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Francisco Dallmeier, born on February 15, 1953, was surrounded by science from a young age. His father, Francisco de Sales Gómez Gonzalez, was a program manager for Venezuela’s Cancer Center. Dallmeier’s mother, Ana Teresa Dallmeier de Gómez, was a descendant of the German Adolph Ernst (1832-1899) who co-founded and chaired the Natural History Faculty of Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV — Central University of Venezuela). Participating as a boy scout brought Dallmeier out of the city and into contact with nature, where he could more fully pursue his fascination with plants and animals.

Volunteering at the La Salle Museum of Natural History in Caracas, starting at the age of 14, gave Dallmeier a more focused avenue for learning more about wildlife. After four years as a volunteer, he became the curator of mammals. Over the course of ten years, his work at the museum taught him that hard work, step-by-step, leads to success. He started doing difficult, menial tasks but mastered skills that allowed him to progress to collecting and preparing specimens, managing collections, and organizing expeditions to many parts of Venezuela. Some of the museum’s expeditions included scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, in search of rare species of plants or animals. Eventually, at the age of 20, his work culminated in a leadership position as director of the museum. The expertise he gained as a volunteer complemented his academic work to give him a firm foundation for his future career.

At the age of 17, Dallmeier graduated from high school and began his academic studies at UCV, pursuing an undergraduate degree in biology at the same faculty (now called the Science Faculty) started by Ernst. His five-year academic program consisted of coursework in biology, chemistry, physics, and computer sciences, and a research thesis. In 1974, as a research assistant at the faculty’s Instituto de Zoología Tropical (IZT — Institute of Tropical Zoology, now referred to as IZET or Instituto de Zoología y Ecología Tropical), Dallmeier coordinated and participated in field expeditions to gather scientific information on the wildlife and ecosystems of the Modulos de Mantecal in the Venezuelan state of Apure. He worked under Dr. Jesus Maria Pacheco in cooperation with Dr. Pinosky and Dr. Dobrobosky of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who helped him complete his research thesis on the white-faced whistling duck in the wetlands of Mantecal, so that he earned his title as “Licenciado” in biology.

While still a student at UCV, Dallmeier began a second major line of study that would continue throughout his life and complement his work in wildlife biology. He became aware of Transactional Analysis (TA), a psychoanalytic theory for social interactions that provides a basis for understanding human behavior, developed by Eric Berne in the 1950s. Dallmeier became effective at using the model in his communications with fellow academics and colleagues.

Upon graduating from UCV, Dallmeier started working for Ingenieros Electricistas y Mecanicos CA (INELMECA — Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), a Venezuelan environmental engineering firm. He was able to apply his academic training in the real world by participating in the development of Venezuela’s first environmental impact assessment. The project, conducted in collaboration with Batelle Columbus Laboratories in Ohio, United States, assessed the environmental impact the construction and operation of the thermal electric power plant Planta Centro would have on the surrounding area. The environmental standards developed during this project led to the creation of Venezuela’s standards for the energy and mining industries. This experience showed Dallmeier the benefits that are derived from having the public and private sectors work together in a multidisciplinary manner, incorporating fields such as engineering, ecology, and management in the greater mission of environmental conservation and sustainability.

In 1981, Dallmeier received a scholarship from the Venezuelan Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho program to study wildlife biology in the United States at the Master’s level at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado. Before starting the Master’s program, however, he went to the University of Tennessee to improve his English skills. While there, he took the opportunity to obtain his pilot’s license for single engine planes, which he flew extensively in Tennessee, Missouri, and later in Colorado around Fort Collins.

In Fort Collins, in addition to his Master’s program, Dallmeier continued to study TA and became actively involved in the local TA community in northern Colorado. In 1982, his life was changed again when he stumbled upon the book Frogs into Princes, by Steve Andreas, which explained the emerging field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Dallmeier began to study NLP as well, taking advanced courses in NLP and then Neuro-Semantics, to the point that he became a practitioner and trainer himself. He found that NLP and Neuro-Semantics provide a systematic method to understand and model human behavior and interactions so that desired experiences can be replicated and undesired ones can be transformed. This leads not only to improved relations with others but individual self-awareness.

In 1984, Dallmeier completed his studies at the Master’s level with a degree in Wildlife and Natural Resources Management. He then began a doctoral program, also at CSU, in Wildlife Conservation and Management, with the support of a scholarship from the Organization of American States (OAS). His PhD dissertation focused on conservation and management of Venezuelan waterfowl.

Dallmeier always knew that he wanted to work in an international science and conservation setting. When he attained his PhD in 1986, the internet was in its infancy, so he used the old-fashioned method of sending out his resume to those organizations that he could find that were involved in wildlife conservation. One of the few organizations that did international conservation work was the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In coordination with the United Nations, the Smithsonian was starting up a biodiversity program within what is now the National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZ/CBI).

The biodiversity program, referred to as Man and the Biosphere (MAB), was envisioned to aid in the conservation of biodiversity in temperate and tropical forests. Dallmeier was hired as a program manager/assistant director in 1986, became acting director in 1988 (the same year he became a US citizen), and became director in 1989. The program’s name was changed to better reflect its full mission, of Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity. Dallmeier remained with the same organization throughout other name changes, such as the Smithsonian Institution Biodiversity Monitoring and Assessment Program (SI/MAB) in 1998, Center for Conservation, Education and Sustainability (CCES) in 2009, and Center for Conservation and Sustainability (CCS) in 2015. He remained as director of CCS until he retired from the Smithsonian Institution in December 2023.

Dallmeier combined his education in wildlife management with his training in communications when he initiated a program to train ecologists from developing countries to conduct the long-term research necessary to assess the status of biodiversity in their own countries. The research is multi-faceted, including not only hands-on work in designated plots on the ground but also remote sensing of those plots through satellite pictures and aerial photography. To assess and then monitor biodiversity in these plots, computer diagrams are created to document the location and size of trees. Once the status of biodiversity is determined, the scientists can assist policymakers in taking steps to maintain and promote biodiversity of both plant and animal species. Over the years, Dallmeier and the Smithsonian’s CCS have developed over 300 research plots in 23 countries and have trained more than 400 scientists from over 40 countries.

Dallmeier’s approach has included getting private corporations to become involved and committed to conservation measures, as well. An example of this approach was the Camisea Project that brought together the Peruvian government and the Shell Prospecting and Development (SPDP) division of Shell Corp. During the period of work on the project (1996-1999), Dallmeier and his team of 100 people conducted an inventory of the plants and animals in the area around Manu National Park, in the Amazonian lowlands, where Shell planned to develop a gas plant and pipelines. As a result of the Camisea Project, Shell decided to change the location of the plant so it would be in an area that previously had been deforested for farming rather than in a relatively untouched area.

Dallmeier’s teaching skills have been put to use in the United States, as well. The Smithsonian had a program of courses for young professionals and created another joint project with George Mason University, the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC). This school had a campus within the Smithsonian complex in Maryland and was focused on training the next generation of experts in conservation and biodiversity. The students received professional level courses that helped them identify not only the challenges and problems impacting biodiversity but also the possible solutions. Dallmeier taught at that school from 2005 to 2020.

Since retiring from his position as Director of CCS in December 2023, Dallmeier has retained an emeritus status to advise the CCS on issues pertaining to biodiversity and sustainable development. He also has embarked on the creation of a private enterprise related to his lifelong efforts in those areas.

References:

Oleksy, Walter. “Francisco Dallmeier: Wildlife Biologist.” In Hispanic-American Scientist. New York NY: Facts on File, Inc., 1998.

