My scientific life

Abstract

I was born in Canero, Spain, a very small village in the north coast of Asturias. When I was one year old, my parents moved to Gij on, also in Asturias, where I spent my childhood and early youth. There, I attended the school and obtained the baccalaureate title in 1954. Since I wanted to pursue a university career, I had to spend one year doing the so-called pre-university studies and to decide whether I wanted to follow a scientific or a humanistic career. I choose to go into science. At the end of the year I had to decide which specific career I wanted to follow. I doubted between medicine and chemistry. Since medicine was not available at Oviedo University, close to Gij on, I decided to go to Madrid University to follow a course common for both careers. Finally, I decided to study chemistry. In the third year we studied organic chemistry, and I enjoyed very much the long hours we spent in the laboratory. I thought that, in the future, I would like to do research in organic chemistry. But that was not the case. In the summer of 1958, when I had finished my third year of chemistry, I went to Gij on to spend the holidays, and I was very lucky to meet Severo Ochoa, which had a decisive influence on my future. I attended a conference he gave about his work and I was fascinated by his talk. Since my father was a good friend of Ochoa, besides being cousins in law, I had the chance to talk to him about my future. I had not yet studied biochemistry and he promised to send me a biochemistry book. I was very excited when I received the book General Biochemistry by Fruton and Simmonds, dedicated by Severo Ochoa. When I finished my chemistry studies I had decided to dedicate myself to biochemistry. Ochoa advised me to do the Ph.D. Thesis in Madrid with Alberto Sols, an excellent biochemist, who had been trained with Carl and Gerty Cori at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Then, I could go to Ochoa’s laboratory at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine for a postdoctoral training. Ochoa wrote me a reference letter for Alberto Sols who accepted me, even if I was a woman, since he could not refuse a request made by Severo Ochoa who had already obtained the Nobel Prize. Thus, in January 1961, I started my Ph.D. Thesis working on carbohydrate metabolism, mainly on glucose-phosphate isomerase from yeast. I found that the enzyme has an anomerase-like activity producing the open form of glucose6-phosphate. This was the first finding in my scientific career, something that was very exciting for me. The work was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. At the end of my studies in chemistry, I