Andrew V. Schally

Andrew Schally was a Polish-American endocrinologist, born Andrzej Wiktor Schally in Wilno, then in the Second Polish Republic and now Vilnius, on 30 November 1926. He escaped to Romania with the Polish government in 1939, moved to the United Kingdom after the war and took his doctorate in endocrinology at McGill University in 1957 before working mainly at Tulane University in the United States, where he became a citizen in 1962. By 1966 he had processed 100,000 pig brains to isolate thyrotropin-releasing hormone, and with Roger Guillemin he described the neurohormone gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which controls follicle-stimulating and luteinizing hormones. For showing that the hypothalamus controls hormone production by the pituitary gland he shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow. Later he used hypothalamic hormones in work on birth control and cancer treatment, and his GnRH analogs became the preferred treatment for advanced prostate cancer. He died at his home in Miami Beach on 17 October 2024 at the age of 97.