Luis Federico Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir

It was during the 1920s that Leloir invented salsa golf (golf sauce). After being served prawns with the usual sauce during lunch with a group of friends at the Ocean Club in Mar del Plata, Leloir came up with a peculiar combination of ketchup and mayonnaise to spice up his meal. With the financial difficulties that later plagued Leloir's laboratories and research, he would joke, "If I had patented that sauce, we'd have a lot more money for research right now."^[7]

Career

Buenos Aires

After returning again to Argentina, Leloir obtained his Argentine citizenship and joined the Department of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires in hopes of receiving his doctorate. However, he got off to a rocky start, requiring four attempts to pass his anatomy exam.^[8] He finally received his diploma in 1932 and began his residency in the Hospital de Clínicas and his medical internship in Ramos Mejía hospital. After some initial conflicts with colleagues and complications in his method of treating patients, Leloir decided to dedicate himself to research in the laboratory, claiming that "we could do little for our patients... antibiotics, psychoactive drugs, and all the new therapeutic agents were unknown [at the time]."^[4]

In 1933, he met

In 1945, Leloir ended his exile and returned to Argentina to work under Houssay at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de la Fundación Campomar, which Leloir would direct from its creation in 1947 by businessman and patron Jaime Campomar. Initially, the institute was composed of five rooms, a bathroom, central hall, patio, kitchen, and changing room.^[12] During the final years of the 1940s, although lacking financial resources and operating with very low-cost teams, Leloir's successful experiments would reveal the chemical origins of sugar synthesis in yeast as well as the oxidation of fatty acids in the liver; together with J. M. Muñoz, he produced an active cell-free system, a first in scientific research. It had initially been assumed that in order to study a cell, scientists could not separate it from its host organism, as oxidation could only occur in intact cells.^[13] Along the way, Muñoz and Leloir, unable to procure the costly refrigerated centrifuge needed to separate cell contents, improvised by spinning a tire stuffed with salt and ice.^[12]

By 1947 he had formed a team that included

At the beginning of 1948, Leloir and his team identified the sugar nucleotides that were fundamental to the metabolism of carbohydrates,

The following year, he reached an agreement with Rolando García, dean of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, which named Leloir, Carlos Eugenio Cardini and Enrico Cabib as titular professors in the university's newly founded Biochemical Institute. The institute would help develop scientific programs in budding Argentine universities as well as attract researchers and scholars from the United States, Japan, England, France, Spain, and other Latin American countries.

Following Jaime Campomar's death in 1957, Leloir and his team applied to the National Institutes of Health in the United States desperate for funding, and surprisingly was accepted. In 1958, the institute found a new home in a former all-girls school, a donation from the Argentine government. As Leloir and his research gained greater prominence, further research came from the Argentine Research Council, and the institute would later become associated with the University of Buenos Aires.^[20]

Later years

In his later years Leloir continued to study glycogen^[21][22] and other aspects of carbohydrate metabolism.^[23]

As his work in the laboratory was coming to an end, Leloir continued his teaching position in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, taking a hiatus only to complete his studies at Cambridge and at the Enzyme Research Laboratory in the United States.

In 1983, Leloir became one of the founding members of the Third World Academy of Sciences, later renamed the

Nobel Prize

On December 2, 1970, Leloir received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry from the King of Sweden for his discovery of the metabolic pathways in lactose, becoming only the third Argentine to receive the prestigious honor in any field at the time. In his acceptance speech at Stockholm, he borrowed from Winston Churchill's famous 1940 speech to the House of Commons and remarked, "never have I received so much for so little".^[24] Leloir and his team reportedly celebrated by drinking champagne from test tubes, a rare departure from the humility and frugality that characterized the atmosphere of Fundación Instituto Campomar under Leloir's direction. The $80,000 prize money was spent directly on research,^[8] and when asked about the significance of his achievement, Leloir responded:^[25]

"This is only one step in a much larger project. I discovered (no, not me: my team) the function of sugar nucleotides in cell metabolism. I want others to understand this, but it is not easy to explain: this is not a very noteworthy deed, and we hardly know even a little."

Legacy

Leloir published a short autobiography, entitled "Long Ago and Far Away" in the 1983 Annual Review of Biochemistry. The title, Leloir claims, is derived from one of William Henry Hudson's novels that depicted the country wildlife and scenery of Leloir's childhood.^[4]

He died in Buenos Aires on December 2, 1987, of a heart attack soon after returning to his home from the laboratory, and is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery. Mario Bunge, a friend and colleague of Leloir, claims that his lasting legacy was proving that "scientific research on an international level, although precarious, was possible in an underdeveloped country in the middle of political strife" and credits Leloir's vigilance and will for his ultimate success.^[26] With his research in dire financial straits, Leloir often resorted to homemade gadgets and contraptions to continue his work in the laboratory. In one instance, Leloir reportedly used waterproof cardboard to create makeshift gutters in order to protect his laboratory's library from the rain.^[20]

Leloir was known for his humility, focus and consistency, described by many as a "true monk in science".^[8] Every morning his wife Amelia would drive him in their Fiat 600 and drop him off at 1719 Julián Alvarez Street, location of Fundación Instituto Campomar, with Leloir wearing the same worn out, gray overalls. He worked sitting on the same straw seat for decades and encouraged colleagues to eat lunch in the laboratory to save time, bringing enough meat stew to share with everyone.^[8] Indeed, despite Leloir's frugality and extreme dedication to his research, he was a sociable man, claiming not to like working alone.^[12]

The Fundación Instituto Campomar has since been renamed Fundación Instituto Leloir, and has grown to become a 21,000 sq ft (2,000 m²) building with 20 senior researchers, 42 technicians and administrative personnel, 8 post doctorate fellows, and 20 Ph.D. candidates. The institute conducts research in a variety of fields, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis.^[27]

Awards and distinctions

Bibliography

• Lorenzano, Julio César. Por los caminos de Leloir. Editorial Biblos; 1a edition, July 1994. ISBN 9-5078-6063-0
• Zuberbuhler de Leloir, Amelia. Retrato personal de Leloir. Vol. 8, No. 25, pp. 45–46, 1983.
• Nachón, Carlos Alberto. Luis Federico Leloir: ensayo de una biografía. Bank Foundation of Boston, 1994.

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References