Category Archives: Notable Hispanic/Latino Scientists

Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for “work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.”

Mario Jose Molina Pasquel Henriquez was bon on March 19, 1942, in Mexico City. His father, Roberto Molina Pasquel, was an attorney and part-time professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Autonomous National University of Mexico — UNAM), where he created an institute for international law. Mario’s mother, Leonor Henriquez, died when Mario was only three years old. His father later married Luz Lara, a former elementary school teacher, who was like a mother to Mario and his older brother and sisters.

At a young age, Mario enjoyed classical music and took violin lessons. After getting a microscope for his 8th birthday, however, his interests expanded to include science. He set out some lettuce until it began to rot, then used the microscope to look at a drop of water from the rotten lettuce and saw microscopic organisms. His aunt Esther Molina, herself a chemist, helped him set up an informal chemistry laboratory in his home, contributing equipment and supplies beyond what was found in a child’s chemistry set. She also helped him conduct chemistry experiments at a level quite advanced for an elementary school student.

In his family, it was a tradition to send children abroad to study after they completed elementary school. Mario’s older sisters had gone to Canada while his brother had studied in Massachusetts. Because it was thought that it would be beneficial for a budding scientist to learn German, in 1954, 11-year-old Mario was sent to study at the Institute auf dem Rosenberg in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Although the other students there did not seem to share his passion for science, he got along well with his chemistry and math teachers. He learned to speak Italian as well as German to be able to communicate with his classmates, as none spoke Spanish but many spoke Italian.

In 1960, Mario returned to Mexico and enrolled at UNAM. At that time in Mexico, students had to focus on either the sciences or humanities with little chance to change majors. Mario chose to pursue chemical engineering, as it had a mathematical, problem-solving orientation.

For graduation, the 5-year bachelor’s program required a thesis that would focus on a topic with a commercial application, such as a connection between chemistry and business or something that could be manufactured. Molina and some college friends looked at methods to produce a catalyst used to produce polyurethane foam. Because of Mexican trade law, products made in Mexico were favored over imported products. The ammonia-based catalyst at that time was imported, so Molina and his friends conducted inexpensive, small scale experiments to determine the organic chemicals and metals, such as tin and hydrochloric acid, that would be needed to make the catalyst. Once they had this solved, through connections they obtained a loan to get the equipment needed to scale up their small experiments to industrial production, thus creating a domestic source for the catalyst.

Molina was awarded his Bachelor’s in Science degree from UNAM in 1965. As his degree was in chemical engineering, he felt a need to focus more on the academic and research side of chemistry, which would require more coursework in physics and mathematics. Molina worked at UNAM after graduation, helping establish a Master’s program in chemical engineering, until he received a scholarship to study polymer chemistry at the University of Freiburg in Germany. As part of his undergraduate studies, Molina had studied chemical kinetics from the perspective of the rates of reactions, yet now for his Master’s program he wanted to look more at how and how fast molecules change during chemical reactions. This required a greater understanding of quantum mechanics at the molecular level. After two years of studying polymerization kinetics, he received his degree from the University of Freiburg in 1967.

At this point, Molina decided that he wanted to get a Ph.D. in the United States. Unlike in Mexico and Germany, where the teaching style is for the professor to lecture and the students to take notes, professors at the doctoral level in the United States acted more as mentors conversing with students. Part of the application process was to prove proficiency in German, which involved translating a text from German to English. For Molina, it was easier to read and understand the German than it was to write in English.

To get a scholarship to pursue a doctoral program at Berkeley, Molina had to apply a year in advance. While waiting to be accepted into the program, he studied mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The year in Paris, during a time of cultural unrest, allowed Molina to learn about issues outside of chemistry, as his friends were in different fields. This reinforced his belief that, as a scientist, it is important to not be single-minded but to interact with multiple areas of interest. For instance, he reconnected with his childhood love of music and learned to play classical guitar.

