The Nobel scientist who feuded with his rivals

Roger Guillemin spent much of the 1960s processing more than 2 million sheep brains. His grueling, federally funded research was part of a ferociously competitive race to isolate the hormones the brain releases to control the pituitary gland, which in turn guides the endocrine organs. Proving that the brain communicates through means other than electrical impulses was extraordinarily difficult, since the so-called releasing factors occur only in trace amounts. From all those sheep brains, Guillemin eventually isolated 1mg of the hormone that directs the pituitary to control the thyroid. That earned him a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in medicine and contributed to the development of birth control pills and cancer treatments. “Every single one of these molecules, which we isolated with all these problems over the years,” he said in 2013, “are currently used in modern medicine.”

The discovery is equally remembered for the bitter rivalries it fueled, said . After the French-born Guillemin completed medical school in Lyons, “a chance meeting with Hans Selye, an expert on the body’s reaction to stress,” led him to the new field of neuroendocrinology.

He worked in Montreal and then at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, searching for the brain’s releasing factors, but after a decade he had little progress to show. Guillemin persisted, said , partly because he was competing against a former partner, Andrew Schally. “In violation of scientific practice, the men concealed data from each other” and “mocked each other’s errors” at conventions. “An equal partner I could be with him,” Schally said in 1978, “but he wanted me to be his slave.”

The two refused to share credit but ended up sharing half of the Nobel, said

e. In 1970, Guillemin set up his own laboratory at San Diego’s Salk Institute and developed another feud, this time with a former protégé, Wylie Vale Jr., who founded a rival lab on the same campus. Guillemin and Vale each found the releasing factors involved in stress and growth, though Vale got to both first. Still, the two men eventually reconciled, and at Vale’s 65th birthday in 2007 Guillemin quoted Freud in praising his younger rival. “Part of any son worth his salt,” he said, “is planning the killing of the father he loves and taking his kingdom.”