Bernardo Alberto Houssay (April 10, 1887 – September 21, 1971) was an Argentine physiologist. Houssay was a co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of glucose in animals, sharing the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori. He is the first Latin American Nobel laureate in the sciences. Biography Early life Bernardo Alberto Houssay was born April 10, 1887, in Buenos Aires. His parents Albert and Clara Houssay were immigrants from France. A precocious youngster, he was admitted to the Pharmacy School at the University of Buenos Aires at 14 years of age and subsequently to the Faculty of Medicine of the same university at 17 years old and was there from 1904 to 1910. While a third-year medical student, Houssay took up a post as a research and teaching assistant in the Chair of Physiology. Career After graduating, he quickly developed and presented his M.D. thesis on the physiological activities of pituitary extracts, published in 1911. This was a theme he would pursue for the rest of his scientific career. Since 1908 he was an assistant lecturer in the same department, and immediately after his doctorate he took up the post of Professor of Physiology in the University's School of Veterinary Medicine. Simultaneously, he started a private practice as an assistant physician at the municipal hospital of Buenos Aires. In 1913, he became Chief Physician at the Alvear Hospital, and in 1915, became Chief of the Section of Experimental Pathology at the National Public Health Laboratories in Buenos Aires. In 1919, Houssay was appointed to the chair of physiology at the University of Buenos Aires Medicine School, serving there until 1943. He transformed and directed the department into a highly respected research department in experimental physiology and medicine of international class. In that year, however, the military dictatorship deprived him of his university posts, due to his liberal political ideas and Houssay was forced to re-establish his research lines and staff at a privately funded Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. This situation, reinforced by a second dismissal by the Peronist government in 1945, was prolonged until 1955 when Peron was ousted from power and Houssay was reinstated in the University of Buenos Aires, where he remained until he died. After this, he was also director of the National Scientific and Technical Research