Andrew Schally

Andrew Schally (1926 to 2024) was a Polish-American endocrinologist who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow. Born Andrzej Wiktor Schally in Wilno, then in the Second Polish Republic, he fled to Romania in 1939, reached the United Kingdom after the war, studied in Scotland and England, took a doctorate in endocrinology at McGill University in 1957 and became a United States citizen in 1962, working chiefly at Tulane University and the Miami Veterans Administration Medical Center. His prize recognized the discovery that the hypothalamus controls the production and release of hormones by the pituitary gland. He isolated thyrotropin-releasing hormone from large numbers of pig hypothalami and, with Guillemin, described gonadotropin-releasing hormone. Later in life he used hypothalamic hormones to research methods of birth control and cancer treatment.