University of Buenos Aires

Luis Federico Leloir FRS was an Argentine doctor and biochemist who received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the first Spanish-speaking... scientist to ever receive the award. Although born in France, Leloir received the majority of his education at the University of Buenos Aires and was director of the private research group Fundación Instituto Campomar until his death in 1987. Although his laboratories were often plagued by lack of financial support and second-rate equipment, his research into sugar nucleotides, carbohydrate metabolism, and renal hypertension has garnered international attention and fame and has led to significant progress in understanding, diagnosing and treating the congenital disease galactosemia. Luis Leloir is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. Leloir's parents, Federico Leloir and Hortensia Aguirre de Leloir, traveled from Buenos Aires to Paris in the middle of 1906 with the intention of treating Federico's illness. However, Federico died in late August, and a week later Luis was born in an old house at 81 Víctor Hugo Road in Paris, a few blocks away from the Arc de Triomphe.
more

César Milstein FRS was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in... 1984 with Niels Kaj Jerne and Georges J. F. Köhler. Milstein was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, to a Jewish family. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and obtained a PhD under Professor Stoppani in the Medical School on kinetic studies with the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase. In 1958, funded by the British Council, he joined the Biochemistry Department at the University of Cambridge to work for a PhD under Malcolm Dixon on the mechanism of metal activation of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase. During this work he collaborated with Frederick Sanger whose group he joined with a short-term Medical Research Council appointment. The major part of Milstein's research career was devoted to studying the structure of antibodies and the mechanism by which antibody diversity is generated.
more

Miguel Angel Ondetti was an Argentinean-born American chemist that first synthesized captopril, the first ACE inhibitor that was used to treat heart... disease. With his co-worker, David Cushman, he won the 1999 Lasker Award for: "developing an innovative approach to drug design based on protein structure and using it to create the ACE inhibitors, powerful oral agents for the treatment of high blood pressure, heart failure, and diabetic kidney disease”. Ondetti was born and raised in Buenos Aires and received a PhD in chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, in his hometown, in 1957. In 1960 he moved to The Squibb Institute for Medical Research in New Jersey where he researched and developed Captopril in 1975. Miguel A. Ondetti was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; on May 14, 1930.Ondetti’s background was Italian. His mother was an Argentinean-born Italian, while his father’s family had first emigrated from Italy to Paris, then to Argentina. Despite this, Ondetti considered himself a “first generation Argentinean”. Ondetti’s father practiced a family craft of making garden furniture from cement that imitated tree trunks.
more

Alberto Pedro Calderón was an Argentine mathematician best known for his work on the theory of partial differential equations and singular... integral operators, and widely considered as one of the 20th century's most important mathematicians. He was born in Mendoza, and died in Chicago. Calderón graduated in civil engineering from the University of Buenos Aires in 1947 and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1950. In 1958 Calderón published one of his most important results, on uniqueness of solution of the Cauchy problem for partial differential equations. With his Ph.D. supervisor and mentor Antoni Zygmund he formulated the Calderón–Zygmund lemma of singular integral operators. At MIT, he supervised the dissertations of Irwin S. Bernstein, among others. During his career he held academic posts at Ohio State University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, from which he retired in 1985. He was awarded many prizes for his work including the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1975, the Wolf Prize in 1989, and the National Medal of Science in 1991.
more

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in... Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones and The Aleph , are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia . Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
more