Kloepfer, Deanne, and Abarca, Patricia. Franicisco Dallmeier. Chicago IL: Raintree, 2006.

Newton, David E. “Dallmeier, Francisco” in Latinos in Science, Math, and Professions. New York NY: Facts on File, 2007.

“Dallmeier, Francisco.: 1953-; Biologist” at http://www.encyclopedia.com

“Francisco Dallmeier, PhD.” at http://www.nationalzoo.si.edu

“Francisco Dallmeier: 1953-; Biologist” at http://www.jrank.org

“Francisco Dallmeier: The Ornithologist who Conquered the Smithsonian” at http://www.Venezuelan-americanarchives.org

“Francisco Dallmeier” at http://www.Linken=din.com

Personal communication with Francisco Dallmeier, October and December 2023.

Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology 1984 for Theories Concerning the Specificity in Development and Control of the Immune System and the Discovery of the Principle for Production of Monoclonal Antibodies

César Milstein was born on October 8, 1927, into a family of Ukrainian descent. His father, Lázaro Milstein, was a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who came to Argentina at the age of 14, in 1913, with an aunt and uncle, living in a Jewish settlement near Bahía Blanca. Although Lázaro learned Spanish, he retained a strong connection to his cultural roots, being active in social and cultural activities and helping preserve Yiddish literature. He worked as a farm laborer, a carpenter, and as a traveling salesman. César’s mother, Máxima Vapniarsky, was born in Argentina to Ukrainian immigrants. She was a schoolteacher who, in 1926 at the age of 33, became the director of the first co-educational school in Bahía Blanca.

Milstein and his two brothers were raised speaking Spanish. Both parents emphasized the importance of education. Other factors that influenced the direction Milstein would take in life were his cousin and a book. His cousin was a biochemist who told Milstein about the work she did at the Instituto Malbrán, doing research into snake venom to develop a treatment for snake bites. The book was a Spanish translation of The Microbehunters (Los Cazadores de Microbios) by Pau de Kruif. The book depicted the lives of such scientists as Pasteur and Leeuwenhoek, which led Milstein to think that scientists led exciting lives.

Milstein spent most of his high school years at the Colegio Nacional in Bahía Blanca. In the mid-1940s, he went to Buenos Aires to prepare for the entrance exam to enroll in the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He started his undergraduate studies in chemistry. There he met a fellow chemistry student, Celia Prilleltensky, who shared not only an interest in chemistry with Milstein but also a spirit of activism in support of free education and against the Peronist government’s policies to privatize education. His activism included a period as the President of the Student Union.

Between 1950 and 1956, both Milstein and Celia worked part-time as clinical analysts at the Laboratorio Liebeschultz. This covered the time during which they graduated from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1952) and got married (1953). In 1953, Milstein was planning to start his doctoral work and, on the recommendation of Luis Federico Leloir, asked Andrés Stoppani to supervise his post-graduate work. Stoppani suggested that Milstein take a year off before starting his graduate studies, as the political climate under the Peronist regime was not favorable to academia. Milstein and Celia therefore took the opportunity to have a year-long honeymoon, traveling around Europe and working on a kibbutz in Israel. When they returned in 1954, they resumed their part-time work at the Laboratorio in the clinical biochemistry lab. Working there while pursuing his graduate studies gave Milstein a firm understanding of the value of organizing one’s time.

Although the political situation had improved in Milstein’s absence, there still was little support for the sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. The academic laboratories had only the most basic equipment and the faculty were not fully staffed. Stoppani was the only full-time professor of chemistry, yet was paid at the level of a janitor and had to pay for basic laboratory supplies out of his own pocket. By 1957, Milstein had completed his doctoral research, which focused on the disulfide bridge, a chemical bond in the enzyme dehydrogenase. Milstein was awarded a prize for the best thesis in chemistry for the year by the Asociación Química Argentina. He also published several papers with Stoppani in the next few years.

In 1958, Milstein received funding from the British Council to work with Malcolm Dixon at the School of Biochemistry in Cambridge, England, even though Milstein did not speak English at this time. In Cambridge, Milstein studied the kinetics and heavy metal activation of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase, a subject that also interested Frederick Sanger (who won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for showing that proteins have a defined chemical composition). Milstein and Sanger developed a close working relationship. After one year of work, Milstein had enough data for a second dissertation, showing that activation of phosphoglucomutase is caused by displacement of heavy metals by magnesium. With this, Milstein was awarded a second doctorate, this time from Cambridge University.

Instead of staying on in Cambridge after receiving his degree, Milstein returned to Argentina to be in charge of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Instituto Nacional de Microbiologia (INM — National Institute of Microbiology), which was headed by Ignacio Pirosky. Celia also had a position there. The timing was right, as in 1961 there was a period of reform following the fall of Peron, when many Argentine scientists who had been exiled or sidelined were able to return to work. At INM, Milstein supervised and mentored 25 young scientists and introduced the subject of bacterial genetics into the laboratory there.

This more open period for scientists, however, was short lived, as a new military coup in 1962 again brought restrictions to academia. There was a heightened level of political pressure against Jews and political dissent. Milstein therefore returned to Cambridge in 1963 to work with his friend Sanger at the Medical Research Council (MRC), Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), where Sanger was head of the Protein Chemistry division. Milstein switched his focus from enzymes to antibodies, as he started to look at the molecular structure related to the formation and diversity of antibodies.

Milstein and his assistant John Jarvis looked specifically at the way that light-chain and heavy-chain units of antibodies are held together by disulphide bridges. They looked at the differences in amino acid sequences to examine the diversity of antibodies at the level of DNA. At first they had to use a time-consuming method based on the chromatography column. Milstein’s wife Celia was another assistant who helped in this work and co-authored a paper with Milstein in 1970. In the early 1970s, a new method of sequencing was developed that made the procedure more efficient. Milstein’s team also began to look at the role of mRNA and the encoding of DNA in the diversity of antibodies.

As early as the 1950s, it was known that normal plasma cells of multiple myeloma produce a large variety of antibodies. Malignant plasma cells, however, produce just one antibody. In the 1970s, scientists at the Salk Institute in California developed a method to adapt myeloma cells from mice to grow in tissue culture. Milstein used mouse myeloma cells originally grown at the Salk Institute for his basic research into the structure of antibodies. He wanted to see if antibody diversity results from a mutation in the DNA of an antibody, a process referred to as somatic mutation. Milstein’s experiments involved fusing together different myeloma cell lines, creating hybrid clones known as hybridomas. In April 1974, he presented the results of his myeloma cellular fusion experiments at the Basel Institute of Immunology, in Switzerland, where he met Georges Kohler. Interested in Milstein’s work, Kohler joined the research team in Cambridge.

In the mid-1970s, Milstein and Kohler had fused mouse myeloma cells with normal B cells from the spleen of a mouse immunized with a known antigen so that the mouse produced a specific antibody. They cultivated the fused cells in a culture medium and, after several months, found that the hybrid cells could secrete antibodies to the specific antigen in large amounts in a cell line that continually reproduced. These “immortal” cell lines could produce a limitless supply of identical antibodies with a known specificity. The process became known as hybridoma technology and the resulting identical antibodies as monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). Milstein and Kohler published their results in the August 1975 issue of Nature.

Milstein described the work he conducted at this time in the Lynen Lecture, entitled “Messing about with isotopes and enzymes and antibodies,” published by W. Whelan in the Proceedings of the Miami Winter Symposium From Gene to Protein: Translation into Biotechnology (1982).

