Bernardo Alberto Houssay

Bernardo Alberto Houssay
(1887-1971)



Argentine physiologist who received (with Carl and Gerty Cori) the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of blood sugar (glucose) in animals.
Working with dogs that had been rendered diabetic by excision of the pancreas (1924-37), Houssay found that removal of the adenohypophysis (the anterior, or frontal, lobe of the pituitary body, located beneath the brain) greatly relieved the symptoms of the disease and made the animal unusually sensitive to insulin. He demonstrated that injection of pituitary extracts into normal animals induces diabetes by increasing the amount of sugar in the blood, indicating that the secretions of the gland oppose the action of insulin.

Appointed professor of physiology (1910) and director of the physiological institute (1919) at the University of Buenos Aires, Houssay was one of 150 Argentine educators dismissed from their posts by the 1943 military coup of Gen. Juan Peron. Although he was reinstated in 1945, he was asked to submit his resignation a year later. He founded (1944) and directed (from 1946) the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine, Buenos Aires, a leading physiological research centre. His best known book is Human Physiology (1951).