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His daughter Chantal Guillemin confirmed the death but did not know the specific cause.
Dr. Guillemin, founder of the research field known as neuroendocrinology, was born in France and settled in the United States after World War II. He spent his professional training years conducting painstaking experiments in search of minute amounts of brain secretions, “neurohormones” so elusive that many scientists doubted their existence.
Dr. Guillemin was affiliated with the Salk Institute in San Diego when he shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and Andrew V. Schally (the latter a former collaborator turned scientific archenemy).
A 1981 book by New York Times science journalist Nicholas Wade details their 21-year battle, which the polished Dr. Guillemin described as “competition in a good way” and the tougher Schally called “many years of ferocious attacks and bitter reprisals.” “
In violation of scientific practice, the men withheld data from each other and refused to share samples. They made fun of each other’s mistakes on the convention stage. Both were reluctant to share credit for their discoveries, both among themselves and with their lab partners.
At the Nobel ceremony, Wade recounts in his book, Dr. Guillemin and Schally, dressed in tuxedos, “looked like men going to their execution.” By winning the prize together, he observed, “they were denied the victory that each also longed for, the final triumph over the other.”
In fact, all three laureates were instrumental in the development of neuroendocrinology, which emerged in the mid-20th century from a hypothesis that the brain releases chemical signals (hormones) into the bloodstream to control the pituitary gland, the master regulator. which controls the various endocrine organs of the body. Typically, the brain sends signals through electrical impulses and the release of neurotransmitters between cells.
This revolutionary idea challenged the prevailing scientific view of the brain as the seat of higher thought and emotions, rather than an ordinary endocrine gland.
“It is justifiable to say that they have discovered a substantial part of the link between body and soul,” eminent endocrinologist Rolf Luft said of Dr. Guillemin and Schally, citing their work on protein hormones during the Nobel presentation. (Luft also credited Yalow for vital groundwork in a related but different area of research.)
Proving that neurohormones existed was a difficult technical challenge. The substances were produced in the brain structure known as the hypothalamus, hidden near the base of the skull. The brain produced them in such small quantities that they could not be measured in the blood circulating through the body.
The hormones could only be detected within the tiny network of capillaries surrounding the hypothalamus, which itself is “incredibly small,” said Gary Hammer, director of the endocrine oncology program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“It was a Herculean task,” Hammer said.
Dr. Guillemin belonged to a small group of researchers who fanatically dedicated themselves to the search. After seven years of grueling and sometimes gruesome work with animal brains, Dr. Guillemin failed to discover the first target of his search, a hormone known as corticotropin-releasing factor that was involved in the body’s reaction to stress. Schally couldn’t find the substance either.
In 1969, it took Dr. Guillemin another seven years and 270,000 sheep hypothalami to isolate one milligram of thyrotropin-releasing hormone, which directs the pituitary gland to control the thyroid gland. He would continue to look for other hormones, including gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which tells the pituitary to send orders to the ovaries and testicles.
Their discoveries had an impact on many fields of medicine, Hammer said, because understanding how the endocrine system works helped researchers develop treatments for a number of disorders related to the endocrine system.
The isolation and analysis of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, for example, accelerated scientists’ understanding of the hormonal control of the menstrual cycle and, ultimately, the development of birth control pills and hormonal therapies for prostate cancer.
Somatostatin, another hormone found by Dr. Guillemin, is the basis of the nausea drug Zofran and has also been instrumental in the development of therapies that inhibit the growth of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors and other hormone-responsive tumors.
Roger Charles Louis Guillemin was born in Dijon, France, on January 11, 1924. His father was a tool maker. After graduating from the University of Dijon in 1942, he began medical school at the University of Lyon, interrupting his studies to join the French resistance’s efforts to transfer refugees to Switzerland during World War II.
He graduated in medicine in 1949 and then completed a doctorate at the University of Montreal. In 1950, he nearly died after an attack of tuberculous meningitis; The following year he married his nurse, Lucienne Billard. His wife died in 2021, also at age 100. In addition to Chantal, survivors include five other children, François, Claire, Hélène, Elisabeth and Cece; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
After completing his doctorate in 1953, Dr. Guillemin joined the faculty at Baylor University School of Medicine in Houston, where he taught physiology and researched neurohormones, working for a time alongside Schally, who left the institution in 1962. In 1970, Dr. Guillemin moved to the Salk Institute, drawn by a phone call from virologist Jonas Salk and the glorious views of the ocean, he said.
He remained there for most of his career, discovering the hormone somatostatin, which acts on the pituitary gland to suppress growth hormones, and also researching endorphins, brain chemicals that act as natural opiates.
He retired from active research in 1989, but served as interim president of the Salk Institute from 2007 to 2009.
Dr. Guillemin and Schally shared half of the Nobel Prize. The remaining half was awarded to Yalow for the development of radioimmunoassays, which detect substances that exist in the body in very small quantities.
Although perhaps unseemly, Dr. Guillemin’s conflict with Schally could have been key to his success, Wade suggested, because it motivated the scientists to persist in a long and difficult (and ultimately very important) search.
“Science is best done in teams where different expertise is brought to the table,” Hammer said. Dr. Guillemin “was a master at that. He brought together physiologists, chemists, molecular biologists and later cellular biologists to crack the nut.”