The work Milstein described in his articles was not a straightforward process, as complications could arise from contamination of the culture medium the cells were grown in, and it could be difficult to fuse the cells to create the different hybridomas. There seemed to be as much art or skill as science involved in the process, as Milstein and his team learned through trial and error. Despite the difficulties of the work, Milstein shared cell lines with other scientists who wanted to conduct their own research. This was done in the spirit of openness common in the scientific community but with the condition that the scientists acknowledge the source of the cell lines, that they ask permission before sharing them with a third party, and that they would not patent any products that came from the cell lines.

Under such conditions, Milstein shared some cell lines with Hilary Koprowski, who was director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Because of the different procedures for and timing of patent applications, Koprowski applied for a broad patent in the United States in June 1977 before the MRC was able to apply for a patent in the United Kingdom through the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC).

Milstein’s own work had started out as pure science but soon was seen to have practical applications. In the spring of 1977, his work on rat histocompatibility and antigens showed that mAbs could be used to test compatibility between an organ donor and recipient as well as for tissue typing. With approval from the MRC, Milstein formed an agreement for Sera-lab to distribute mAbs in the United Kingdom and give part of the profit back to the MRC. He made a similar arrangement with the Salk Institute for distribution in the United States.

Milstein collaborated with other scientists for other ways in which mAbs could be used in medicine. He had a long-lasting friendship and collaboration with a fellow Argentine, Claudio Cuello, in a variety of mAb applications, such as detecting Substance P, involved in pain and neurotransmission, and other neural proteins like serotonin. Their work improved the understanding of diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson and the development of neuropharmacological drugs and immuno-based diagnostic tests. Milstein collaborated with Leonard Herzenberg on methods to use mAbs for automated separation of cells, with David Secher for using mAbs to purify natural products like interferon, and with Douglas Voak and Steven Sacks for using mAbs for blood group typing.

For all of his work, Milstein was well-known internationally as a top researcher in the field. He received such recognition as membership in the Royal Society (1975), an honorary doctorate (1977) from the Universidad Nacional del Sur in his hometown of Bahía Blanca, the Wolf Prize in Medicine (1980), and the Royal Medal (1982). In 1983 he became the Head of the Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division in Cambridge. His most note-worthy award, however, was the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, along with Georges Kohler, in 1984, for their theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies. Milstein entitled his Nobel Prize lecture “From the Structure of Antibodies to the Diversification of the Immune Response.”

In his later years and even at the time he retired in 1995, Milstein was interested in the origin of somatic mutation in antibodies. After retirement he remained an active member of the LMB and collaborated with Michael Neuberger to determine the enzymatics involved in somatic mutation. He contributed to a paper on the mutational process and its mechanism, which was submitted for publication to PNAS shortly before his death in 2002.

In the 1970s, Milstein had been diagnosed with a chronic heart condition that had afflicted his mother, as well. He modified his diet and incorporate exercise to the extent that he was well known as an avid walker. Despite such lifestyle changes, he died of a heart attack at the age of 74. He was remembered by his colleagues as not only an excellent research scientist, but also as someone who throughout his life devoted himself to helping science and scientists, especially in the less developed countries. In March 2000, Milstein said that “Science will only fulfill its promises when the benefits are equally shared by the really poor of the world.” With that as inspiration, the MRC created a scholarship in Milstein’s name to help support Argentine scientists studying in Cambridge.

Resources:

“César Milstein – Biographical,” “Cesar Milstein – Facts,” and “Cesar Milstein Nobel Lecture” at http://www.nobelprize.org

“Professor César Milstein” at http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org

“The Story of César Milstein and Monoclonal Antibodies”. Collated and written by Dr. Lara Marks, content from an exhibit on César Milstein, at http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org (makes reference to a film about Milstein “Un Fuegito,” produced by Ana Fraile, Pulpo films, available on vimeo.com)

“César Milstein” at en.wikipedia.org

“César Milstein: Argentine Immunologist” at http://www.britannica.com

“César Milstein, PhD.” at http://www.aai.org (American Association of Immunologists)

“César Milstein, 74, Who Won Joint Nobel Prize in Medicine” New York Times, 26 March 2002

“César Milstein (1927-2002)” at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

“César Milstein: Pasión por la Ciencia” at http://www.serargentino.com

“César Milstein” at http://www.bionity.com

“César Milstein: Oct 8, 1927 – March 24, 2002” by Rabbitts, T.H., Cell Press, 2002 at http://www.cell.com

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1980 for discovery “concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions” or “discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface protein molecules important for the immune system’s distinction between self and non-self.”

Baruj Benacerraf was born on October 29, 1920, in Caracas, Venezuela. His parents, Abraham and Henriette Lasry Benacerraf, had immigrated to Venezuela from North Africa. Abraham was born to a poor Sephardic Jewish family in the 1880s in what then was Spanish Morocco. The Jewish ghetto where they lived lacked basic services such as water and sewage. When Abraham was 14, he moved to Caracas, Venezuela, to help a cousin in his textile import/export business. As Abraham became successful, he sent money to his family and several of his brothers joined him in Caracas. When Abraham wanted to marry, he sought a wife in the area where his family then lived, a Jewish community in French-speaking Algeria. There he met Henriette, who had been raised speaking French and no Spanish. After they were married in September 1919, they moved to Venezuela and lived in a large house with Abraham’s brothers and several servants.

About a year later, Baruj Benacerraf was born at home. Although his first language was Spanish, he also learned French. When he was five years old, the family moved to Paris to establish the purchasing side of the company, while Abraham’s brothers stayed in Caracas to manage that end of the family business. At age six, Benacerraf started school at the Lycee Janson where for 12 years he received a classical French education that focused on the humanities but was weak in the sciences.

Although his life seemed privileged, during his childhood and adolescence he had his share of tribulations. Throughout his childhood, Benacerraf had chronic asthma and undiagnosed dyslexia, so that he often was sick and required special tutoring. Eventually he overcame his language barriers and learning disabilities to become one of the best students in his school. In 1931, when Benacerraf was 11 years old, his brother Paul was born. As a teenager, before World War II, Benacerraf was able to enjoy the cultural life of Paris, even though he experienced discrimination both by being a foreigner (Venezuelan, born to a Spanish father) and Jewish, as antisemitism was evident in school, on the streets, and in the subway.

In 1938, Benacerraf passed the first of two exams required to obtain his Baccalaureate, similar to a high school diploma. In between exams, he took the opportunity to visit his uncle in Caracas, the first time he had been back to his birth country in 10 years. Upon his return, Venezuela felt both foreign and unfamiliar to him. His objective was to learn more about the family business. Under the guidance of his uncle Fortunato, Benacerraf got to know aspects of the business that were established in Venezuela. He returned to Paris by boat via New York City in the early spring of 1939 to prepare for his second Baccalaureate exam. War seemed imminent. Benacerraf returned to Venezuela as Paris was an increasingly dangerous place, yet he decided to continue his education in the United States. He enrolled in a textile engineering school in Philadelphia to start in the fall of 1939 and went to New York in July 1939 to learn English. Once he started in Philadelphia, however, he decided that he did not enjoy studying textiles, so he returned to New York and enrolled as a student in an extension program at Columbia University that taught English writing to foreigners. His parents and brother also moved to New York to establish the purchasing office for their family business, as Paris no longer was possible as a base of operations.

To finish his second Baccalaureate exam, Benacerraf enrolled at the Lycee Francais in New York. He became friends with two science teachers there, the chemist Paul Weil and the microbiologist Rene Dubos, who inspired in him an interest in the sciences. Having obtained his Baccalaureate diploma, Benacerraf enrolled in Columbia University’s School of General Studies in September 1940, in the pre-med track.

This was a perilous time for Europe and the United States. In June 1940, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. As France fell to the Nazi regime, the Petain government was established in exile in the south of France. The United Kingdom was isolated. Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941.

