Luis Federico Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir was an Argentine physician and biochemist, born in Paris in 1906 to a family from Buenos Aires and raised in Argentina. He qualified in medicine at the University of Buenos Aires in 1932, soon turned from clinical work to the laboratory, and trained under Bernardo Houssay, later studying enzymes at Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins. After a period in the United States during the political upheavals of the 1940s he returned to Argentina and directed the private research group Fundacion Instituto Campomar until his death in 1987. His work on sugar nucleotides and the metabolic pathways by which carbohydrates are made and turned into energy earned him the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and his research also advanced the understanding and treatment of the congenital disease galactosemia and touched on renal hypertension. He is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.