Investor's Business Daily, May 21st, 2007
From an early age, Severo Ochoa knew he loved biology and chemistry. But he never intended to practice medicine. He wanted to pursue his passion -- research.
There was a problem, though. In his home country, Spain, in the early 1920s, there were no graduate programs in the biomedical sciences.
So Ochoa, being practical, enrolled as a medical student at the University of Madrid. That way, he could gain the basic knowledge in life sciences that would give him the foundation needed to pursue his dream.
After he graduated, Ochoa (1905-93) knew that to be top-notch he needed to study with the best and brightest.
So he headed straight off for one of Europe's most cutting-edge laboratories -- the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Germany. There he worked under the tutelage of Otto Meyerhof, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology.
Under Meyerhof, Ochoa became fascinated with how enzymes affect metabolic reactions -- a passion he pursued the rest of his life.
"All life is chemistry," Ochoa later remarked. "The more we know of these chemical reactions, the more we know of life."
His pursuit of that passion paid off. In 1959, Ochoa won the Nobel Prize for creating, in a test tube, the molecular chains that were keys to the chemistry of life. The molecules he synthesized, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, helped scientists later uncover the genetic makeup of humans.
But Ochoa's chosen path wasn't an easy one. Political and social upheaval throughout Europe before and during World War II caused Ochoa to move from one lab to another -- nine in total, in three countries.
In 1941, he moved to the U.S. After temporary stints at two research universities, Ochoa found a home at New York University.
Throughout all the disruptions, Ochoa never gave up.
"He was unwavering in his steadfastness and devotion to science," said Arthur Kornberg, who worked under Ochoa in his early years at NYU. "Imperturbably in the face of all kinds of adversities, experimental and social, he always remained on course."
What formed the basis of Ochoa's Nobel Prize-winning work occurred in 1955 when he isolated and characterized several key enzymes of the citric acid cycle.
"This major discovery ... was, like many others, serendipitous, but it was exploited by excellent enzymology and a keen sense of its importance," Kornberg said.
Kornberg shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Ochoa for his separate work synthesizing another life chemical, deoxy-ribonucleic acid, or DNA.
Kornberg says he learned from Ochoa never to let disappointments stop him from pursuing his goals.
"Ochoa's enthusiasm and optimism were infectious. Rather than suffusing a blinding intelligence, Ochoa taught me that with an ethic of unremitting experimental work, good things eventually happen," said Kornberg.
At NYU, the conditions under which Ochoa worked were hardly ideal. Yet he never complained.
As a lowly research associate, he was evicted from his space at his first assigned lab. He arrived on a Sunday afternoon, bent on working, to find that his desk and equipment had been moved into the hallway.
He moved to borrowed space in a rundown lab elsewhere. "He had to move around several times. He often said to me, 'What do we care? We have a lab. To do experiments, that's the important thing,'" said a former colleague, Sylvia Lee-Huang, now a senior professor at NYU's School of Medicine.
Lee-Huang, later known for her AIDS research, says Ochoa wasn't driven by fame or money. "He'd say, 'You work for science,'" she recalled.
In 1946, Ochoa was offered a full professorship and chair of the pharmacology department. He was reluctant to accept. He feared the job would detract from his research. Besides, pharmacology wasn't his forte; biochemistry was.
What finally persuaded him? Modern, well-equipped laboratories in the department. But he took his teaching and administrative responsibilities seriously, following up on every detail.
Proving he could teach and oversee a department, he was offered the post of chairman of the biochemistry department eight years later. He accepted.
Lee-Huang says Ochoa put as much work into teaching as he did into his beloved research. He'd pass on teaching hints to junior lecturers, offering tips on content.
In the lab, he stressed to assistants the importance of having a plan -- knowing what you want to get and how to get there.
"We'd discuss the experiment and then he would take off. He'd say, 'It's your show.' By the time he came back, he expected to see the results," Lee-Huang said.
Ochoa urged his assistants to keep their options open. "If you find something unexpectedly, then look further," he'd say.
Ochoa was exacting about starting experiments the right way. He made sure the first step was always the same: Experiments began with clean enzymes.
In 1980, President Carter presented Ochoa the National Medal of Science for his discoveries involving the individual cell's citric acid cycle, through which it makes energy.
This story originally ran Feb. 7, 2002, on Leaders & Success.
