Leloir, Luis F. (1906–1987)

Luis F. Leloir (b. 6 September 1906; d. 2 December 1987), Argentine scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1970. Born in Paris to a wealthy Argentine landowning family, Leloir was brought to Argentina when he was two years old. He received an M.D. from the University of Buenos Aires in 1932, after which he briefly practiced medicine. In 1934 he joined the research team at the Institute of Physiology under the leadership of Dr. Bernardo A. Houssay, the pioneering Argentine scientist and 1947 Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine. From 1936 to 1937, Leloir pursued his interest in the young field of biochemistry at Cambridge University, England, with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, another Nobel Prize winner (1929). He returned to Buenos Aires and rejoined the Institute of Physiology (1937–1943), where he studied the oxidation of ethanol and fatty acids, and later worked on the mechanism of renal hypertension.

In 1944, disagreements with the Juan Perón government led Leloir (and many other scientists) to pursue research abroad. Initially, he worked on the formation of citric acid as a research associate at Washington University in Saint Louis, and later joined the Enzyme Research Laboratory at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. In 1947, he returned to Argentina and became the first director of the Biochemical Research Institute in Buenos Aires, a research group formed and led by Leloir and financed by businessman Jaime Campomar. On Campomar's death in 1957, the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided a grant that allowed the institute to continue its research.

Leloir was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for the work he and his staff did at the institute in the late 1940s and early 1950s that led to the discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates. His more than seventy scientific articles have been published in international scientific journals. Leloir's dedication and many scientific successes, despite an often astonishing lack of financial support for even basic equipment and laboratory space, attest to his genius and contradict the image of Latin American disinterest in science.

See alsoMedicine: The Modern Era; Science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Luis Leloir, Opera selecta (1973) and "Far Away and Long Ago," in The Excitement and Fascination of Science, edited by Joshua Lederberg, vol. 3, pt. 1 (1990), pp. 367-381.

Additional Bibliography

Nachón, Carlos A. Luis Federico Leloir, 1906–1987: Premio Nobel de Química 1970: (ensayo de una biografía). Buenos Aires: Fundación Banco de Boston, 1994.

                                       J. David Dressing