When was severo ochoa born

Louis and New York. He held over 30 honorary doctorates, published well over scientific papers, and was awarded many prizes. It contributed greatly to the knowledge of the basic steps in the metabolism of carbohydrates and fatty acids, the utilization of carbon dioxide, and the biosynthesis of nucleic acids.

His work in on polynucleotide phosphorylase PNPase , an enzyme that catalyzes the polymerization of polyribonucleotides, led to the Nobel Prize. His contribution to deciphering the genetic code established him as a scientist at the cutting edge of molecular biology during the s. Severo Ochoa was born in Luarca, Spain in Ochoa returned to Spain in and began to teach physiology and biochemistry at the University of Madrid. The following year he went to London to extend his training in enzymology with H.

Dudley at the National Institute for Medical Research. In Ochoa was back in Madrid, teaching at the university and further investigating the chemistry of muscle. His work was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War in , however. In Ochoa came to the United States, joining the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine as instructor and research associate in Pharmacology and working in the laboratory of Carl and Gerty Cori on the problems of enzymology.

During his year and a half in St. Louis, Ochoa was imbued with the importance and techniques of isolating and characterizing enzymes. He subsequently became assistant professor of Biochemistry in , professor of Pharmacology in , professor of Biochemistry and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry in Before Meyerhof left, however, he ensured that his protege was not stranded, arranging for Ochoa to receive a six-month fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth, England.

Although this fellowship lasted only half a year, Ochoa enjoyed his time there, not the least because his wife Carmen started working with him in the laboratory. Their collaboration later led to the publication of a joint paper in Nature. At the end of six months, though, Ochoa had to move on, and friends at the lab found him a post as a research assistant at Oxford University.

Two years later, when England entered the war, Oxford's Biochemistry Department shifted all its efforts to war research in which Ochoa, an alien, could not take part. So in the Ochoas picked up stakes again, this time to cross the Atlantic to work in the laboratory of Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty T.

Cori in St. Part of the Washington University School of Medicine, the Cori lab was renowned for its cutting edge research on enzymes and work with intermediary metabolism of carbohydrates.

This work involved studying the biochemical reactions in which carbohydrates produce energy for cellular operations. Ochoa worked there for a year before New York University persuaded him to move east to take a job as a research associate in medicine at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where he would for the first time have graduate and postdoctoral students working beneath him. In , Ochoa was promoted to assistant professor of biochemistry at the medical school. Two years later when the pharmacology chair retired, Ochoa was offered the opportunity to succeed him and, lured by the promise of new laboratory space, he accepted.

He remained chairperson for nine years, taking a sabbatical in to serve as a visiting professor at the University of California. His administrative work did not deter him from pursuing his research interests in biochemistry, however. In the early s, he isolated one of the chemical compounds necessary for photosynthesis to occur, triphosphopyridine nucleotide, known as TPN.

Ochoa continued his interest in intermediary metabolism, expanding the work of Hans Adolf Krebs, who posited the idea of a cycle through which food is metabolized into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the molecule that provides energy to the cell. The Spanish scientist discovered that one molecule of glucose when burned with oxygen produced 36 ATP molecules.

When the chairman of the biochemistry department resigned in , Ochoa accepted this opportunity to return to the department full-time as chair and full professor. Once more ensconced in biochemistry research, Ochoa turned his attentions to a new field: the rapidly growing area of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA research. Earlier in his career, enzymes had been the hot new molecules for biochemists to study; now, after the critical work of James Watson and Francis Crick in , nucleic acids were fascinating scientists in the field.

Ochoa was no exception. Drawing on his earlier work with enzymes, Ochoa began investigating which enzymes played roles in the creation of nucleic acids in the body. Although most enzymes assist in breaking down materials, Ochoa knew that he was looking for an enzyme that helped combine nucleotides into the long chains that were nucleic acids.

In , he found a bacterial enzyme in sewage that appeared to play just such a role. When he added this enzyme to a solution of nucleotides, he discovered that the solution became viscous, like jelly, indicating that RNA had indeed formed in the dish. In , five years after he assumed the directorship of the biochemistry department, Ochoa shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Kornberg, for their work in discovering the enzymes that help produce nucleic acids.

While Ochoa was particularly delighted to share the prize with his old colleague, by this time he was no stranger to academic plaudits. The holder of several honorary degrees from both American and foreign universities, including Oxford, Ochoa had also been the recipient of the Carl Neuberg Medal in biochemistry in and the Charles Leopold Mayer Prize in Ochoa served as chairperson of NYU's biochemistry department for 20 years, until the summer of , just before his seventieth birthday.

When he retired from this post, he rejected the department's offer to make him an emeritus professor, preferring to remain on staff as a full professor. But even that could not keep Ochoa sufficiently occupied. In he returned to his native Spain as a professor of biology at the University Autonoma in Madrid to continue his lifelong fascination with biochemical research. At the age of 75 Ochoa wrote a retrospective of his life, which he titled "Pursuit of a Hobby.

Sir Henry Dale, one of the party's honorees, joked, "now that he is a pharmacologist, he has biochemistry as a hobby. All rights reserved.

Nobel Prize Winners, H. Wilson,