Once he was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley in 1968, Molina found early on that his ability to read scientific literature in English did not make it easy to communicate with teachers and classmates in English. The doctoral program in physical chemistry involved a lot of interaction in small classes for difficult courses that demanded a lot of time and effort in homework and original research. Molina joined a research group led by Dr. George Pimental, who became a mentor to Molina. The research focused on the nature of chemical reactions using chemical lasers, which were new at the time. Molina’s work also required him to write scientific articles about this research, using a stylized form of writing common to scientists but not to the public in general. This helped Molina become prepared to write his doctoral thesis, on the energy changes in molecules that take place during chemical and photochemical (induced by light) reactions. He was awarded his PhD in 1972 and continued in a postdoctoral position for a year at Berkeley.

In July 1973, Molina married Luisa Tan, who had been one of the few female students to study with Dr. Pimentel. As a fellow chemist, his wife assisted him with his research and also conducted her own research with other research groups, including on low temperature spectroscopy. In 1975, Molina became a US citizen. In 1977, their son Felipe José was born. (He later became a physician in Boston.)

In the fall of 1973, Molina moved to UC Irvine for a second postdoctoral position, under the supervision of F. Sherwood Rowland, known as Sherry to his friends. Molina and Rowland began to study the behavior of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the upper atmosphere. At lower levels, CFCs are stable, so most scientists assumed they would have little impact on the environment. Molina and Rowland wondered if the greater amount of solar radiation higher in the atmosphere, such as in the stratosphere, would be able to break apart the molecules of CFCs. Using computer modeling and a variety of experimental methods, including spectroscopy, they conducted research into their hypothesis, that in the presence of solar radiation in the stratosphere, CFCs would break apart or decompose into several chemicals, including chorine atoms. Chlorine can act as a catalyst in the decomposition of ozone (O₃) into oxygen (O₂) in such a way that only small amounts of chlorine can break apart thousands of molecules of ozone, having a great impact on the ozone layer. It is the ozone layer that acts as a barrier to solar radiation so that not too much reaches the lower levels of the atmosphere and the surface of the earth. Their research also showed that, in the stratosphere, chemical reactions could speed up at lower temperatures, even though closer to earth they speed up at higher temperatures and slow down at cooler ones.

When Molina and Rowland published the results of their research in the scientific magazine Nature in 1974, there was no firm evidence that the ozone layer was being damaged. While they knew that amassing enough data to provide that evidence could take 10 years, they also know that, if they were right, they needed to warn people about the potential danger, not just fellow scientists but also the general public and policymakers. To reach this new audience, they had to adjust how they communicated with the news media so the implications of their findings could be better understood. At this time, the environmental movement was just starting, but it focused on local water and air pollution, not something as global as the ozone layer. As more people in the scientific community began to take the issue seriously, Molina and Rowland testified at hearings with lawmakers at the state and national levels about the establishment of environmental regulations on CFCs. Some of the chemical companies that produced CFCs started to look for possible replacements in case CFCs, which were used in aerosol cans and refrigerants, were proven to be harmful.

By the 1980s, there were three types of scientists working on the ozone problem: computer modelers, laboratory scientists like Molina, and those who conducted measurements in the environment. Several methods had been devised to measure the level of ozone in the stratosphere. One method used measurements of how much ultraviolet light reaches the ground, as only ozone can absorb ultraviolet light. Another method used data gathered by satellites, while a third method used high altitude planes over Antarctica to gather air samples. The three methods all showed that there was a spot over Antarctica (the ozone hole) that had no ozone but high levels of chlorine. These data supported Molina and Rowland’s hypothesis that CFCs could damage the ozone layer.

Molina and other laboratory scientists used spectroscopic techniques that measure particular wavelengths of light to identify specific chemicals, as chemicals like chlorine absorb particular wavelengths of light. In addition, they used flash photolysis to follow the changes in the amounts of chemicals. Molina and Rowland developed their own instrumentation or adapted already existing instruments (like mass spectrometers and lasers), designing instruments that other specialists, like machinists or glass blowers, would actually make. By conducting experiments to analyze the behavior of chlorine, Molina and Rowland determined that chlorine peroxide was a key factor in the development of the ozone hole over Antarctica.

The reports that Molina and Rowland wrote provided a basis for negotiations the resulted in the Montreal Protocol, finalized in 1987. The Montreal Protocol was the first international agreement to create a consensus among nations on actions to take to confront an environmental condition on a global scale. This created a precedent for future international action on such issues as global climate change, addressed by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Mexico was the first nation to ratify the Montreal Protocol.

