How exactly does a boy from a provincial, seafaring town become a world-renowned scientist, teacher and Nobel laureate? Perhaps through perpetual motion.
Severo Ochoa de Alboronz was born in Luarca in the Northern Spanish province of Asturias on September 24, 1905. The youngest of Carmen de Alboronz and Severo Ochoa’s seven children was far from the mountains of his birth when his father’s death cause the family to move to Málaga. The tragedy and subsequent relocation would be a fortuitous catalyst for Ochoa’s education and career, however. Educated in private school, the young Ochoa attended Málaga College where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1921.
Shortly after graduation, Ochoa enrolled at the University of Madrid to study medicine. There he worked as an assistant to physiology professors and acquired an interest in how the human body functions. Ochoa completed his M.D. in 1929 and was eager to continue his research.
The doctor left Madrid to work under Otto Meyerhof at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (now the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research) at Heidelberg, Germany, where he conducted research in biochemistry and muscle physiology.
In 1931, Ochoa and his wife, Carmen García Cobaín, relocated to England where Ochoa conducted research in enzymology and fermentation at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, a rural London suburb. There Ochoa met colleagues whose work, much like his own, would shape modern science.
Ochoa would be catapulted from the lab to a classroom with his first professorship in Madrid, where he would teach physiology and eventually biochemistry, beginning in 1931. He taught there until 1935 and become the head of the physiology department for the newly formed Institute for Medical Research. That is until Spain’s Civil War erupted.
Ochoa and his wife fled Spain’s harsh political conditions. In 1936, they left for Germany, where he worked with his old mentor, Meyerhof. But the reunion would be brief. The German Jew was forced to flee to France soon after Ochoa returned.
The pending arrival of World War II put Ochoa on the move again. Leaving Germany’s tense climate, Ochoa took a half-year fellowship at the Maritime Biological Laboratory in Plymouth, England. The move would eventually bring him and Doña Carmen to Oxford, where his interest in enzymes and metabolism grew. As England entered the war, the immigrant couple was again forced to move. In 1941 they left Europe for North America, where Ochoa took a post at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.
In 1944, Ochoa accepted a position as a professor of physiology, pharmacology and biochemistry at New York University (NYU).
The static life of teaching did not hinder Ochoa’s own personal research or curiosity. While at NYU, Ochoa made his greatest scientific breakthrough. Ochoa was intent on learning what enzymes helped build or create nucleic acids. In 1955, Ochoa found his match in a bacterial enzyme and added it to a solution of nucleotides. Once the material became viscous, he knew he had formed ribonucleic acid (RNA).
Ochoa’s work would set the stage for future scientists to create life outside of living beings.
In 1959, Ochoa was co-winner (with Arthur Kornberg from Stanford University), of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ochoa was the second Spaniard to become a Nobel winner in science. Ochoa’s scientific hero, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, was the first, in 1906.
Ochoa died in Madrid on November 3, 1993, from a stroke and heart problems at the age of 88, according to his obituary in the Washington Post. Schools, hospitals and research institutes from Madrid to Tangier bear his name as testament to Ochoa’s scientific legacy.