Roger Guillemin, 100, Nobel Prize winner, fueled by rivalry, dies

Roger Guillemin, a neuroscientist who co-discovered the unexpected hormones that the brain uses to control many bodily functions, died Wednesday at a retirement home in San Diego. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Chantal.

The career of Dr. Guillemin was marked by two spectacular competitions that turned the staid world of endocrinological research upside down. The first was a decade-long battle with his former partner, Andrew V. Schallythat ended in a draw when the two shared half Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977. (The other half went to American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow for unrelated research.)

The second match began shortly thereafter when Wylie Vale Jr., Dr.’s longtime associate and protege. Guillemin, set up a rival laboratory on the same campus of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego where both men worked, leaving Dr. a new period of intense scientific struggle.

Roger Charles Louis Guillemin (pronounced with a hard g: GEE-eh-mah) might have pursued a quiet career as a general practitioner in the French city of Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, where he was born on January 11, 1924 and where he attended public schools and then to medical school. But a chance meeting with Hans Selyean expert on the body’s response to stress, took him to Montreal, where he was introduced to medical research at Dr. Selye at the University of Montreal.

There he became interested in a leading problem of the time: the way the brain controls the pituitary gland, the master organ that controls the production of the body’s other major glands.

The pituitary gland is located in a small bone sac just below a central brain area called the hypothalamus. No one could find nerves connecting the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, so a fallback suspicion was that the hypothalamus might control the pituitary gland with hormones. But many biologists refused to believe that the brain could produce hormones as a mere gland.

The postulated hormones were called ‘releasing factors’ because they were shown to cause the pituitary gland to release its own hormones.

In 1954, Dr. Guillemin made a critical observation: pituitary cells grown in glassware would not produce hormones unless cells of the hypothalamus were cultured with them. The finding supported the idea of ​​letting go of factors, and Dr. Guillemin was determined to prove this. He moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he attempted to isolate the putative releasing factors from the hypothalami of cattle killed in a kosher slaughterhouse.

Success eluded him and in 1957 he teamed up with another young researcher, Andrzej V. Schally, better known as Andrew. The two worked together for five years, but mysterious unleashing factors thwarted their best efforts. The partnership is broken. Dr. Schally moved to the Veterans Affairs Hospital in New Orleans. Dr. Guillemin eventually hired two key researchers at Baylor – Dr. Vale as a physiologist and Roger Burgus as a chemist – who would form the mainstay of his efforts over the next decade.

Dr. Guillemin and Dr. Schally worked independently and both decided that they needed much larger numbers of hypothalami to extract sufficient amounts of releasing factor. Each of them turned his laboratory into a semi-industrial processing plant, aided by liberal government research funds that became available after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial space satellite, in 1957. Dr. Guillemin eventually processed more than two million sheep hypothalami, and Dr. Schally worked on the same scale with pig brains.

The rivalry between the two teams was intense, especially in the area of ​​scientific credit. “Let me remind you too,” wrote Dr. Schally to Dr. Guillemin in a letter in 1969, “to your deliberate, repeated and personal scientific attacks against me, as well as to your continued failure to recognize our contributions.”

Dr. Schally later told an interviewer, “I could have been an equal partner with him, but he wanted me to be his slave.”

The releasing factors exist in such small quantities in the brain that they were barely detectable with the techniques of the time. A single fingerprint on glassware contained enough amino acids – the components of the releasing factors – to ruin an entire experiment. After another seven years of effort, neither Dr. Guillemin, nor Dr. Schally isolated a liberating factor. Other researchers said the government, which has funded the two men’s work for years, should stop wasting its money. There was more evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, they said.

In 1969, the committee of scientists advising the National Institutes of Health on endocrinological research convened a meeting to prepare to end support for the two laboratories. But a few days before the meeting, Dr. Burgus made a significant advance in identifying the chemical structure of the releasing factor that controls the thyroid gland via the pituitary gland. Within a few months, Schally and Guillemin’s teams had fully identified the releasing factor known as TRF and the funding disruption was averted.

A race now began to find a second releasing factor, FRF, which controlled the body’s reproductive systems. The team of Dr. Schally narrowly came in first place, but Dr. Guillemin then recovered by discovering a releasing factor involved in the control of the body’s growth.

Dr. Guillemin succeeded because he had identified a crucial problem that he and Dr. Schally had pursued against all odds, while better-known researchers had failed. The identification of the releasing factors was a major event in medicine, and the Nobel Committee in Stockholm awarded the prize for this achievement.

Dr. Guillemin had little time to rest on his laurels. His research team had become disenchanted with his relentless quest for scientific glory. Dr. Vale later complained about “what hell it can sometimes be for people who get caught in the meat grinder and take out more and more meat. glory for Guillemin, especially if you are the meat.

Dr. Vale founded his own laboratory at the Salk Institute in 1977 (Dr. Guillemin had founded one in 1970), and endocrinologists were treated to the spectacle of yet another raging rivalry, this time between Dr. Guillemin and his protégé. They competed to find the releasing factors known as CRF, which is involved in stress, and GRF, which stimulates growth. Both succeeded, although Dr. Vale was the first in both cases.

Dr. Guillemin married Lucienne Jeanne Billard in 1951, who had been his nurse during a near-fatal attack of tuberculous meningitis in Montreal. In addition to his daughter Chantal, he is survived by four other daughters: Claire, Hélène, Elisabeth and Cece; a son, François; and four grandchildren. His wife died in 2021, also at 100.

Dr. Guillemin and Dr. Vale later reconciled and became good friends. In a tribute to the 65th birthday of Dr. Vale quoted Dr. Guillemin, well aware of the irony of competing with his ‘scientific son’, Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth: ‘A part of every son worth his salt plans to kill the father he loves and who takes over his kingdom.”

Kellina Moore contributed reporting.