ROBERTO DE BELLIS (Uruguay)

ROBERTO DE BELLIS (1939-2007)

Uruguayan hematologist who performed the first autologous bone marrow transplant in South America in 1985.

He graduated in 1968 from the Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay.

De Bellis trained in Hematology in Paris with Professor Jean Bernard. Later he trained Iin Japan, United Kingdom, USA, and again in France.

He was the patron of modern Hematology in Uruguay.

Roberto De Bellis became Full Professor and First Chairman of Hematology at the Faculty of Medicine of Uruguay, in 1980. He published more than 200 medical articles.

In 1985 he founded a bone marrow transplant unit at the British Hospital in Montevideo, where he carried out the first autologous bone marrow transplant in South America.

An Uruguayan postage stamp was issued in his honor in 2008.

REFERENCE:

Muxi P, Wiernik PH 'A tribute to Professor Roberto De Bellis.' Medical Oncology, Volume 24, Number 2, June 2007 , pp. 265-265(1)

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ROCHA LIMA (Brazil)

HENRIQUE DA ROCHA LIMA (1879-1956)

Brazilian physician, pathologist and infectologist.

In 1902, Rocha Lima, Adolfo Lutz, Carlos Chagas and other researchers in the area of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases joined Oswaldo Cruz (1872-1941) in the establishment of the Instituto Serotherapico Federal, known as the Instituto Manguinhos, in Rio de Janeiro. In 1908 this institute was renamed Instituto Oswaldo Cruz.

Rocha Lima went to Germany in 1906. In Hamburg, he worked with Stanislaus von Prowazek (1875-1915) and together they described Rickettsia prowazeki.

In 1916, Rocha Lima grouped the microorganisms in the order Rickettsiales and named them “Rickettsia” in honor of the American bacteriologist and pathologist Howard Tayler Ricketts (1871-1910). He named the agent of typhus “Rickettsia prowazeki” after Ricketts and his old friend von Prowazek.

He later described the causative agent of Trench fever.

In Brazil, Rocha Lima participated in the foundation of the Paulista School of Medicine, and of the University of São Paulo.

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RENÉ FAVALORO (Argentina)

RENÉ GERÓNIMO FAVALORO (1923-2000)

Argentine cardiac surgeon who created the technique for coronary bypass surgery.

In 1967, René Favaloro became the first surgeon to perform bypass surgery on a patient suffering from coronary artery disease.

He published, in 1970, the book Surgical Treatment on Coronary Arteriosclerosis.

Dr. Favaloro obtained his MD degree in 1949 in the University of La Plata. He trained as a surgeon in La Plata, Buenos Aires and in the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

He was Director of the Institute of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery of the Favaloro Foundation in Buenos Aires.

Dr. Favaloro is universally recognized for his contribution to the development of coronary bypass surgery.

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CARLOS CHAGAS (Brazil)

CARLOS JUSTINIANO RIBEIRO CHAGAS (1879-1934)

Brazilian physician who identified Trypanosoma cruzi as the casuative agent of American trypanosomiasis (Chagas disease) in 1909, while working at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de janeiro.

Chagas’ legacy is unparalleled in the history of medicine - it is the only occasion in which an individual investigator has described the infection, its agent, its vector, its manifestations, its epidemiology, and some of the hosts of the pathogenic genus.

In 1912 Carlos Chagas received the Schaudinn Price, awarded every four years for the best work in the field of protozoology and tropical medicine in the world, by the "Institut für Schiffs und Tropenhygiene" in Hamburg (Germany). Up to then this honor had only been conferred to von Prowazek (1875–1915), eminent Austrian bacteriologist.

He was granted the Great Prize of the Pasteur Centenary Commemorative Exposition in Strasbourg (France) in 1922. In 1921 Chagas became the first Brazilian to be honored with the title of doctor honoris causa by Harvard University (USA), and later by the University of Paris (France).

He was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize - in 1913 and in 1921 and in two more occasions (according to some references), but never received the award. The reasons for this failure are probably related to the fierce political opposition that Chagas faced in Brazil.

Carlos Chagas headed the Oswaldo Cruz Institute after the death of its founder (1917) until his own death; and from 1920 until 1926 he also directed the Brazilian Department of Public Health.

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LUIS MORQUIO (Uruguay)

LUIS MORQUIO (1867–1935)

Uruguayan physician and paediatrician.
He is considered the father of paediatrics in Uruguay and the greatest personality of South American paediatrics.

Luis Morquio qualified in medicine from the University of Montevideo in 1892.
In the following year he began a medical training in Paris. He specialised in paediatrics at Jacques-Joseph Grancher's clinic for sick children.
Morquio also studied at the Pasteur Institute.

In 1894 he returned to Uruguay, where he opened practice as a paediatrician and became professor of paediatrics in Montevideo.

He is remembered for Morquio syndrome, a lysosomal disorder also known as "mucopolysaccharidosis type IV". The condition was first described, simultaneously and independently, in 1929, by Luis Morquio in Montevideo, and by James F. Brailsford in England.

Morquio was a founder of the Sociedad Uruguaya de Pediatría in 1915.
The French government conferred upon him the rank of officer of the Légion d'Honneur.