For Benacerraf personally, this time in New York changed his life. While at Columbia, he joined French student organizations through which he met Annette Dreyfus, whose family had been prominent in the Jewish community in Paris. Family connections and friends helped the Dreyfus family escape Paris, first to London then to New York, where Annette was enrolled at Barnard College. As the Dreyfus family lived near the Benacerraf family, Baruj and Annette often would share a ride to the Columbia/Barnard campus. After receiving college credit for the Baccalaureate, Benacerraf was able to complete the pre-med degree in just two years. Upon completing his degree, he and Annette announced their engagement in June 1942.

Although Benacerraf had received good grades from Columbia and had a degree in chemistry with pre-med credits, he was not accepted into most of the medical schools he applied to, possibly because of being a foreign national with intentions of staying in the United States, possibly because he was Jewish. Through connections with friends, however, he was offered a spot in the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in Richmond, to start in September 1942. He lived in a rented room in the home of Baptists who were impressed with his ability to speak French so well despite being Venezuelan.

Benacerraf noted differences between Venezuela and the South in general and Richmond in particular. In Venezuela, blacks were poor but had equal rights with other groups. Richmond in 1942 still had scars from the Civil War and was segregated, so that blacks were cared for in the teaching hospital of MCV but in facilities that were separated from those for white patients.

Because of the wartime need for medical officers, the usual four years of medical school were condensed into three years. During a short break between the first and second years in March 1943, Benacerraf went to New York City and married Annette in an orthodox Sephardic congregation, in keeping with his father’s tradition. Back in Richmond, Benacerraf was drafted and inducted into the Army unit connected with the medical schools and was trained to serve as a medical officer upon graduation. To be able to serve as commissioned officers in the US Army, all foreign medical students inducted into the Army also received US citizenship.

At the end of his final year, Benacerraf was accepted for an internship at Queens General Hospital, so he and Annette returned to New York City and moved into the Benacerraf family apartment in Manhattan. His 9-month internship started in July 1945. During this time, the war against Nazi Germany and Japan ended, and his wife Annette was diagnosed with and treated for pulmonary tuberculosis. When Benacerraf finished his internship and had to begin serving as a first lieutenant in the Army medical corps, the situation in Europe was much more secure. By the time he finished his basic training, Annette and her family had returned to Paris. Before Benacerraf could leave for Europe, however, his father (who then was in Venezuela) had a stroke, so he went to Venezuela and arranged to have his parents move to Paris, as well.

Benacerraf was sent first to Germany, then a medical hospital in Villejuif, south of Paris. France still was suffering from the effects of war; as industry and agriculture remained weak, there were shortages of food and energy. Annette’s father Ado Dreyfus was put in charge of the French governmental agency tasked with allocating surplus stocks that the American army donated to France in support of the recovery. When the medical hospital in Villejuif was closed, Benacerraf was reassigned to a medical unit in a French military hospital in Nancy, in the Alsace region of France. For 12 months, he was in charge of a 5-bed unit that provided community health services to American servicemen in the area. Once the year of service in Nancy was completed, Benacerraf was eligible for discharge from the Army and returned to the United States to finish his medical training.

For the next stage of his life in the United States, Benacerraf had dual careers. On the one hand, he started his medical career focusing on research rather than clinical work. On the other hand, he oversaw his father’s interest in the family business in Venezuela, as Abraham never fully recovered from his stroke. The experience of handling a business as well as making research discoveries was of major importance later in his life. In the mid-1940s, however, the family business aspect of his life helped support his medical career, as the two-year research fellowship he obtained at Columbia University was unpaid.

The fellowship was under immunochemist Dr. Elvin Kabat, at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. In part because of his childhood asthma, Benacerraf had decided to focus on immunology, which was a relatively new field in 1947 and little was then known about antibodies. Kabat suggested that he study hypersensitivity and hypersensitivity reactions. Using rabbits and guinea pigs, Benacerraf measured antigen and antibody concentrations. From Kabat, he learned the importance of accuracy and quantification as the basis for evaluating data objectively. Benacerraf found that the sense of discovery arising from such research was exciting.

In the spring of 1949, two major events happened for Benacerraf. In April, his daughter Beryl was born. Also, Benacerraf passed the New York Board of Medicine examination, which enabled him to practice medicine. He decided instead to devote his career to research. During his fellowship, Benacerraf had met Dr. Bernard Halpern, a French pharmacologist who helped develop the first clinically effective antihistamine. Halpern had an active research lab in Paris with work looking into hypersensitivity. Halpern offered Benacerraf a one-year appointment at his lab in the Broussais Hospital. Benacerraf accepted and moved to Paris with his wife and daughter to be closer to both sets of families.

Although Benacerraf found that Halpern’s lab lacked some of the more modern facilities and equipment that he was used to in New York, his one-year appointment turned into a six-year collaboration with Dr. Guido Biozzi. Using guinea pigs, rats, and mice for their experiments, the two studied the effect of antihistamines on the clearance of particulate material from the blood by phagocytes in the liver and spleen. Phagocytes are cells that circulate in blood and tissue, engulf foreign materials (such as microorganisms and debris from other cells), and ingest them, effectively clearing them from the blood and tissue. Benacerraf and Biozzi looked at natural phagocytic defense mechanisms involved in immune responses, in particular the concentration of carbon particles in blood and organs of the test animals to establish a pattern of clearance. Their study resulted in a general method to investigate the phagocytic capacity of the reticuloendothelial system (RES — a set of tissue and organs including the liver, spleen, and lungs) using mathematical equations to describe how the phagocytic system physiologically clears particulate matter from blood. Such work provided better understanding about how vaccination can activate some of those phagocytes to increase resistance against pathogens.

By 1959, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) was supporting French research personnel, but the only full-time position at Halpern’s lab was given to Biozzi. As Benacerraf was not a French citizen and had not earned his degree from a French medical school, his career in France would be limited. At an international meeting, he met Dr. Lewis Thomas, the chair of pathology at New York University (NYU), who offered Benacerraf a position as assistant professor of pathology. This allowed Benacerraf to return to New York.

While Benacerraf was in Paris, he continued to have two careers, dividing his time between the research in Halpern’s lab and the family business in Venezuela. Benacerraf separated his father Abraham’s interests from his uncle Fortunato’s interests in Caracas by converting Abraham’s part into a banking business, the Banco Union, that could be supervised from abroad. Banco Union was owned in part by Benacerraf’s family and by other associates in Venezuela. In 1953, Abraham fell into a coma and died, leaving Benacerraf to settle his father’s estate in Venezuela and manage his mother’s and brother’s shares in addition to his own. As part of this business management, in 1958 he used Banco Union to obtain the controlling interest in Colonial Trust Co., a small New York bank. Due to the political instability in Venezuela at the time, none of the Venezuelan associates were able to come to New York to manage Colonial Trust, so Benacerraf was appointed director and chair of the credit committee. His salary from Colonial Trust was substantially higher than his starting salary at NYU. After learning the basics of banking from the staff at Colonial Trust, Benacerraf managed the bank for several years before selling it for a profit. This management and business experience was very important later on in his medical research career.

As assistant professor and later professor of pathology at NYU, Benacerraf had his own lab and research support, and with several colleagues looked at a wide variety of topics, including hypersensitivity at the cellular level, immune complex diseases, anaphylactic hypersensitivity, tumor specific immunity, immunogenetics, and the structure of antibodies. At NYU he also worked with colleagues on phagocytic function in the RES, the effect of endotoxins on phagocytes, blood clearance of bacteria and viruses, inflammatory immune complexes, the role of mediators in inflammation, tumor immunology, and immunoglobulins. Annette trained as a technician to be able to help out in the lab.