While this research and environmental efforts were going on, Molina had a few career changes. Molina began working with Rowland as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine in 1973. In 1975, he was appointed as a faculty member there, setting up an independent program to study chemicals and spectroscopic properties of compounds that affect the atmosphere, including those that contain chlorine atoms in some form. As a faculty member, Molina had to deal with students, which limited the time he could devote to experiments. In 1982, he decided to take a non-teaching position at the Molecular Physics and Chemistry section of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, where he directed only a few postdoctoral fellows. After it was shown that there is seasonal depletion of ozone over Antarctica, Molina and his group at JPL looked more closely at the effect of polar stratospheric clouds that can have ice crystals. In the lab, Molina simulated the chemical effects of clouds over Antarctica and showed that chlorine-activation reactions take place in the presence of ice under polar stratospheric conditions.

Wanting to return to teaching, in 1989 Molina took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also continued his research on global atmospheric chemistry issues. In 1994, Molina served as a member of the US President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) under President Clinton, then again under President Obama. Molina also was on the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In 1995, Molina, along with Rowland and Paul Crutzen of the Netherlands, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their “work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.” This was the first time a Nobel Prize was given for research on environmental degradation resulting from human-made substances. Molina felt that the fame he achieved from winning the Nobel Prize carried with it the responsibility to educate the public about other human-made chemical pollutants. In 1996, he donated two-thirds of his Nobel Prize money to MIT to establish a fellowship program to help students from less developed nations conduct research in atmospheric sciences.

Around this time, Molina turned his attention to atmospheric chemistry at lower levels of the atmosphere, close to earth, especially air pollution in Mexico City. He wanted his students at MIT to be exposed to multidisciplinary approaches to societal problems and relate policy. To that end, he helped establish the Integrated Program on Urban, REgional and Global Air Pollution at MIT. He also initiated research projects that involved multidisciplinary scientists from both the United States and Mexico and collaborated with policymakers to find and implement ways to improve air quality in Mexico City. He saw that urban air pollution is linked with climate change, as chemical compounds like black carbon (soot) and methane are important factors in both urban air quality and climate change. In 2002, Molina and his wife Luisa published their work Air Quality in the Mexico Megacity and presented it to a group of scientists and government officials in Mexico City.

In 2004-2005, Molina founded the Centro Mario Molina para Estudios Estratégicos sobre Energia y Medio Ambiente (www.centromariomolina.org; the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment) in Mexico City to focus on practical solutions between science and public policy on energy and environmental matters to promote sustainable development and vigorous economic growth.

As Molina wanted to spend more time in Mexico City but MIT did not want professors to be part-time, Molina accepted a position at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2004. He and his first wife Luisa divorced in 2005, and in 2006 Mario Molina married his second wife, Guadalupe Alvarez. On October 8, 2020, Molina died of a heart attack at his home in Mexico City.

References:

“Mario J. Molina — Facts” and “Mario J. Molina — Biographical” at http://www.NobelPrize.org

Newton, David E (2007). “Molina, Mario” in Latinos in Science, Math and Professions. Facts on File, NY.

“Mario Molina” at http://www.Sciencehistory.org

Caruso, David J. and Roberts, Jody A. “Oral History Interview with Mario Molina May 6-7, 2013 at digital.sciencehistory.org/works/8pmnklq?

“Mario Molina” at en.wikipedia.org

“Mario J. Molina, PhD” at http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mario-j-molina-ph-d/

“Mario Molina” at http://www.britannica.com

“National Hispanic Heritage Month: Mario J. Molina” at http://www.planetaid.org

“Hispanic Heritage Month Profile: Mario J. Molina” at mbb.yale.edu

“5 Scientists in Latino History who Changed the World” at http://www.tylerprize.org

Luis Federico Leloir of Argentina received the Nobel Prize in Chemist in 1970 “for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates.”

As he described it himself in an autobiographical essay “Far Away and Long Ago,” Luis Federico Leloir was born at roughly the same time as the scientific field (biochemistry) to which he would devote his life. Leloir’s life also began in the shadow of tragedy. His father, Federico Augusto Leloir Bernal, had become very ill, so Luis’ parents left Buenos Aires for Paris, France, in search of a cure. Unfortunately, the illness was terminal, and Federico died one week before his son Luis Federico Leloir Aguirre was born near the Arc de Triomphe on September 6, 1906.

