Andrew V. Schally life and biography

Andrzej "Andrew" Viktor Schally is a Polish-born American endocrinologist and Nobel Prize laureate (1977) in medicine, sharing the prize that year with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.

Schally won the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1977, for his research into peptide hormone production in the brain. He fled Poland with his family in 1939, and lived in Romania, Italy, France, England, Scotland, and Canada, before becoming an American at age 36.

He studied interactions between the hypothalamus and the endocrine system, synthesized the thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH), isolated and synthesized the luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LH-RH), and researched somatostatin, the growth-hormone-inhibiting hormone. He also spent many years doing research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and Veterans Administration, including several years as chief of endocrine and polypeptide laboratories at the VA Medical Center in New Orleans, and later became senior medical investigator for the VA.

In his early research, Schally worked with future Nobel laureates John Cornforth, Archer J. P. Martin, and Rodney R. Porter. He spent several years working alongside Roger Guillemin, but the two men later became cold-blooded competitors, a rivalry chronicled in the non-fiction best-seller The Nobel Duel. In a furious exchange of letters over the perception of credit denied at a seminar, Schally wrote to Guillemin, "Your somewhat derogatory and deprecating remarks ... surprised me as the attack on Pearl Harbor surprised the U.S. Navy," and Guillemin replied, "I am neither your conscience nor your psychiatrist." Each scientists' quest for victory over the other was dashed when they were awarded the Nobel Prize jointly, sharing that year's honors with a third scientist, Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.

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