Benacerraf also enjoyed training young scientists in the ways of research. He felt that modern medicine is scientific, so physicians and clinicians need to be trained to think like research scientists, not only as healthcare providers. Research supported by public funds in the United States requires grant requests to be meticulous, as only the most imaginative, skilled scientists will get funding. In his view, impartial peer review systems used to award grants also helps make American biomedical sciences so strong.

In part due to changes in the faculty at NYU, in 1968 Benacerraf was eager to concentrate more on research and less on academic responsibilities, so he accepted the position of Director of Immunology at the lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) in Bethesda, MD. Continuing on work started at NYU, Benacerraf and his team used in-bred guinea pigs in immunogenetic research, which led to the identification of an immune response (Ir) gene located in a chromosome linked with the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This gene was found to be associated with auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, and with the body’s rejection of transplanted organs.

Moving from an academic setting to a governmental one did not end the difficulties Benacerraf encountered with personnel issues. Government regulations regarding hiring and firing practices allowed scientists whom Benacerraf regarded as incompetent to remain on staff. One of his complaints about this group of scientists was that they placed a greater value on prestigious titles than they did on the research work itself. To deal with this, he abolished many of those titles. As a result, many of those scientists resigned. Benacerraf reoriented the NIAID lab towards immunogenetics and cellular immunology, replacing the scientists who resigned with young scientists he considered to be highly competent. With this group he started a set of experiments that eventually revealed aspects of antigen processing and T lymphocytes.

And yet, after all, he missed academic life. In the spring of 1969, when he was 50 years old, Benacerraf was offered a position at Harvard Medical School (HMS), which had been in discussion before he became head of NIAID. HMS is affiliated with several Boston teaching hospitals and appoints the faculty who will teach at those hospitals, even though HMS does not control the clinical facilities themselves. As Chair of the Department of Pathology, Benacerraf continued his tendency to appoint young scientists who were starting their careers instead of those seasoned scientists who already had achieved some claim to fame. Among the staff he recruited for the pathology lab and the Department of Immunology was Dr. Emil Unanue, a Cuban physician chosen to head the Division of Immunology. Benacerraf also established a new program in immunology that was interdepartmental, run by faculty committee rather than a single department. The Department of Pathology shifted its focus from morphology to experimentation, especially in immunology, immunopathology, inflammation, cell biology, and vascular and renal pathophysiology.

Benacerraf continued his own research, focused on immunogenetic and cellular immunology. Along with colleagues, he worked to identify genes that encode immunological molecules linked with specificity and discrimination between self and foreign materials. They found that Ir genes are not related so much to the body’s ability to produce antibodies but to the ability of T lymphocytes to recognize foreign materials as antigens. In 1978, Benacerraf formulated the hypothesis that transplantation molecules expressed on the surface of cells are capable of specific interactions with processed peptide fragments of processed antigens. Processed antigens are those proteins that have been denatured, unfolded, and digested by enzymes of phagocytes to initiate the cellular immune response and are presented to the T lymphocytes of the immune system.

In part based on this work, in 1980 Benacerraf was awarded the Nobel Prize for the “discovery of the MHC genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune system’s distinction between self and nonself” or the “genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions.” The honor was amplified by being the first time a Venezuelan had received a Nobel Prize. It also was the first time a graduate of the Medical College of Virginia and the first time since 1954 that a member of HMS had won. When the Nobel Prize winners were announced, Benacerraf was contacted by multiple news outlets, friends, family, colleagues, and politicians. For the award ceremony, he traveled to Stockholm with his wife Annette, his daughter Beryl, and Beryl’s husband Peter, on the way stopping in Paris to visit his mother as she was unable to travel. As Benacerraf recounts in his 1998 memoir From Caracas to Stockholm: A Life in Medical Science, winning the Nobel Prize gave him a sense of independence from authority and feeling of having a mantel of protection. Ironically, he attributes his self-doubts to his winning the award and the other accolades in his life. Because he never was overly confident of his work, he always was very thorough in the lab and never took anything for granted or accepted a discovery as valid until it was verified multiple times. This gave him a reputation for having impossibly high standards and being too demanding, but it was such devotion to accuracy and reliable data that laid the foundation for his success.

His career reached its highest step earlier in 1980 when he was named president of the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute. A benefactor, Charles Dana, helped the institute build a new facility, so the organization was renamed Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). Benacerraf’s work at Colonial Trust was very beneficial to him in this position as managing finances was an important aspect of his work. He began a five-year campaign for funds, which raised $60 million (starting with Benacerraf’s own Nobel Prize award money). This funding put the DFCI on a sound financial footing. While president of DFCI, a major project was the development of a new way to treat leukemia, in which a patient’s bone marrow is removed and treated with antibodies, then transplanted back into the patient after the patient has undergone radiation or chemotherapy.

Benacerraf remained as both chair of HMS Department of Pathology and head of the DFCI until 1991. After that time, he continued to work in his own lab well into his 80s. His wife Annette passed away in June 2011 and Benacerraf himself died of pneumonia later that year at the age of 90. His daughter Beryl continued in his footsteps, as a radiologist and professor at HMS, and director at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston.

Sources:

Benacerraf, Baruj (1998). From Caracas to Stockholm: A Life in Medical Science. New York: Prometheus Books.

“Baruj Benacerraf Biographical” at http://www.nobelprize.org

“Baruj Benacerraf” at en.wikipedia.org

Newton, David E. (2007). Latinos in Science, Math, and Professions. New York: Facts on File, Inc.

“Barug Benacerraf (1920-2011)” at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

“Baruj Benacerraf: American Immunologist” at http://www.britannica.com

“Baruj Benacerraf Biography” at http://www.faqs.org

A nuclear physicist, in 1968 Luis W. Alvarez received the Nobel Prize in Physics for “his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonant states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chambers and data analysis.”

Luis W. Alvarez wrote his autobiography in 1987, calling it Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist. Being adventurous seems to have run in his family. His paternal grandfather, Luis F. Alvarez, was born in Asturias, Spain, and immigrated to California via Cuba in the 1870s. By the 1880s, Luis F. had made enough money in real estate in the Los Angeles area to enroll in medical school in San Francisco. Married and with a son (Walter), Luis F. graduated from medical school and became a physician for the Kingdom of Hawaii in Oahu, where Walter (Luis W.’s father) grew up. Luis W.’s maternal grandparents moved from Ireland to China, setting up a missionary school where Harriet Smyth (Luis W.’s mother) grew up. She completed high school in Berkeley, California, and graduated from the University of California in 1906. Walter enrolled in medical school in San Francisco after high school and interned at San Francisco General Hospital in 1906, at the time of the earthquake. Walter and Harriet met at the University of California in Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and were married in 1907, moving to a small mining town in Mexico, 25 miles south of the Arizona border, where Walter served as a physician. During their three years there, their first child Gladys was born. They moved back to San Francisco before their second child, Luis W., was born in 1911.

Luis W. Alvarez became fascinated with the physical sciences and engineering at a young age. When he was four years old, he was intrigued by the Machinery Hall exhibits at the 1915 San Francisco Pan-American Exhibition. Later, while his father worked in the physiology lab of the Hooper Foundation, Alvarez became interested in the electrical equipment in the room next door. By the time he was 10 years old, he was able to measure resistances and construct circuits. This ability helped him build his own radio at age 11 by following the description in a Literary Digest article. When he finished elementary school in 1924, his interest in mechanical things led him to the local polytechnic high school rather than a college preparatory school. His lessons in mechanical drawings helped him throughout his career in physics. In early 1926, Alvarez moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where his father had accepted a research position at the Mayo Clinic. Although the high school in Rochester had a more academic focus than the vocational school in San Francisco, Alvarez was ready to absorb more than the science classes had to offer. His father therefore took him to professional lectures (for example on electromagnetism) and hired a machinist at the Mayo Clinic to give Alvarez private lessons during the weekends. Alvarez ended up working in the clinic’s instrument shop during the summers of his junior and senior years in high school.