Leloir and his mother, Hortensia Mercedes Aguirre Herrera de Leloir, returned to Buenos Aires in 1908 to live on the family estate near San Clemente del Tuyú. Luis’ grandparents had immigrated to Argentina from the Basque region in southwestern France/ northeastern Spain and purchased enough land to build up an agricultural enterprise based on grain and cattle, the “rural activities” that allowed Luis to graduate and devote himself to research rather than worry about a stable salary by earning a living.

In his childhood home, there were many books on a variety of subjects related to natural phenomena, which complemented his natural curiosity and interest in the animal life he saw in the countryside around him. His schooling, however, did not lead him directly to biochemistry. His early years were spent at private schools such as Escuela General San Martín and the Colegio Lacordaire, followed by a few months at Beaumont College in England and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. As these did not satisfy him, however, he returned to Argentina, obtained Argentine citizenship (as he had been born in France), and enrolled in the Department of Medicine at the Universidad de Buenos Aires to get a doctorate. After passing the anatomy exam on the fourth try, he received his degree in 1932 and began his two-year residency in the Hospital de Clínicas, with a medical internship at the Ramos Mejía hospital.

During his residency, Leloir realized that, at the time, there were not enough effective treatments for his patients, so he decided to direct his efforts towards medical research rather than treating patients. At the time, Dr. Bernardo Houssay was the most prominent researcher in Argentina. Through family connections, Leloir met Houssay in 1933 and the two became closely inked, collaborating on research projects until Houssay died in 1971. Leloir credited Houssay with having the greatest influence on his career. Houssay became Leloir’s doctoral adviser, supervising his thesis work in the role of the adrenal glands in carbohydrate metabolism while serving as a research assistant at the Instituto de Fisiología (Institute of Physiology) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. As this work required more knowledge about chemistry than Leloir had learned for his medical degree, he continued to take courses at the Facultad de Ciencias (Faculty of Sciences). With Houssay’s help performing adrenalectomies on dogs, Leloir completed his thesis work, which won the Annual Prize of the Faculty for best thesis in 1934.

After Leloir completed his doctoral thesis, Houssay advised him to gain some work experience abroad. To better grasp biochemistry, in 1936-1937 Leloir went to work in the Biochemical Laboratory in Cambridge, England, with the Nobel Prize winner Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, considered the father of English biochemistry. While in Cambridge, Leloir also worked with Malcolm Dixon on enzymology, looking at the effects of cyanide and phosphate on succinic dehydrogenase. His time in England introduced Leloir to the international scientific community and exposed him to international scientific practices such as the methods involved in selecting the fundamental problem to study. He also learned solid work habits and how to work in small spaces.

When he returned to the Instituto de Fisiología in Buenos Aires in 1937, Leloir brought with him enzymes to study. He teamed up with Juan M. Muñoz, who provided a small distillation apparatus that could be used to reliably measure ethanol in their work on ethanol metabolism. Although this equipment was not ideal, the research team used “lo que tiene a mano” (what one has at hand). This ability to innovate was extremely necessary when they started to study the metabolism of alcohol and formation of fatty acids in the liver. The tissue samples used in the experiments had to be kept cold so liver homogenates would remain active. As refrigerated centrifuges were too expensive, Leloir and Muñoz covered their regular centrifuge with inner tubes filled with a mixture of water, ice, and salt. By using a substance thus extracted from liver cells, they showed that oxidation of fatty acids was due to the enzymes found in the cells and not intact cells themselves, which had previously been believed. Leloir and Muñoz also worked with Eduard Braun Menendez on the effect an enzyme found in the kidneys could have on a transient or temporary increase in blood pressure.

