Bernardo Alberto Houssay

Houssay, Bernardo Alberto 

Born Apr. 10, 1887, in Buenos Aires; died there Sept. 21, 1971. Argentine physiologist. President of the Argentine Society of Biology.

Houssay graduated from the University of Buenos Aires; he became a professor there in 1910 and received the degree of doctor of medicine from the university the following year. He founded the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine in Buenos Aires and served as the institute’s director from 1943 to 1955.

Houssay’s main works dealt with physiology and endocrinology. He studied the hormones excreted by the thyroid and pituitary glands and by the adrenal cortex; he was particularly concerned with the part these hormones play in carbohydrate metabolism and in the disturbance of the metabolism in diabetes mellitus; he demonstrated that an injection of pituitary extract induces symptoms of diabetes.

Houssay was a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, of the Royal Society of London, and of other societies and academies of sciences. He received a Nobel Prize in 1947.