Andrew Schally: The Nobel Laureate Who Processed 100,000 Pig Brains in New Orleans

The Nobel Laureate Who Processed 100,000 Pig Brains in New Orleans

Andrew Victor Schally was born on November 30, 1926, in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). His father was a brigadier general in the Polish Army and chief of cabinet to the Polish president. When World War II shattered Poland, young Andrew fled — eventually making his way through Romania, Italy, and Scotland to Canada, where he earned his doctorate in endocrinology from McGill University in 1957. He then came to the United States, became a citizen in 1962, and joined the faculty at Tulane University, where he would do the work that won the Nobel Prize.

The Hypothalamus Discovery

Working at Tulane and the Veterans Administration Medical Center, Schally pursued one of the great questions in endocrinology: how does the brain control the body's hormones? The answer lay in the hypothalamus — a tiny region at the base of the brain that sends chemical signals to the pituitary gland, which in turn regulates growth, reproduction, metabolism, and stress response.

To isolate these hormones, Schally processed an almost unimaginable quantity of biological material. By 1966, he had gone through 100,000 pig brains to isolate tiny quantities of thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH). He also identified gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). The work was painstaking, unglamorous, and revolutionary.

In 1977, Schally shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland. It was one of the foundational discoveries of modern endocrinology.

Saving Lives After the Prize

Schally's work didn't stop at basic science. In the 1980s, he developed GnRH agonistic analogs that became the preferred treatment for advanced prostate cancer, benefiting approximately seventy percent of prostate cancer patients. Andrew Schally died on October 17, 2024, at ninety-seven. He came to New Orleans as a refugee and left it as a Nobel laureate who saved thousands of lives.