In 1943, at the age of 37, Leloir married Amelia Zuberbühler, whom he had first met in 1941 at a friend’s wedding. The two shared a love of the fine arts, outside of Leloir’s devotion to science. Unfortunately, this life milestone coincided with a coup d’etat that replaced the civilian government with a military junta that included Juan Perón. As the new government was more sympathetic with the Axis powers, Houssay, Leloir, and other scientists promoted the return to democracy, the constitution, and solidarity with the American hemisphere in support of the Allied forces. This activism caused Houssay to lose his position at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Although he decided to remain in Argentina, Leloir moved to the United States with Amelia. There he continued his training in biochemistry, first with Carl and Gerty Cori at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, then with David Green at Columbia University in New York City, where he worked on the purification of aminotransferases. Another important aspect of science that Leloir learned from working with Green is that groups of researchers can apply for grants to fund salaries, equipment, and supplies if they have a space somewhere set aside for them to perform their experiments.

Although Houssay no longer had a government position at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he was able to raise sufficient private funding to open the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine) in 1944. In 1945, Leloir returned to Argentina and renewed his collaboration with Houssay at this new research institute. Around the same time, a textile industrialist, Jaime Campomar, approached Houssay with the idea of establishing a new research institute to focus on biochemistry. Houssay recommended that Leloir be the director. The Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas del la Fundación Campomar (Biochemical Research Institute of the Campomar Foundation) was inaugurated in 1947 in a small house next to Houssay’s institute in Buenos Aires.

Leloir preferred working with others rather than alone and had assembled a research team, including Carlos Cardini, Alejandro Paladini, Enrico Cabib, Ranwell Caputto, and Raúl Trucco. This group began work on the biosynthesis of saccharides, a relatively new field at the time. Their initial research looked at the formation of lactose but when those efforts were not successful they shifted their focus to the degradation of lactose and galactose utilization. Leloir and his team used enzymatic tests and paper chromatography to identify the substances separated and purified in their experiments. This allowed them to detect nucleotides involved in storing sugar during the biosynthesis of carbohydrates. Because of the work that the Instituto Campomar did to identify the sugar nucleotides that are fundamental to the metabolism of carbohydrates, Leloir was awarded the Premio de la Sociedad Científica Argentina (Argentine Scientific Society Prize). The research team’s efforts expanded to include glycoproteins and the mechanisms of galactose metabolism, which led to their discovery of the cause of galactosemia, a disorder related to lactose intolerance.

In 1957, Jaime Campomar died, depriving the Instituto Campomar of its annual funding. Finding support from the United States National Institutes of Health (US NIH) and other organizations, Leloir and his team continued their work measuring the activating action on galactose transformation using yeast extracts and detecting biosynthesis of sucrose using wheat germ enzymes. In addition, they found that liver extracts could catalyze the formation of glycogen and worked to clarify how glycogen is synthesized and degraded. This gave new impetus to their work on the regulation of glycogen metabolism. Different types of glucose are bound together to form glycogen in times of plenty; glycogen then is degraded back to glucose as fuel in liver cells in times of scarcity.

After Perón was ousted from power in 1955, the new government started to support the sciences. By 1958, several new scientific institutions were being established, such as the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research — CONICET). At the same time, Argentine universities regained their autonomy. The Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences) of the Universidad de Buenos Aires became associated with the Instituto Campomar when the Argentine government converted a larger building, which had been a school for nuns, into the new site for Leloir’s institute, that of Houssay, and the new Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas (Institute for Biochemical Research) established by the Facultad itself. As Leloir was the head of this new institute as well as being the director of the Instituto Campomar, he also served as a professor at the Facultad. In this way, the two institutes and that headed by Houssay collaborated with each other, sharing space, equipment, and researchers. Leloir and his team thus had a greater number of sources of support, including US NIH, CONICET, the Facultad, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Science and Technology section of the Ministerio de Economia.

With such support, Leloir’s team expanded their research beyond glycogen to the formation of starch in plants. They found that the glycoprotein (UDP-Glc) that worked well as a precursor for glycogen did not work well for starch but that another glycoprotein (ADP-Glc) did.

In 1970, Leloir was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates.” He donated his prize money to the Fundación Campomar to support research. In addition to this honor and being the head of both the Fundación Instituto Campomar and the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas, Leloir at various times was a professor and head of the department of biochemistry at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a member of the Board of Directors of CONICET, president of the Asociacíon Argentina para el Progreso de Ciencia (Argentine Association for the Advancement of Sciences), and a founding member of the Third World Academy of Sciences, which was established in 1983. Also in 1983, Leloir wrote a short autobiography, “Long ago and Far Away,” which was published in the Annual Review of Biochemistry (Annual Review 52: 1-15 at http://www.annualreview.org). In that year, the Instituto Campomar moved into a new building that was constructed on land donated by the mayor of Buenos Aires to be a center for biochemical research. Leloir devoted the rest of his career to that institute.

