Roger Guillemin

Roger Charles Louis Guillemin was a French-American neuroscientist, born in Dijon, France, on January 11, 1924. After secondary studies at the Lycee Carnot in Dijon he began medical studies at the University of Dijon in 1943 and completed them at the University of Lyon with an MD degree in 1949. He then went to Montreal to work with Hans Selye at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal, where he received a PhD in 1953, and later moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In 1954 he observed that pituitary cells do not produce hormones unless hypothalamic cells are present, supporting the theory that the hypothalamus controls the pituitary through releasing factors, and he processed over two million sheep hypothalami in the search for them. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1965, received the National Medal of Science in 1976, and shared the 1977 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow for his work on neurohormones.