In 1930 he was appointed director of the Clínica Pediátrica y Puericultura (the Institute of Clinical Pediatrics) in Montevideo.

Morquio wrote many publications in the field of pathology and hygiene of paediatrics, and two paediatric textbooks.

A bust was erected in his honour at the Institute of Paediatrics, in Montevideo, after his death in 1935.


SEE POSTAGE STAMPS ON MORQUIO

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MANUEL E. PATARROYO (Colombia)

MANUEL ELKIN PATARROYO (born 1947)

Colombian physician who developed the world’s first synthetic vaccine for malaria.

He graduated from the National University of Colombia, received a scholarship to Yale University (USA), and later received his PhD from Rockefeller University in New York.

Dr. Patarroyo donated the patent for his vaccine to the World Health Organization in 1995.

He founded the Institute of Immunology in Bogotá in 1972.

Dr. Manuel E. Patarroyo holds more than 21 honor doctorates from many universities around the world, and has received many prestigious awards including the “Prince of Asturias Prize”.

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JOSÉ VEROCAY (Uruguay)

JOSÉ VEROCAY (1876-1928)

Uruguayan pathologist.

He attended the German Medicine School in Austria. In 1904, he was confered the title of Doctor Medicinae Universae.

In Prague (in present-day Czech Republic), Verocay dedicated himself to the study of pathologic anatomy.

In 1906, he was distinguished for his performance in the University of Hamburg (Germany).

He became the head of the Pathologic Anatomy Institute in Austria, when Dr. Hans Chiari – considered the most important pathologist in that country – was transferred to the University of Strasbourg (France).

In 1907, José Verocay developed his fundamental work on nervous pathologies, the discovery of the celular structure and genesis of the tumors characteristic of the Reckhighausen disease, which he named neurinomes, known ever since as "Verocay neurinomes" (or "Verocay nodules").

Verocay’s greatest desire was to come back to Uruguay to apply all the knowledge he had acquired in Europe.

He was honored in a postage stamp (image above) issued in Uruguay in December 18th, 1998, along with other two remarkable Uruguayan physicians, Roberto Caldeyro Barcia and José Duomarco.

REFERENCE:

Ortiz-Hidalgo C. José Verocay. Neurinomas y cuerpos de Verocay y otras contribuciones a la medicina [José Verocay. Neurinomas and Verocay bodies and other contributions to medicine] [Article in Spanish] Rev Neurol. 2004 Sep 1-15;39(5):487-91.

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CÉSAR LATTES (Brazil)

CESARE MANSUETO GIULIO LATTES, known as CÉSAR LATTES (1924-2005)

Brazilian physicist, co-discoverer of the pi meson or pion, one of the nuclear particles.

Lattes graduated in 1943 from the University of São Paulo (Brazil) with degrees in Mathematics and Physics.

He and a group of young Brazilian scientists worked under European teachers such as Giuseppe Occhialini and Gleb Wataghin .

César Lattes was one of the founders of the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas) in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1947 he began to study cosmic rays. In the same year, at the University of Bristol (England), under Cecil F. Powell’s supervision, he made the discovery of a new atomic particle, the pi meson (or pion), which disintegrates into a new kind of particle, the mu meson.

Cecil Powell alone was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for “his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method”. Nobel Committee policy until 1960 was to give the award only to the head of the research group.

In 1948, working with Eugene Gardner at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), Lattes was able to detect the artificial production of pion particles (heavy and light mesons) by bombarding carbon atoms with alpha particles.

In 1969 he and his staff discovered the mass of the so-called fire balls, a phenomenon induced by naturally occurring high-energy collisions.

Lattes worked in Brazil at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro , Brazilian Center for Physical Research, University of São Paulo, and State University of Campinas.

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BERNARDO HOUSSAY (Argentina)

BERNARDO ALBERTO HOUSSAY (1887-1971)

Argentine physician and physiologist.

He was awarded (with Carl and Gerty Cori) the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the influence of pituitary hormones in regulating the blood glucose in animals.

Houssay was Professor in Physiology in the National School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires.

In 1919, he created the Institute of Physiology of the Faculty of Medicine of Buenos Aires, which became a center of world excellence in the area of the scientific research.

He performed his teaching and research job until 1943 when he was fired for political reasons.

In 1944 he developed a hard work of investigation in the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine (Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental) that he funded with private support.

Houssay and his team managed to investigate the role of the pituitary gland in the metabolic processes of the carbohydrates and in diabetes mellitus.

Houssay’s many disciples has gained recognition around the world. One of them, the Argentine Luis Federico Leloir received the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1970.

Other disciples such as Eduarto Braun-Menéndez, and Miguel Rolando Covian became also influential by themselves.

Miguel Rolando Covian is considered one of the fathers of neurophysiology in Brazil.

Houssay wrote with Braun-Menéndez and Covian the most influential textbook of human physiology in Latin America (Fisiologia Humana, 1950).

In 1972, the OEA (Organization of American States) instituted the “Bernardo Houssay’s Award” to reward the most important investigators of the American continent.