In 1987, after returning home from a day of work at the laboratory, Leloir died of a heart attack. The institute to which he devoted so many years of his life was renamed the Fundacíon Instituto Leloir which continues to conduct research in a variety of medical fields.

According to Armando Parodi (in his article “Luis Federico Leloir, or How to Do Good Science in a Hostile Environment, in IUBMB Life, 9 May 2012, Vol 64, #6, pp. 567-572), Leloir gave some valuable advise to other scientists who were at the beginning of their careers, by comparing his career in science with how he learned to play polo as a young man:

“One thing I have always tried to avoid is working on subjects that have already drawn other researchers’ interest. Young scientists tend to become fascinated with subjects that are in fashion and decide to focus their work on them. By the time they become experts, those subjects themselves may already be running out of fashion, or what is worse, they may have become the subject of fierce competition. This whole situation reminds me of the times when I played polo in my youth. The older, more experienced players would always advise me not to ride after the ball itself, for once one reached it, it was already too late. The wise thing to do, they kept telling me, was to ride straight to where one thought the ball will end up. There is a slight time difference between both tactics, and in sport strategy is truly learnt only by experience. When dealing with science, I guess the right strategy is to follow the results from experiments rather than those from literature.”

Sources: http://www.nobelprize.com “Luis Leloir — Biographical”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Federico_Leloir

Leloir, Luis (1983). “Far Away and Long Ago.” Annual Review of Biochemistry, Vol. 52: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.bi.52.070183000245

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-Federico-Leloir

http://www.thefamouspeople.com “Luis Federico Leloir”

http://www.biografiasyvidas.com “Luis Federico Leloir”

http://www.esearch.sc4.edu Hispanic and Latinx Scientists

Parodi, Armando J. “Luis Federico Leloir, or how to do good science in a hostile environment.” 9 May 2012. iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. IUBMB Life 64:6, pp. 567-572.

Saavedra, Gabriela (21 March 2021). http://www.serargentino.com “Luis Federico Leloir: un genio modesto”

Lorenzano, Cesar (2015). Luis Federico Leloir: Historia de una Investigacion Nobel. http://www.academia.edu

A neurologist, Antonio Egas Moniz was the first Portuguese scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to him in 1949 for his work on developing the prefrontal leucotomy as therapy for certain psychoses or mental disorders.

Antonio Egas Moniz was born in Avança, Portugal, November 29, 1874. Although his parents Fernando de Pina Rezende Abreu and Mariado Rosario de Almedia é Sousa named him Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire, he adopted the surname Egas Moniz at the request of his uncle Abbé Caetano de Pina Rezende Abreu, who believed the family was connected to a medieval nobleman of that name. This uncle, a clergyman, oversaw Egas Moniz’s education during his primary school years at the Escola do Padre José Ramos. After finishing high school at the Colegio de S Fiel dos Jesuita, Egas Moniz entered the University of Coimbra at the age of 17 (in 1891) to study medicine. He specialized in neurology, held internships in Bordeaux and Paris, and graduated in medicine from the University of Coimbra in 1899 at the age of 25. Two years later he completed a doctorate, focusing his thesis on the physiology and pathology of sexual life, a two-art work that was published as one volume in 1913.

In 1902, Egas Moniz married Elvira de Macedo Dias and also became a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Coimbra, where he taught anatomy, physiology, and general pathology.

