Beacon at Buenos Aires

No South American scientist had ever been awarded such honors in the U.S. In Manhattan last week, Argentina's Dr. Bernardo Alberto Houssay was made an honorary fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. In Boca Raton, Fla., the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association gave him its first award for distinguished research. Eminent U.S. scientists acclaimed the shy Argentine "the world's greatest living physiologist."

The object of all this kudos was a small, quiet, black-eyed, 60-year-old man stiffly dressed in a black sack coat and old-fashioned starched collar. Because he signed a wartime manifesto favoring "democracy and American solidarity," he was promptly fired from his job at the University of Buenos Aires by Argentina's Dictator Juan Peron.

A great admirer of the U.S., which he considers the "most scientific" and one of the "most moral" nations in the world, Dr. Houssay last week was traveling happily from banquet to banquet and reveling in the "international fraternity" of his fellow scientists. Of politics, he said philosophically: "It is very regrettable that political considerations oblige us to some restriction."

Dr. Houssay's most important work has been on the pituitary gland. (He discovered that pituitary secretions play a part in diabetes.) But he and his colleagues have also published nearly 300 reports on a wide range of medical studies. His monumental Human Physiology, considered by some the finest physiology text ever written, will soon be published in English by McGraw-Hill for worldwide distribution --the first Latin American scientific work to be given such recognition. Dr. Houssay has been honored by scientists and leaders of a dozen nations (including the British Royal Society). But in Argentina he is now restricted to a small laboratory financed partly by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Said shaggy Dr. Anton J. Carlson, dean of U.S. physiologists, as he presented the research award to Dr. Houssay in Boca Raton: "We regret that a few myopic citizens in our sister Republic of Argentina have tried to black out the Houssay scientific beacon at Buenos Aires. But the Houssay beacon still guides and cheers many workers on the frontiers of biology and medicine in every land."

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