Nobel Prize Recipient. He received professional recognition after being awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received the covet award "for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates." He was the third Argentinean to receive the Nobel Prize in any category. A French-born Argentinean with seven siblings, he was born a few weeks after his father's death. His father had come to France seeking medical treatment. His widowed mother returned to Argentina from Paris when he was two years old, where they lived in poverty. After changing his major from architecture to medicine, he graduated as a Medical Doctor at the University of Buenos Aires in 1932 and started his scientific career at the Institute of Physiology, doing research with Bernardo Houssay. He and Houssay were distantly related by marriage. Houssay shared the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with the American researcher, Dr. Carl Cori. In 1947 the research center's name was changed to Leloir Institute. In 1936 he traveled to Cambridge University in England to perform research under the direction of the 1929 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine recipient, Sir Frederick Hopkins. In 1944 he was a Research Assistant in Dr. Cori's laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri before going to Columbia University in New York City. With the support of a host of other scientists, he made his discovery between 1953 and 1955. He also received international recognition for his research in renal hypertension. He became a professor in the Faculty of Sciences at University of Buenos Aires. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received numerous accolades including the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation and the Columbia University's Louisa Gross Horowitz awards, both from the United States; the Argentine Scientific Society, Severo Vaccaro Foundation and the Bunge and Born Foundation awards, all from Argentina; Gairdner Foundation from Canada; Benito Juarez from Mexico; and the Order of the Legion of Honour from France. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, President of the Pan-American Association of Biochemical Societies as well as a host of other professional organizations. He received four honorary degrees from universities in France, Argentina, and Spain. In 1983, Leloir became one of the founding members of the Third World Academy of Sciences and published his autobiography "Long Ago and Far Away." He married and had a daughter. A dedicated scientist at age 81, he performed laboratory research on the day he suddenly died from a heart attack.