ARGENTINA: Case History

For Argentina’s Dictator Juan Domingo Perón it was all very embarrassing. Dr. Bernardo Alberto Houssay, the first South American to win a Nobel Prize in medicine (TIME, Nov. 3), was an Argentine, but he was no Peronista. In fact, Perón had fired him from the faculty of the University of Buenos Aires in 1946 because he signed a wartime manifesto favoring “democracy and American solidarity.”

At first the Government-controlled papers kept quiet; what was left of the opposition press printed glowing stories. Then the Peron party line was passed along. The pro-Perón La Época, charging that the prize had been “granted with political ends,” went to town with a caricature of Dr. Houssay and an attack on the originality and value of his studies of the pituitary gland. “This gland detective,” it said, should have been doing something useful like tackling tuberculosis and syphilis. Physiologist Houssay did not reply. He was busy last week getting ready for next month’s trip to Stockholm to collect his share ($24,460) of the prize.