobel Prize in Medicine” 22 September 1971 (obituary)
es.wikipedia.org “Barnardo Houssay”
http://www.biografiasyvidas.com. Ruiza M, Fernandez T, Tamaro E (2004). Biografía de Bernardo Houssay
TRANSCIENCIA 