Early life and education
Daniel Bovet worked in biochemistry at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Daniel Bovet was born at Neuchâtel in 1907. His recorded nationality is Switzerland. He was educated at University of Geneva.
Around the turn of the twentieth century the sciences fractured into specialisms and simultaneously became national assets, funded and directed on a scale no earlier generation had seen.
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He held appointments at Pasteur Institute and Sapienza University of Rome, where the work centred on histamine antagonist and sulfonamide drug.
The work that carried his reputation furthest concerned discovery in 1937 of antihistamines, which block the neurotransmitter histamine and are used in allergy medication. Biochemistry supplied the mechanism that biology had been describing from the outside.
Working from Switzerland shaped what was possible. Access to instruments, collections, journals and colleagues has always been geographic, and the history of science is partly a history of that inequality.
Scientific influence and honors
The honours are a fair index of how the work was received - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1957) and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1962).
Legacy and death
Read now, the significance is less in any single result than in the fact that the results held. Biochemistry is cumulative, and a contribution counts if the next generation could stand on it.
Daniel Bovet died in 1992 at the age of 85. The work outlived the debates that surrounded it, which is the only durable form of scientific success.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1957
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 1962
- Held posts at Pasteur Institute and Sapienza University of Rome
- Educated at University of Geneva
- Fields of research: histamine antagonist and sulfonamide drug
