By Jose Antonio Romero Feris
former governor
Especial
I had the opportunity to interview Dr. José Claudio Escribano on my television program “Corrientes de Pensamiento”. A man who has inspired me, because I have seen his struggles in defense of press freedom. But he never ceases to amaze me since he collaborated with the edition of the book Argentines who improved medicine in the world, a work by different authors that deals with the lives of the 14 Argentine doctors who influenced world medicine and which the National Academy of Medicine commissioned by its 200 years.
“Among the first acts to commemorate the bicentennial of its creation, the National Academy of Medicine has decided to take a risk. The risk has been to publish a book of regarding 400 pages with the human and professional portraits of 14 Argentines who contributed to the progress of medicine in the world”, Escribano explained to Pocho Romero Feris, who was deputy director of the newspaper La Nación.
“Bernardino Rivadavia, son of the Enlightenment and of Mayo, and mentor in the gestation of this great house, would have celebrated it. Only those who do nothing or risk nothing avoid error and criticism. The burden of subjective judgments that accumulate in the choice of 14 names over the plethora of other outstanding teachers of Argentine medicine and biochemistry has been, however, limited by a specific conditioning”.
“That conditioning has circumscribed this book to precursors who gravitated with research or innovative surgical techniques on the course of world medicine. So here we have a shared trait, which meets the epistemological requirement of objectivity in this selective tribute that is perpetuated in a book”.
“In truth, I am far from medicine as a discipline, I gave 1,000 turns before agreeing to be the speaker of the act with which the commemorative cycle of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the National Academy of Medicine was opened,” Escribano said.
“The Academy was happy to publish the book with the 14 teachers of Argentine medicine, who contributed to improving world medicine. It is no small thing to say that we have had doctors and biochemists whose scientific research was of such a dimension or whose contributions to the innovation of surgical techniques were so innovative that they influenced the evolution of world medicine”.
“I got to know Dr. Abel Canónico a lot, an oncologist, and he was one of the five doctors who was in the operating room in 1951 when Eva Perón was operated on. He had great modesty that he had not been involved in the operation at all. What he had done was, following instructions from superiors, go to Chicago to find the fifth surgeon, George Pack, to operate on Eva. His work ended by escorting Pack back by plane to Chicago, where he confessed to her that it was the first time he had operated on a patient without exchanging a single word, and he returned with the certainty that he would not exchange a word with her. single word. That is, the doctor felt that he had operated on a doll because he had not been able to talk to that patient”.
“Among the 14 Argentines mentioned, there are three Nobel Prize winners and there is a fourth that might have won that recognition. I am referring to Eduardo Braun Menéndez, who would have been a Nobel Prize winner had he not died in the fatality of 1959, when the plane crashed 1,000 meters off the coast of Mar del Plata. There was only one survivor.”
“It seems to me that it is very important to dwell on René Favaloro, because he is one of the various figures that correspond to that Argentina of social mobility, of the 20th century. Favaloro was the son of a very modest carpenter, so he grew up in an ordinary neighborhood
“Like Enrique Finochietto, he was the son of a Genoese greengrocer. From an immigrant who was barely able to give a university degree to one of his three children. That is to say, children of that dynamic Argentina that allowed, from the most modest social positions, growth to a very first level in Argentine society”.
“The list opens with none other than Luis Agote, who in 1914 performed the first transfusion through an effective and safe procedure. He had to introduce certain chemical elements under test and he does it in his own body intravenously and achieves the blood transfusion. But he doesn’t patent it, he makes it immediately available to those wounded in World War I.”
“An objective condition has been established that is the common trait that everyone made a contribution in research, in basic science, applied science, in scientific research. They introduced innovations that influenced world medicine. Allow me to think regarding the doctor Salvador Mazza, and everything he did, a life dedicated to the study of diseases such as Chagas; or Julio Isidro Maiztegui, who from Pergamino managed to corner the evil of the stubble, which had to mistreat an entire large region in the north of the province of Buenos Aires”.
“César Milstein, from Bahia, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1984 for his theories related to the specificity and control of the immune system. He was the one who revolutionized the field of immunology with the discovery of monoclonal antibodies.”
“The years of outstanding maturation of both Milstein and Leloir, another of our Nobel Prize winners (1971), in his case for contributions to the knowledge of carbohydrates, should give hope to students who sense at some point the morbidity of the definitive setback . Both Milstein and Leloir did not exactly stand out in their graduate studies, but they eventually rose as scientific stars. I do not know the reasons for Leloir’s initial traffic jams, but perhaps Milstein, as a student of Exact Sciences, devoted excessive effort to anarchist struggles that led to his exile and later to the conquest of high academic positions in Cambridge”.
“Rebeca Gerschman, Mauricio Rosenbaum, Miguel Ángel Ondetti, and of course, Bernardo Houssay, the physiologist who was a teacher among teachers, the first to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine (1947) and whose name was so associated with creation, at the beginning of 1958, of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research.
They have been doctors and biochemists who were ahead of their time. Today, the globalization of knowledge enhanced by the amazing dynamism of technologies that burst in at the end of the 20th century mercilessly punishes retarded distraction”, Escribano concluded.
