Eugenia Sacerdote de Lustig

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Eugenia Sacerdote de Lustig (1910–2011)

Eugenia Sacerdote de Lustig (born November 9, 1910 in Turin , Italy ; † November 27, 2011 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ) was an Italian-Argentine physician. Sacerdote is considered to be the pioneer of polio vaccination in Argentina; she published more than 180 works.

Life

Eugenia Sacerdote was born in Turin, Italy in 1910. Together with her cousin Rita Levi-Montalcini - who later won the Nobel Prize for Medicine - she decided to study medicine at the University of Turin in 1930 . Both Levi-Montalcini and Sacerdote were students of Professor Giuseppe Levi , Sacerdote later worked with him. During her studies, she also met her future husband, Maurizio Lustig, a Pirelli engineer, and married him.

In the course of the emerging state discrimination against Jews, Sacerdote lost her job at the university in 1938 because she came from a Sephardic family. In 1939 she emigrated to Argentina with her husband and daughter. There she began to research and teach in the field of histology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires . Among other things, she dealt with in vitro cell cultures.

During a major poliomyelitis epidemic in Argentina in the late 1950s, the World Health Organization sent Sacerdote to the United States to learn more about the work of the American immunologist Jonas Salk . When she returned, she vaccinated herself and her children in public to convince the population of the sense and benefits of the polio vaccination.

Sacerdote later moved to Instituto Malbrán , where he headed the Virology Department. She also worked at the Instituto de Oncología Ángel H. Roffom , where she researched tumor cells. Since 1989 she has been researching the importance of free radicals and oxidative stress in patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease as well as vascular dementia in order to learn more about neurological diseases.

She worked until her eighties, but then gave up her job as her increasing blindness made her job difficult. Shortly before her death, she received one of the highest honors in the Argentine state, the " Medalla del Bicentenario ". Eugenia Sacerdote de Lustig died in Buenos Aires in 2011 at the age of 101.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Deutsch, Sandra McGee, 1950-: Crossing borders, claiming a nation: a history of Argentine Jewish women, 1880-1955 . Duke University Press, Durham [NC] 2010, ISBN 0-8223-9260-7 , pp. 85 f .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f A los 101 años, murió la doctora Sacerdote de Lustig. In: La Nación. November 29, 2011, Retrieved July 3, 2018 (Spanish).
personal data
SURNAME Sacerdote de Lustig, Eugenia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sacerdote, Eugenia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-Argentinian medic
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Turin , Italy
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 2011
Place of death Buenos Aires , Argentina