Roger Guillemin

Roger Guillemin (1924 to 2024) was a French-American neuroscientist who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow for work on the hormones made by the brain. Born in Dijon, he took his medical degree at the University of Lyon in 1949, practised briefly as a village doctor in Burgundy, then trained under Hans Selye in Montreal, where he earned a doctorate in 1953. He became a United States citizen in 1965. At Baylor College of Medicine and later the Salk Institute in La Jolla, he showed that the hypothalamus controls the pituitary through releasing factors. His team identified thyrotropin-releasing hormone, and Guillemin and Schally separately worked out the structures of the thyrotropin-releasing and gonadotropin-releasing hormones, a rivalry that became famous in the history of science. He also discovered somatostatin and was among the first to isolate endorphins. He led the Salk neuroendocrinology laboratories until 1989 and died in San Diego in 2024 at the age of one hundred.