The Coris path-breaking research into the enzyme-catalyzed chemical reactions of carbohydrate metabolism resulted in their sharing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947 with Bernardo Houssay of Argentina. The Nobel committee cited the Coris “for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen” and Houssay “for the discovery of the importance of the anterior pituitary hormone for the metabolism of sugar.” Their son Tom, who was then eleven, remembers his parents “were in high spirits” when they received news of the Nobel award, but they also told a newspaper reporter that they were “pleased, overwhelmed, and too busy to celebrate.”
Houssay’s worked in many fields of physiology, such as the nervous, digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, but his main contribution, which was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine of 1947, was on the experimental investigation of the role of the anterior hypophysis gland in the metabolism of carbohydrates, particularly in diabetes mellitus. Houssay demonstrated in the 1930s the diabetogenic effect anterior hypophysis extracts and the decrease in diabetes severity with anterior hypophysectomy. These discoveries stimulated the study of hormonal feedback control mechanisms which are central to all aspects of modern endocrinology.
Houssay’s many disciples along his years of activity became also influential by themselves as they spread around the world; such as Eduardo Braun-Menéndez, and Miguel Rolando Covian (who went to become the “father” of Brazilian neurophysiology, as chairman of the Department of Physiology of the Medical Faculty of Ribeirão Preto of the University of São Paulo). Houssay wrote with them the most influential textbook of Human Physiology in Latin America, in Spanish and Portuguese (the latter was translated by Covian and collaborators), which, since 1950 has been published in successive editions and used in almost all medical schools of the continent. Houssay published more than 600 scientific papers and several specialized books. Besides the Nobel, Houssay won many distinctions and awards from the Universities of Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and Paris and 15 other universities, as well as the Dale Medal of the Society for Endocrinology in 1960.
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