Alvarez graduated from Rochester high school in 1928. While for years he had assumed he would follow many of his family to the UC Berkeley, Alvarez instead followed his teachers’ advice to apply to the University of Chicago because of its strong science program. He first intended to major in organic chemistry but changed to physics in his junior year after taking an advanced class on light. In this class, Alvarez learned how to conduct experiments with optical spectrometry using a device to measure positions of spectral lines that characterize the light signature of chemical elements. While on vacation at his parent’s home in Rochester, he noticed that the light reflected off of a vinyl record was diffracted in such a way that he could use the record, a light bulb, and a yardstick to measure the wavelength of light in the living room. This experiment became the basis of his first scientific paper, which was published in the January 1932 issue of School Science and Mathematics.

In his final months of his undergraduate career in Chicago, Alvarez worked on a project to build a Geiger counter. Using the data in the original 1928 article (by Geiger and Muller) and his experience in Rochester in mechanical engineering, he constructed his Geiger counter out of metal and glass. Although crude, it worked. Alvarez continued on at the University of Chicago to get an advanced degree (he finished his graduate work at the University of Chicago when he earned his PhD in 1936). His graduate adviser was Arthur Compton, who had earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for demonstrating the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. Compton suggested that Alvarez adapt his Geiger counter to study cosmic rays, which were not well understood at the time. Manuel Vallarta, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had invited physicists to come to his native Mexico City to test the theory that cosmic rays are charged particles rather than gamma rays. Mexico City was a good location for this experiment due to its high altitude and proximity to the equator. Alvarez took his Geiger counter telescope to measure the deflection of cosmic rays due to the East-West effect. His results indicated that cosmic rays are positively charged. Alvarez published these results with his adviser in a letter to Physical Review.

In 1933, Alvarez set up his Geiger counter telescope as part of the General Motors exhibit at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. At the Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) meetings being held there, Alvarez heard Ernest Lawrence, a professor at UC Berkeley, speak about the cyclotron, a device that accelerated nuclear particles. Alvarez’s sister Gladys worked for Lawrence and arranged for the two to meet, thus beginning a long friendship and scientific partnership. At this time, Alvarez also started taking flying lessons and became interested in aviation, which became a life-long passion.

Alvarez met Geraldine Smithwick through mutual friends at the University of Chicago. They were married in April 1936, after Alvarez passed the oral exams for his PhD. Their original plans to go to Europe were dropped due to the Spanish Civil War. Instead, they moved to California, where Lawrence offered Alvarez a position at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. Starting in May, Alvarez’s work focused on the cyclotron as well as the linear accelerator. These devices, key tools in studying high-energy particle physics, often were built and repaired by the physicists themselves, so they worked as mechanics as well as nuclear physicists. Alvarez’s background in chemistry also was useful when identifying the chemical element and atomic weight of isotopes discovered in experiments using the cyclotron. Doing this work made Alvarez realize, however, that he did not have a firm background in nuclear physics, radio-frequency engineering, or electrical engineering. These he learned on-the-job as an experimental physicist at the Radiation Lab and would be of great importance in the future.

Experimental physicists like Alvarez often work in coordination with theoretical physicists, such as Robert Oppenheimer, who taught graduate students at UC Berkeley. Hans Bethe, a theoretical physicist who taught at Cornell University, built upon Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay by suggesting that a nucleus could decay by capturing an electron orbiting it. Such an electron would be captured from the level, or shell, that is closest to the nucleus, which is referred to as the K shell. Alvarez devised an experiment to test this theory using a Geiger counter filled with argon gas to catch the type of x-ray that would be emitted by a K-capture. His experiment demonstrated that K-shell electron capture does happen, and he published his results in 1938.

Sometimes an experiment does not support a theory but contradicts it. In 1932, a physicist at Columbia University discovered deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. It was found that when an atom of deuterium is fused with another atom of deuterium, the result is either a helium nucleus with a mass of 3 or a hydrogen nucleus with a mass of 3 (known as tritium). In theory, the helium 3 atom was thought to be unstable or radioactive, while the tritium was thought to be stable. Using a cyclotron, Alvarez sought to determine the radioactive half-life of helium 3. HIs experiment, however, showed that helium 3 is stable. Later experiments showed that it is tritium that is radioactive, contrary to theory.

Towards the end of 1940, there were several major changes that happened in Alvarez’s life. In October he became a father, when his son Walter was born. About a month later, Alvarez moved from Berkeley to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work at MIT as part of the U.S. war effort. He became part of a team focused on developing radar devices based on the transmission of electromagnetic pulses directed at and reflected off of an object (like aircraft) to produce pulses at a receiver. The time lag between directing a pulse at an object and having a corresponding pulse reflected back to the receiver can be used to determine the distance between the object and the receiver. The MIT team used a cavity magnetron, invented in England, as the source of the microwaves that were the basis for the research. Alvarez was appointed as coordinator for the project to produce the first pulsed microwave radar set.

In the midst of trying to get the project started, in April 1941 Alvarez had to return to Rochester to undergo gallbladder surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Due to complications, it took him several month to recover. Back at MIT, Alvarez was inspired by work done on a radar device developed to track and shoot down enemy aircraft to develop a device that would guide friendly aircraft to land in bad weather. Drawing on what he had been learning about flying and aviation since the 1930s, Alvarez led his team to create the Ground Controlled Approach (GCA), a new system that was the first to use a microwave phased-array antenna. Although the first trials of the GCA did not work as expected, with each trial what was seen as a mistake was corrected until finally the equipment worked as intended. After seeing the successful demonstration of the GCA, the Army and Navy ordered hundreds of units for the war effort. Later, GCA also was used for civilian and commercial aircraft. During the summer of 1943, Alvarez worked in London to collaborate with the British on further developments of the GCA.

Upon returning to the U.S. at the end of the summer 1943, Alvarez shifted the direction of his work yet again. While working on radar, he had also followed work being done in the field of radioactive isotopes of uranium and plutonium that could be used in nuclear bombs. This now became the focus of Alvarez’s work. He joined Robert Oppenheimer’s research lab to work on what was called the Manhattan Project. At first Alvarez worked with Fermi in the Argonne Lab in Chicago, testing materials that would be used in the reactors in Oak Ridge and Hanford, Washington state. General Leslie Graves, an Army engineer, was in charge of the Manhattan Project. He assigned Alvarez the task of devising a method to determine if Germany was operating nuclear reactors. The resulting method to monitor fission processes was effective after the war, but during the war it was used to determine that Germany was not developing a nuclear bomb (because scientists working in Germany never were able to initiate the chain reaction needed for a nuclear bomb).

Alvarez’s next assignment involved moving to the site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project was focused on developing nuclear bombs. Despite being an important part of that team, when Alvarez prepared to move his family to the housing set aside for scientists at Los Alamos, some of those living there already resisted the idea that someone with a Spanish surname would live among them. By the time Alvarez brought his wife and son from Chicago one month later, the social situation had been smoothed out. That October, on his son Walter’s 4th birthday, Alvarez and his wife Gerry had a daughter, Jean.

