Science: Unknown Giant

The 1957 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine (worth $42,000) was awarded last week to a man who is no physician but a chemist, a man who had never been interviewed by a newsman until the announcement came from Stockholm, a man who had never been listed in the Who’s Who of his adopted country. For good measure, the distinguished laureate-to-be was ill in bed with what he believed to be Asian flu when the Swedish ambassador called to deliver the news.

The winner: Daniel Bovet, 50, Swiss-born but now a naturalized Italian. One of the research stars of Rome’s Istituto Superiore di Sanità, he is a scientist’s scientist who has spent a lifetime in quiet laboratories. Though his discoveries have been the basis of countless medical products—sulfa drugs, antihistamines, muscle relaxants—he has never taken out a patent in his own name or made a penny from the commercial exploitation of his findings.

Dye Against Death. Son of a Swiss professor of pedagogy, Daniel Bovet recalls: “We children were guinea pigs for testing father’s educational theories. It was wonderful.” As a boy. he grew mushrooms in the family cellar, cultivated molds in his mother’s fruit jars. In 1929 the famed Pasteur Institute of Paris offered Biologist Bovet a job. By 1932 news reached Paris that Germany’s Gerhard Domagk had found that a dye product, prontosil could be used to kill bacteria that cause common infections. Bovet and his colleagues at the Pasteur found that prontosil was “a clumsy, complex chemical,” set about breaking it down. After months of night-and-day work they found the essential germ killer in it: sulfanilamide, first of the modern wonder drugs that work directly on the cause of infection. Bovet kept going, synthesized hundreds of related compounds, took the lead in chemotherapy away from Germany in helping to create the succession of sulfa drugs that have saved millions of lives.

With the same energy, Bovet threw himself into work on a new problem. “I was fascinated,” he says, “by the fact that in nature, in the human body, no product existed to counteract the excessive effects of histamine.” These effects are allergic reactions such as hay fever and hives. From 1937 to 1941 Bovet did 3,000 experiments, worked out the chemical formulas on which are based most of the infinite variety of antihistamines now widely prescribed.

Poison to Relax. This done, Bovet switched to the mechanism by which curare paralyzes the muscles. It took him eight years to find the essential ingredients in the impure mixtures of Indian arrow poisons: along the way he synthesized 400 compounds which produced some of curare’s effects in one degree or another. His research brought out the usefulness of succinylcholine. a long-neglected curare-like compound now widely employed as a muscle relaxant in major surgery on the chest and abdomen.

In Paris during the ’30s, Bovet had met Filomena Nitti. daughter of the exiled anti-Fascist ex-Premier of Italy, Francesco Nitti. “I proposed immediately,” says Bovet. “It was a lightning chemical reaction.” Since then, with time out for three children, Filomena Bovet-Nitti has helped her husband in all his work. In 1947, Bovet moved from the Pasteur Institute to Rome’s Istituto, which was able to offer him better facilities. The husband-wife team’s current preoccupation: the chemistry of the brain, especially as it is influenced by mental illness and by drugs such as the ataraxics. For, believes Biochemist Bovet, the key to mental illness lies in chemistry.