Luis Leloir

Luis Frederico Leloir, an Argentine biochemist, graduated with an M.D. in 1932. He then worked on his thesis under Bernardo Houssay at the University of Buenos Aires for about two years on the role of the adrenals on carbohydrate metabolism. Houssay recommended for him to go abroad to improve his understanding so he went to the Biochemical Laboratory of Cambridge University, England where he remained for a year before returning to the Institute of Physiology at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1943 Argentina experienced some political events that affected the university causing Houssay and many others to be dismissed. Leloir resigned his position and traveled to the United States where he was a research associate in the department of pharmacology at Washington University and in the Enzyme Research Laboratory of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. After only three years he returned to Buenos Aires and took charge of the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquimicas "Fundaciуn Compomar"(McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science 318-320).

At his research institute, Leloir began his work on the discovery of the sugar nucleotides and their function in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates. Leloir was able to show that "the glucose is added by a stepwise transfer process in which the reactive intermediate derivative, uridine diphosphateglucose (UDPG), and further, that galactose is converted to glucose by a similar mechanism"(Larousse Dictionary of Scientists 314). For this work, Leloir was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1970.

Before the discoveries of Leloir, our understanding about the countless corresponding synthetic reactions which occur in organisms was incomplete. It was usually assumed that the syntheses were a direct reversal of the well-known breakdown reactions but the work of Leloir has since revolutionized our views about these problems. Leloir had found the answer that would enable us to unravel an immense number of metabolic reactions. Other scientists shortly realized that a vast field was now available to investigation so research began. Worldwide, his discoveries have initiated research and caused it to grow. Leloir soon found that besides the sugar nucleotide first isolated, several others of the same occur in nature and have been found by other researchers. Today more than one hundred sugar nucleotides that are important in various reactions are well-known and characterized.