Juan Negrín

Juan Negrín López was a Spanish physician and physiologist who also became a statesman, born in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in 1892 and dead in exile in 1956. He studied medicine in Kiel and Leipzig, took a doctorate at twenty under Theodor von Brücke and worked in the Leipzig institute of physiology on the adrenal glands and the central nervous system. Returning to Spain, he became professor of physiology at the Complutense University of Madrid in 1922, and his laboratory grew into an internationally known research centre and school of training whose students included the future Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa. He later led the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, served as minister of finance and of defence, and was the last prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic from 1937 to 1939.