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Nicolae Paulescu (October 30 1869, Bucharest - July 17 1931, Bucharest) was a Romanian physiologist, professor of medicine and the discoverer of insulin.
Early life and activities
Since his early school years, he displayed a remarkable intelligence. He learned French, Latin and Ancient Greek at an early age, so that a few years later he became fluent in all these languages and was able to read classical works of Latin and Greek literature in the original. He also had a particular gift for drawing and music and special inclinations towards natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry.
In the autumn of 1888, he left for Paris, where he enrolled in medical school. In 1897 he graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and was immediately appointed as assistant surgeon at the Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours Hospital. In 1900, Paulescu returned to Romania, where he remained until his death (1931) as Head of the Physiology Department of the University of Bucharest Medical School, as well as a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Bucharest.
Paulescu's discovery of insulin
In 1916, Paulescu succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. After a gap during World War I, he resumed his research and succeeded in isolating the antidiabetic pancreatic hormone (pancreine).
From April 24 to June 23, 1921, Paulescu published four papers at the Romanian Section of the Society of Biology in Paris:
- The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a diabetic animal by way of the blood.
- The influence of the time elapsed from the intravenous pancreatic injection into a diabetic animal.
- The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a normal animal by way of the blood.
An extensive paper on this subject - Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation - was submitted by Paulescu on June 22 to the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in Liège, Belgium, and was published in the August 1921 issue of this journal.
Furthermore, Paulescu secured the patent rights for his method of manufacturing pancreine (his own term for insulin) on April 10, 1922 (patent no. 6254) from the Romanian Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Controversies
Eight months after Paulescu's works were published, doctor Frederick Grant Banting and biochemist John James Richard Macleod from the University of Toronto, Canada, published their paper on the successful use of a pacreatic extract for normalizing blood sugar (glucose) levels (glycemia) in diabetic dogs. Their paper is a mere confirmatory paper, with direct references to Paulescu's article. However, they misquote that article, enunciating that "He * states that injections into peripheral veins produce no effect and his experiments show that second injections do not produce such marked effect as the first.", which is exactly the opposite of what Paulescu found out. [Later on, Banting said that "I regret very much that there was an error in our translation of Professor Paulescu's article, I cannot recollect, after this length of time, exactly what happened. . . . I do not remember whether we relied on our own poor French or whether we had a translation made. In any case I would like to state how sorry I am for this unfortunate error..."
Surprisingly, Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, while Paulescu's pioneering work was being completely ignored by the scientific and medical community. International recognition for Paulescu's merits as the true discoverer of insulin came only 50 years later.
Paulescu has been criticized for expressing anti-semitic and anti-masonic views in articles such as The judeo-masonic plot against the Romanian nation. He was an associate of A. C. Cuza, and wrote extensively for the latter's newspaper Apărarea Naţională.
Following protests from several Jewish organizations, the inauguration of professor Paulescu's bust at the Hôtel-Dieu State Hospital in Paris, scheduled for August 27 2003, had to be canceled.
- "If the Nobel Committee in 1923 judged the entire persona of its laureate, then Hôtel Dieu in 2003 must do no less and conclude that Paulescu's brutal inhumanity nullifies any scientific merit" (Simon Wiesenthal Center letter to the French Minister of Health and the Romanian Ambassador in Paris).
However, such an oppinion is not shared by Romanian Jewish Nicolae Cajal, member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, who stated that there is the need to dissociate between the private views and the scientific merit of a certain person, mentioning that his own father, a student of Paulescu, was admiring Paulescu for his scientific skills, although he could not agree (as a jew) with Paulescu's antisemitic views.
External links
- William Totok, Cazul lui Nicolae C. Paulescu (II), in Revista 22, nr. 710 (in Romanian).
- Simon Wiesanthal Center document.
- Statement of Nicolae Cajal
1869 births | 1931 deaths | Anti-Semitic people | Romanian journalists | Romanian scientists | Diabetes
"Nicolae Paulescu"