At the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, scientists working on the Manhattan Project were developing two methods to detonate nuclear devices: the gun method, to be used with the Little Boy (uranium) bomb, and the implosion method, to be used with the Fat Man (plutonium) bomb. Alvarez was assigned to the Fat Man team, under the supervision of George Kistrakowsky. Once the implosion detonation device for the Fat Man bomb was successfully finished, Oppenheimer asked Alvarez to devise a method to measure the energy released from the two bombs that were scheduled to be dropped on two cities in Japan. Alvarez developed a way to measure the strength of the blast wave and calculate the bomb’s energy using microphones and an oscilloscope.

After being commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Alvarez tested the monitoring device in a B-29 airplane over the Trinity test site when the first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. He also joined the mission at the U.S. base at Tinian and monitored the explosion at Hiroshima on August 9. He did not fly on the flight that monitored the Nagasaki mission. Years later in his autobiography, Alvarez discussed the conflicting positions about whether dropping the bombs on Japan was morally defensible. Although most scientists he knew were reluctant to kill civilians at such a massive scale, Alvarez felt that it was preferable to a prolonged war that would have involved a military invasion of Japan. This conviction that powerful bombs could deter prolonged wars might have led Alvarez to join Lawrence in his support of having the U.S. develop a hydrogen bomb that would be more powerful than the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb for the first time in August 1949, Alvarez and Lawrence got support from influential people in Congress to start up a new projects for a Materials Testing Accelerator (MTA). A site was set up for the MTA at an old army base in Livermore, California, which became the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

After the war, as a civilian and professor, Alvarez was back at UC Berkeley with his family living close to campus. Alvarez and his colleague Ed McMillan renewed their research into particle physics, using microwave radar sets left over from the war effort. While McMillan focused on studying electrons, Alvarez set out to build a linear accelerator using radio frequencies to alternately push and pull protons through an electric field.

In the early 1950s, the area of high-energy particle physics was expanding as a field in which large accelerators create unstable particles by “materializing energy.” Many of Alvarez’s graduate students did work on the scattering of gamma rays by protons to observe whether pions materialize in nuclei. They also looked at “strange” particles like K mesons. Because these “strange” particles had much shorter lifetimes than other known particles, established methods using cloud chambers or nuclear film emulsions would not adequately track or capture their basic reactions for physicists to study. At a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society, Alvarez talked with Don Glaser, who invented the bubble chamber, filled with ether in which particles left their tracks. Alvarez and his team at UC Berkeley replaced the ether with liquid hydrogen to study the single proton of a hydrogen atom. Over the next few years, they found that they could use their hydrogen (H) bubble chamber to study a variety of particles, atoms, and molecules, many with very short half-lives, in particular, three “strange resonances.” The H bubble chamber had glass windows through which researchers could take pictures of the tracks left by particles through the hydrogen gas that was alternately decompressed (reduced pressure led to a gas state) and compressed (high pressured led to a liquid state). The cycle of compression and decompression was synchronized with the action of the accelerator beam to allow a photo to be taken of the particle interactions. Alvarez and his team developed a computer system to measure and analyze the interactions and, in so doing, discovered families of new particles and resonance states. In recognition of this work, in October 1968 Alvarez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, “for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonant states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chambers and data analysis.”

In April 1956, Alvarez was among a group of U.S. physicists who were invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to attend a conference on high-energy physics in Moscow. The diary that he kept during that trip was published in the journal Physics Today. This was followed by an international conference in particle physics held in Geneva, Switzerland. When he returned home, it was clear that his 21-year marriage with Geraldine was not working. The couple divorced when their son Walter was a senior in high school. In June 1957, at the annual dinner of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Alvarez met Janet Landis, daughter of the ASME President Jim Landis. Although she was 20 years younger than Alvarez, the two had similar interests and fell in love. They were married in December 1958. They had two children, Don (born in 1965) and Helen (born in 1967).

In August 1958, Ernest Lawrence died and a new director was named to head the Berkeley Radiation Lab. Eventually, Alvarez resigned as associate director and formed a new group that received independent funding from the National Air and Space Administration (NASA). In the following decades, Alvarez pursued a variety of projects covering a wide range of topics. During the Kennedy administration, he was appointed as a senior adviser to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Later appointed to the PSAC Limited War Panel, Alvarez was chair of the PSAC military aircraft panel, and so was able to participate in test flights of several military aircraft. He also served on several NASA committees and obtained NASA funding for a bubble chamber program to study cosmic rays. In 1964, Alvarez developed a method to use cosmic ray muons to probe the Chephren pyramid in Egypt to see if there were any hidden chambers. In 1967, accompanied by his wife Janet and his son Walter, Alvarez showed that the technique could work but the Chephren pyramid had no hidden chambers. During a trip to Africa in 1963, Alvarez was frustrated by the need to prop up a zoom telephoto lens against something when trying to photograph animals, so he designed an optical lens attachment that led to stabilized optics.

One of Alvarez’s latest projects might be one of his best known. In 1980, Alvarez’s son Walter, a geologist, was studying residual magnetism of rocks in the Apennines of Italy. Walter showed his father Luis a rock that had white limestone on one side, red limestone on the other, and a layer of clay in between. The clay layer, found around the world, was laid down during what is known as the K/T boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, a time when the dinosaurs became extinct. Alvarez thought it might be possible to determine how long it took for the clay layer to form by measuring traces of meteorite debris represented by iridium, which normally is deposited on earth at a known, regular rate. Neutron activation analysis conducted by a couple of Alvarez’s colleagues showed that 300 times as much iridium was concentrated in the clay layer than in the limestone layers, indicating that something out of the ordinary had happened. A lack of plutonium in the clay layer indicated that it was not the result of a supernova explosion. The next hypothesis they came up with was that an asteroid, possibly 10-kilometers wide, struck earth. As this coincided with the massive extinctions at the end of the dinosaur era, they looked at many possible explanations of how those extinctions occurred. Drawing a comparison with the dust produced when the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, Alvarez suggested that asteroid dust could have stayed in the stratosphere in sufficient amounts to block sunlight for several years, reducing photosynthesis and the food supply for those large animals that disappeared from the fossil record. Computer modelling shows that temperatures could have fallen well below freezing for 6-9 months. Walter presented results of this research in paleontology meetings and published a paper in Science. In January 1980 he gave a talk on the impact hypothesis at the AAAS annual meeting. Many of the predictions made based on this theory were supported by later research. It was not until after Alvarez died that other scientists in 1990 found what they think is the crater caused by that asteroid impact off of the coast of Mexico. The impact theory of extinction had an effect on geopolitics and arms control as it was adapted into the “nuclear winter” theory that modern nuclear weapons could set off so much fire and smoke that the sun would be blocked again, recreating the type of situation that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

By the time Alvarez wrote his autobiography in 1987, he had accumulated a long list of honors in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Collier Trophy in aviation, National Medal of Science, National Inventors Hall of Fame (with over 20 patents to his name), election to the National Academy of Sciences, and six honorary doctorates of science. Throughout his career, he was able to combine his passions for optics, aviation, cosmic rays, and particle physics. Like his friend and mentor Lawrence, Alvarez died of complications after surgery, for esophageal cancer, on September 1, 1988.

Sources:

Alvarez, Luis W. (1987) Alvarez: Adventures of a physicist. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

“Alvarez, Luis Walter (1911-1988) physicist, inventor” in Newton, David E, Latinos in Science, Math and Professions. New York: Facts on File (2007) Infobase Publishing

“Luis Walter Alvarez.” En.Wikipedia.org

“Luis Alvarez: Biographical”. http://www.nobelprize.org. Nobel Lectures, Physics 1963-1970. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Co., 1972.