At the same time, however, Egas Moniz devoted himself to politics. While a student, he had been an activist supporting a republican form of government in opposition to the monarchy. Before and after the First Republic was established in 1910, Egas Moniz served in the national legislature. In 1917, he was named Ambassador to Spain and then Minister of Foreign Affairs. In that capacity, Egas Moniz led the Portuguese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of Word War I and was Portugal’s signatory to the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1919, Egas Moniz retired from politics and recommitted himself to the world of science. Even while active in politics, since 1911 Egas Moniz had been a full professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lisbon. By the time Egas Moniz left the world of politics, several scientists around the world had begun to investigate different possible methods to conduct brain imaging, including injecting air into the vascular system of the brain to create a contrast to be visible by x-ray. Egas Moniz began research using radio-opaque solutions or dyes instead of air to create this contrast. Experimenting first with animals, he and his colleague Almeida Lima found that sodium iodide (25% solution) could make vascular branches in the brain visible on x-ray to be able to identify and localize brain tumors, aneurysms, vascular lesions, and other intracranial conditions. In 1927, Egas Moniz presented his findings on this technique to the Neurological Society in Paris and the French Academy of Medicine. This technique came to be known as cerebral angiography. Between 1928 and 1937, Egas Moniz was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for his work on cerebral angiography but did not receive the award at that time. Instead, he won the Oslo Prize in 1945.

In the 1930s, Egas Moniz turned his attention to a possible treatment for certain psychoses like schizophrenia. He had noticed that some soldiers who had suffered injuries to their frontal lobes experienced personality changes. He thought that partially disconnecting the frontal lobe (which is associated with psychological responses) from the thalamus (which is the relay center for sensory impulses at the center of the brain) might reduce several symptoms of some mental disorders. As Egas Moniz was not well trained in neurosurgery and had gout that affected his hands, he worked again with his colleague Almeida Lima. After first attempts to use injections of absolute alcohol to destroy part of the frontal lobe, the colleagues created a needle-like device with a retractable loop to surgically separate white matter fibers. This procedure, first known as a prefrontal leucotomy, was adopted and modified by other physicians, especially in the United States, as a lobotomy. Although successful in eliminating symptoms in some patients, the procedure had serious side effects, so that Egas Moniz warned that it only should be used if no other treatments were effective. At the time, there were no medications that could be used with severe psychoses, so without the procedure some cases of psychoses would have been incurable.

In recognition of his work on prefrontal leucotomy, in 1949 Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in some psychoses. That year, Walter Rudolf Hess of Switzerland also was awarded the prize, for his discovery of the functional organization of the inter brain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs.

Although the work recognized by the Nobel Prize has gone into disrepute due to the negative side effects associated with leucotomy or lobotomy, his work on brain imaging continues to be very valuable. Cerebral angiography was the most effective method to reveal intracranial conditions until the development of computed tomography (CT or CAT scan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the 1970s and 1980s.

By the time Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize, he had retired from his position in the neurology department at the University of Lisbon. He had been shot by a patient suffering from schizophrenia in the late 1930s and was paralyzed at the age of 65. Although confined to a wheelchair, Egas Moniz continued in private medical practice until his death at age 82 in 1955, in the rural home where he had been born.

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

Recognized as the father of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1906, along with Camillo Golgi, for his work on the structure of the nervous system and the role of the neuron.

The son of Justo Ramon and Antonia Cajal, Santiago Ramon y Cajal (also known as Cajal) was born on 1 May 1852 in the village of Petilla de Aragón, Spain, where his father was a rural doctor. Justo Ramon earned a doctorate in medicine in 1858 and eventually became a professor of dissection and anatomy at the Universidad de Zaragoza (University of Saragossa), which later would be a major influence on Cajal’s career.

At a young age, Cajal was interested in being an artist yet also showed signs of potential as an inventor which, when not channeled correctly, could lead to trouble, as when he destroyed a neighbor’s gate with a homemade cannon at the age of 11. Seeking to instill discipline and stability in his son, Justo Ramon apprenticed Cajal to a shoemaker and a barber. By the time Cajal was 16, however, he was assisting his father in anatomical studies by sketching bones from human remains found in a cemetery. The merging of arts and medicine had a profound impact on Cajal’s future.

Cajal attended medical school at the Universidad de Zaragoza and graduated as a licentiate in medicine in 1873, at the age of 21. After entering the Spanish army as a medical officer, he served in an expedition to Cuba in 1874-1875, in the midst of Cuba’s 10-year struggle to achieve independence from Spain. The tropical environment did not treat Cajal kindly, as he contacted both malaria and tuberculosis.

