Luis Federico Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir: The Monk of Argentine Science

He needed four attempts to pass his anatomy examination. Thirty-eight years later he collected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, having built the work that earned it inside a Buenos Aires institute so short of money that his team once improvised a centrifuge out of a car tyre packed with salt and ice. Leloir wore the same worn grey overalls to the laboratory for decades, sat on a straw seat, and spent the whole of his eighty-thousand-dollar prize on research.

Paris and El Tuyú

Leloir was born in Paris on 6 September 1906, to Federico Augusto Rufino and Hortencia Aguirre de Leloir, one of nine children. The family was Argentine — his grandparents had emigrated from the Basque Country — and he was raised on their estate, El Tuyú. He was schooled at the Escuela General San Martín and the Colegio Lacordaire, with a spell at Beaumont College in England, and briefly studied architecture at the École Polytechnique in Paris before abandoning it.

A Slow Start

Medicine came next, at the University of Buenos Aires, and it did not come easily; the anatomy examination defeated him three times before he passed. He took his medical degree in 1932 and practised long enough to learn how little medicine could then do. "We could do little for our patients," he recalled of those years. "Antibiotics, psychoactive drugs, and all the new therapeutic agents were unknown." The frustration pushed him out of the clinic and into the laboratory.

Houssay

In 1933 he began working with Bernardo Houssay on carbohydrate metabolism — the chemistry of how the body handles sugar. Houssay, who would win his own Nobel Prize, gave Leloir both a research problem and a model of how to run a laboratory in a country with no scientific infrastructure to speak of. From 1936 Leloir went abroad for advanced study at the University of Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the founder of British biochemistry, absorbing the enzymology that would define his career.

The war years took him to the United States: associate professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis from 1943 to 1944, then research assistant at Columbia University from 1944 to 1945. In 1943 he married Amelia Zuberbuhler; their daughter, also Amelia, was their only child.

The Instituto Campomar

In 1947 Leloir founded the Fundación Instituto Campomar in Buenos Aires and directed it until his death forty years later. It was a small, privately funded operation, permanently short of equipment and permanently at the mercy of Argentine political turbulence. Improvisation was policy rather than anecdote — hence the tyre filled with salt and ice standing in for a refrigerated centrifuge. What the institute had instead of money was a director who worked beside his staff and a problem worth years of attention.

Sugar Nucleotides

In 1948 Leloir and his team identified sugar nucleotides, and with them the mechanism biochemistry had been missing. Cells cannot simply attach one sugar to another; the sugar must first be activated, chemically loaded onto a nucleotide carrier that supplies the energy and the specificity for the transfer. Uridine diphosphate glucose was the first of these carriers to be found. The discovery explained, at a stroke, how organisms assemble complex carbohydrates — glycogen, starch, the sugar chains on cell surfaces — and how they convert them back to usable energy.

The Leloir Pathway

In 1949 the group elucidated the metabolism of galactose, the sugar released when lactose is broken down. The sequence of enzymatic steps by which galactose is converted into a form the body can burn is now universally called the Leloir pathway. It carried an immediate clinical dividend: a defect in one of those enzymes is the cause of galactosemia, the inherited disorder in which infants cannot process milk sugar and which, undetected, is lethal. A piece of pure biochemistry became a newborn screening test.

The Nobel

The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize came from Columbia in 1967, and in 1970 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Leloir alone for the discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in carbohydrate biosynthesis. He deflected the credit in the same breath as he accepted it: "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." At the Stockholm ceremony he borrowed a line from Churchill: "Never have I received so much for so little."

The Royal Society elected him a Foreign Member in 1972, France made him a member of the Legion of Honour in 1982, and in 1983 he was a founding member of the Third World Academy of Sciences — an institution whose purpose he had already demonstrated with his own career.

Later Years

Leloir kept directing the institute, which now bears his name, until he died in Buenos Aires on 2 December 1987, aged eighty-one. He is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery.

Why Leloir Matters

The science alone is foundational: no account of how living things build or burn carbohydrates is possible without sugar nucleotides, and the pathway named for him is in every biochemistry textbook. But his friend the philosopher Mario Bunge identified the second legacy precisely — Leloir proved that scientific research at an international level, however precarious, was possible in an underdeveloped country in the middle of political strife. He could have stayed at Cambridge or in St. Louis. He went home to Buenos Aires with a tyre full of ice and won the Nobel Prize from there.