“Luis Alvarez: American Physicist”. http://www.britannica.com

“Luis Alvarez”. http://www.famousscientists.org

“Luis Alvarez”. Science Matters blog at umraish.wordpress.com

“10 Hispanic Scientists You Should Know.” at science.howstuffworks.com

Seidel, Robert W. “Alvarez, Luis Walter”. http://www.encyclopedia.com

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Alvarez, Luis Walter: 1911-1988: Nuclear Physicist, Inventor, Educator” http://www.encyclopedia.com

“Alvarez, Luis (1911-1988)”. World of Earth Science.

A biochemist, Severo Ochoa received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for his “discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.”

Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was born on 24 September 1905, in Luarca, Spain, the youngest of seven children. His father, Severo Manuel Ochoa, was a lawyer and businessman who died when Ochoa was 7 years old. His mother, Carmen de Albornoz, moved the family from Luarca, in Asturias, to Málaga, on the southern coast. Ochoa attended a private Jesuit school where a chemistry teacher inspired him to study the natural sciences. Inspired by the career of Ramón y Cajal, Ochoa chose to study biology. In 1923, he was admitted to the Medical School of the Universidad de Madrid (University of Madrid). As Ramón y Cajal already had retired, Ochoa studied under Juan Negrin, who encouraged him and a fellow student, José Valdecasas, to conduct laboratory experiments to isolate creatinine from urine. The two developed a method to measure creatinine levels in muscle. During the summer of 1927, Ochoa worked with Dr. Noel Paton in Glasgow, Scotland, to learn more about creatinine metabolism and to improve his skills in English. After he returned to Madrid, he and Valdecasas submitted a paper on their work to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, among the first of hundreds of papers Ochoa was to write over the course of his career.

In 1929, Ochoa completed his undergraduate degree in medicine and went to study with Otto Meyerhof in Berlin-Dahlem. Meyerhof had received the Nobel Prize in 1922 for work on muscle metabolism and glycolysis (the splitting of sugars), processes by which cells obtain energy. His laboratory in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Medizinische Forshung (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research) was widely recognized in the field of biochemistry. While in Berlin, Ochoa became interested in the chemical processes involved in muscle contraction, the metabolic role of phosphocreatinine, and the enzymatic mechanisms of metabolic reactions, specifically looking into the sources of energy in muscular contraction in frogs. Still focusing on muscle contraction, Ochoa completed his doctoral thesis in Madrid, writing about the role of adrenal glands on the chemistry of muscular contraction. He was awarded his MD degree in 1931. In the same year, he married Carmen Cobián.

For his post-doctoral work, Ochoa went to London to study enzymes at the National Institute for Medical Research for 2 years. In particular, he conducted research involving the enzyme glyoxalase, which is involved in the oxidation of glucose to lactic acid.

When Ochoa returned to Madrid, a bright career stretched before him at the Instituto de Investigaciones Medicales (Institute for Medical Research) at the medical school of the Universidad de Madrid (University of Madrid). He started off as a lecturer in physiology and biochemistry, then as the director of the physiology section. His stable path at the Instituto was cut off, however, when the Spanish Civil War began.

In 1936, Ochoa embarked on a series of temporary positions during a period he referred to as “the wander years.” He returned to Meyerhof’s laboratory, which had moved to Heidelberg, as a research assistant working on enzymatic steps involved in glycolysis and fermentation. Before too long, however, the unrest preceding the Second World War prompted both Meyerhof and Ochoa to leave Heidelberg. Ochoa found a fellowship at the Marine Biological laboratory in Plymouth, England, in July 1937. As staff at the lab were limited, Ochoa’s wife Carmen assisted him in his work to isolate what came to be known as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). As the fellowship in Plymouth was only for 6 months, Ochoa found another fellowship in December 1937, this time in Oxford, England, to work with Rudolf Albert Peters on the role of thiamine (Vitamin B1) in enzyme action, and of thiamine and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in cellular respiration.

The disruption of WWII reached Ochoa in England, as well. In 1939, the laboratory in Oxford had to redirect its focus to the war effort. In addition, because Ochoa was not a British citizen, he had to leave. Ochoa contacted Drs. Carl and Gerty Cori and joined them in 1941 as an instructor and research associate in pharmacology at the University of Washington in St. Louis, MO, in the United States. Although his time in St. Louis was short lived, he found stability in New York. In 1942, he became a research associate in medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, working his way up to assistant professor of biochemistry (1945), professor of pharmacology (1946), and professor of biochemistry as well as chair of that department (1954), a position he held for 20 years.

While at NYU and with the assistance of his graduate and post-doctoral students, Ochoa continued to work on metabolism and cellular respiration, especially on the steps involving oxidative phosphorylation (also known as electron transport), CO2 fixation in green plants, and the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle (also known as citric acid cycle or Krebs cycle). In 1946, one of his first post-doctoral students, Arthur Kornberg, assisted Ochoa in the discovery of malic enzyme. Another post-doctoral student, Marianne Grunberg-Manago, joined Ochoa’s team in 1953 and worked on bacterial cells in which they found an enzyme, polynucleotide phosphorylase, which enabled them to synthesize ribonucleic acid (RNA) from ribonucleoside diphosphates in vitro.

Ochoa published the results of this work in 1955, in the J of Am Chem Society. In 1959, Ochoa received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work contributing to the “discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis or ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.” His co-recipient was his former student, Arthur Kornberg, for his discovery of DNA polymerase in bacteria.

The polynucleotide phosphorylase Ochoa discovered plays a role in the mechanism that converts DNA nucleotides of the genetic code into the functional sequence of amino acids to form a protein. In 1959, Marshall Nirenberg at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) developed a procedure using synthesized mRNA molecules containing amino acids with radioactive labels to determine how DNA information is expressed as protein function. Beginning in 1961, staff at Ochoa’s laboratory at NYU also were working on this topic. Using polynucleotide phosphorylase to generate polyribonucleotides of a known base composition, they experimented to see if amino acids would be incorporated into proteins depending on the specific base composition of polyribonucleotides. The two laboratories entered into friendly competition and, between 1961 and 1963, published a series of papers that fully defined all aspects of the genetic code. Nirenberg and others (but not Ochoa) received the Nobel Prize in 1968 for interpreting the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. Ochoa continued to work on the mechanisms of protein synthesis.

In 1974, Ochoa retired from NYU and accepted a position at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey. After 1975, he concurrently held a position at the newly established Instituto de Biología Molecular in Madrid. In Spain, he led a research group including former students César de Haro and José Manuel Sierra, still focused on the mechanisms of protein synthesis.

In 1985, Ochoa retired from the position in New Jersey and returned to live in Madrid. Unfortunately, his wife Carmen died of pneumonia in 1986. After her death, Ochoa refrained from writing for publication. He did, however, continue to participate in conferences and to work with students at the Centro de Biología Molecular in Madrid. In June 1993, the journalist Mariano Gómez Sanchez published a biography of Ochoa entitled “La Emoción de Descubrir” (The Thrill of Discovery). Later that year, Ochoa also died of pneumonia, at the age of 88.

Sources:

en.wikipedia.org “Severo Ochoa”

http://www.britannica.com “Severo Ochoa: Spanish-American Biochemist”

http://www.nobelprize.org “Severo Ochoa: Biographical”

http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/medicine/medicine-briographies/severo-ochoa

Ruiza, M., Fernández, T., Tamaro, E. (2004). http://www.biografiasyvidas.com “Severo Ochoa”

http://www.thefamouspeople.com “Severo Ochoa Biography”

Newton, D. E. (2007). “Ochoa, Severo” in Latinos in Science, Math, and the Professions. New York, NY: Facts on File.