Roger Guillemin
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Roger Guillemin
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977
Born: 11 January 1924, Dijon, France
Died: 21 February 2024, Del Mar, CA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: The Salk Institute, San Diego, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain”
Prize share: 1/4
Work
Hormones are substances that convey signals between different parts of the body and regulate their functions. Around the pituitary in the brain, Releasing hormones serve to release other hormones and are formed around the pituitary gland. The releasing hormones occur in very small amounts. From large quantities of pig brains and lamb brains respectively, Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally separately extracted a sufficient amount of releasing hormone to determine its structure in 1969. They subsequently were able to produce it with chemical methods.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
