Andrew V. Schally, an endocrinologist who was awarded a Nobel for discovering the hormones used by the brain to control growth, reproduction and other bodily functions, sharing the prize with his bitter rival, the neuroscientist Roger Guillemin, died on Thursday at his home in Miami Beach. He was 97.
His son, Gordon, confirmed the death.
Dr. Schally, a Polish refugee who started out as a research technician, spent much of his career at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Orleans, where he led an intense effort to be the first to find the hormones.
His rivalry with Dr. Guillemin, his onetime colleague, stretched over two decades, ending in a tie in 1977 when each received a quarter share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (The other half went to Rosalyn S. Yalow, a medical physicist, for unrelated work.) Dr. Guillemin died in February.
Dr. Schally’s discovery was a feat of industrial-style research. Because the brain contains only tiny amounts of hormone, Dr. Schally needed thousands of brains to obtain thimblefuls of the substance to study. A donation of one million pig brains from Oscar Mayer allowed him to put more money into building his scientific team.
Unlike many Nobel-winning endeavors, the research was less the work of one or two people than of the entire group. Dr. Schally purified the hormones and turned them over to structural chemists, who did the tedious analytical work. Though he regularly fought for fair credit from Dr. Guillemin, he was less concerned when a dispute about authorship broke out among members of his team. “What do I care?” Dr. Schally said. “It’s my lab — I get the glory anyway.”
Andrzej Viktor Schally was born on Nov. 30, 1926, in Wilno, Poland, now part of Lithuania, to Kazimierz and Maria (Lacka) Schally. His father was a major general in the Polish Army and chief of the Polish mission to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, the Allies’ central military command during World War II.
The boy spent much of his youth in exile. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled with his mother and sister to Romania. Rather than return to Poland after the war, his family emigrated to Scotland, where he completed high school.
After studying chemistry at the University of London, he remained in London as a lab technician at the National Institute of Medical Research, where he rubbed elbows with future Nobel Prize recipients. He became hooked on medical science.
In 1952, he took a technician’s job at McGill University in Montreal, in the lab of Murray Saffran, a young biochemist who was searching for the mysterious “releasing factors,” as the brain’s hormones are called.
Scientists at the time believed that releasing factors were produced in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, and that each factor controlled the release of a corresponding hormone from the pituitary, a pea-size clump of cells located just beneath the brain. But evidence supporting this theory was scant.
In a crucial experiment after Dr. Schally joined his lab, Dr. Saffran used an extract containing rat hypothalamus to induce cells from the pituitary to secrete the stress hormone corticotropin. The experiment provided strong indirect evidence that releasing factors existed; the next step for scientists was to isolate them and determine their chemical formula.
At McGill, Dr. Schally received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in 1955 and earned his doctorate there in 1957. After graduation, he moved to the United States and joined Dr. Guillemin’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which was already immersed in a search for the releasing factors. The scientists brought complementary skills to the quest — Dr. Schally was a chemist; Dr. Guillemin, a physiologist. But each was intensely competitive and reluctant to share credit.
“If something went wrong, he blamed me,” Dr. Schally said in “The Nobel Duel” (1981) by Nicholas Wade, an account of the Schally-Guillemin rivalry. (Mr. Wade is a former science writer and editor for The New York Times.) “He wanted me to take the blame when things went wrong and to take the credit for himself when they went right.”
In their five years together, Drs. Schally and Guillemin found no releasing factors, a dismal record that had scientists shaking their heads. At a meeting in Miami in 1961, a prominent endocrinologist poked fun at the two men, likening the elusive releasing factors to the Loch Ness monster and the Abominable Snowman.
The relationship between the two soon deteriorated. In 1962, Dr. Schally left Baylor to set up his own lab at the Veterans Affairs center in New Orleans, moving his rivalry with Dr. Guillemin into the open.
“Your somewhat derogatory and depreciating remarks … surprised me as the attack on Pearl Harbor surprised the U.S. Navy,” Dr. Schally wrote after feeling slighted by Dr. Guillemin at a scientific conference, in a letter exchange detailed in “The Nobel Duel.” Dr. Guillemin wrote back, “I have no comments except to say I am neither your conscience nor your psychiatrist.”
Initially, they were no more successful apart than together. Signaling its concern about the lack of progress, the National Institutes of Health in 1968 awarded Dr. Schally only 60 percent of the funding he had requested.
Finally, in November 1969, Drs. Schally and Guillemin confirmed the existence of releasing factors.
In studies published six days apart, the two scientists reported the chemical formula for thyrotropin releasing factor, which the brain uses to control body temperature. Although Dr. Schally’s report came first, the scientific world considered the race a draw. So the rivals continued their quest, each looking for a decisive victory over the other.
Dr. Schally gained an edge in 1971 with the discovery of the luteinizing releasing factor, which regulates the production of sex hormones. He delayed the announcement of his discovery for a month so that he could declare victory at a scientific symposium that Dr. Guillemin was scheduled to chair. As Dr. Guillemin sat crestfallen before a roomful of scientists, a triumphant Dr. Schally revealed the formula. “I blew him out of the water,” Dr. Schally said.
“It was one of the most joyous moments of my life,” he later told a reporter.
Dr. Guillemin evened the score in 1972 with the discovery of a third releasing factor, somatostatin, which has a role in controlling growth.
Dr. Schally and others went on to research therapeutic uses for releasing factors. Today, synthetic versions are used in diagnostic tests or to treat hormone-related diseases.
Luteinizing-releasing factor is among the most studied; synthetic versions are used to treat illnesses related to sex hormones, such as prostate cancer in men, endometriosis and fibroids in women, and precocious puberty in young children.
Somatostatin is used to treat acromegaly, a growth disorder that causes enlargement of the hands, feet and chin and forehead.
Dr. Schally remained at the medical center in New Orleans until 2005 and was on the faculty of Tulane University School of Medicine from 1962 to 2006. Since 2007, he had been chief of endocrine and cancer research at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Miami and a professor at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. His research there focused on the role of brain hormones in cancers affecting the brain, breast, colon, lung, ovaries and pancreas.
Dr. Schally won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1975 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978. He is an author of more than 2,380 publications.
His first marriage, to Margaret White ended in divorce. His second wife, Ana Maria Comaru-Schally, a Brazilian endocrinologist, died in 2004.
In addition to his son, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Maria De Lourdes, whom he married in 2011, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. A daughter from his first marriage, Karen Elizabeth Del Rosso, died in 2022.
Dr. Schally made no secret of his dream of winning the Nobel Prize. “Some people compete for 20 years and never get it,” he said in “The Nobel Duel.”
“In 1973 I came within a hair of getting it,” he recalled. “After that I said, what the hell; otherwise I would have become catatonic.”
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