Severo Ochoa

Severo Ochoa de Albornoz (1905 to 1993) was a Spanish physician and biochemist who shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arthur Kornberg for work on the mechanisms of the biological synthesis of nucleic acids. He was born in Luarca in Asturias, grew up in Malaga, and studied medicine at the University of Madrid, where his teacher Juan Negrin encouraged him to isolate creatinine from urine and to develop a method of measuring small amounts of muscle creatinine. After a summer at the University of Glasgow working on creatine metabolism, he completed his medical degree in 1929 and joined Otto Meyerhof laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem, then a centre of the rapidly developing discipline of biochemistry. His early paper on creatinine in the Journal of Biological Chemistry marked the beginning of a research career in biochemistry.