After recovering from these illnesses in Spain, Cajal quickly succeeded in the field of medicine. In 1875, he became an assistant at the school of anatomy in the Universidad de Zaragoza. In 1877, after studying in Madrid, he received a doctorate in medicine. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, he divided his time between studying in Madrid and working in Zaragoza. In 1879, he became the director of the anatomical museum at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Zaragoza. Also that year he married Silveria Fañanas Garcia, which whom he eventually had seven children.

In the early 1880s, while studying in Madrid for an exam that would allow him to become a professor, Cajal saw a demonstration of the microscopic preparation of cells. Upon his return to Zaragoza, Cajal set up his own laboratory in the attic of his home, where he taught himself histology, which is the study of the microscopic structure of cells and tissues or microscopic anatomy. This was part of his more general study of inflammation, muscle anatomy, and microbiology. Based on his studies, he began writing about histology.

In 1883, Cajal became a professor of anatomy and histology at the Universidad de Valencia. His early work there focused on the pathology of inflammation, the structure of epithelial cells and tissues, and the microbiology of cholera.

In 1887, Cajal became a professor of histology and pathological anatomy at the Universidad de Barcelona, where he worked until 1892. Also in 1887, Cajal learned of a technique to stain nerve cells, which was first developed by the Italian Camillo Golgi in 1873. Golgi’s “reazione nera” (black reaction) used specific chemicals to make neurons visible against a transparent yellow background. Cajal experimented with this method in his own laboratory, finding that different tissues required different procedures and that tissues from younger animals allowed better staining results than tissues from older animals.

Using his early skills as an artist, Cajal created detailed drawings of the cells he studied under his microscope. His systematic documentation of the microscopic structure of the central nervous system supported his theories that challenged the commonly accepted ideas about how cells in the brain work. At this time in Spain, there was little support for scientific research, so Cajal edited and financed his own medical journal, Revista Trimestral de Histología Normal y Patológica (Quarterly Review of Normal and Pathological Histology), where he published the results of his work.

By 1891, Cajal devised the theory that nerve cells are individual cells that are not anatomically connected to other nerve cells. The term “neuron” was proposed by another scientist (Heinrich von Waldeyer) to refer to these individual nerve cells. Cajal also stated that the neuron is the structural and functional unit of the nervous system and that the neuron has three parts: dendrites, soma, and axon. His illustrations of nerve cells showed what he called “arborizations” in that nerve cells have branches like trees that grow and become more elaborate over time.

In 1892, Cajal moved to Madrid where he was appointed professor of histology and pathological anatomy. At this time, Spain was felt to be in decline compared to the rest of Europe, which was more heavily influenced by the industrial revolution and what has been referred to as “the cult of positive science.” As a member of the “generación de ’98”, Cajal worked toward an appreciation for science and its role in society.

In the early 1890s, Cajal began to receive recognition in the form of honorary degrees and prizes and was elected as a member to many scientific societies and academies. His reputation extended beyond Spain. In 1894, he was invited to give the prestigious Croonian Lecture at the British Royal Society of London. In subsequent years, he received honorary degrees from universities in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Untied States.

In 1900, Cajal was appointed as the director of the Instituto Nacional de Higiene (National Institute of Hygiene) and of the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas (Biological Research laboratory) in 1901. During this time, he continued to improve upon Golgi’s staining techniques.

In 1906, along with Golgi, Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for their work on the structure of the nervous system, even though they supported differing theories about that structure. The theory supported by Cajal ultimately proved to be more accurate and more widely accepted, so that it is Cajal who is more often recognized as the father of neuroscience.

In 1920, the king of Spain commissioned a building for the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas, of which Cajal was the director. The Laboratorio at the same time was renamed the Instituto Cajal, where Cajal continued to work until his death in 1934.

Cajal wrote a memoir, Recuerdos de mi Vida (Recollections of my Life); the first volume Mi Infancia y Juventud (My Childhood and Youth) was published in Madrid in 1901, and the second volume Historia de mi Labor Cientifica (Story of my Scientific Work) in 1917. The two were combined into one publication in 1923. The 1923 version is available online in Spanish at Instituto Cervantes (cvc.cervantes.es).

Other sources include:

http://www.Wikipedia.com

http://www.Nobelprize.org

http://www.britannica.com

http://www.scholarpedia.org