Luis Federico Leloir
The prestige of the Nobel Prize is such that one is suddenly promoted to a new status.
After returning from Cambridge in 1936, I did some work with J. M. Mioz on the oxidation of fatty acids in liver.
We managed to prepare a cell-free system which was active when suitably supplemented, and this was a novel result since the process of oxidation was believed to require the integrity of the cells.
A logical extension of our work on glycogen was to investigate the formation of starch in plants.
The variety of polyprenol phosphate sugars may turn out to be as large as that of sugar nucleotides.
This is only one step in a much larger project. I discovered (no, not me: my team) the function of sugar nucleotides in cell metabolism. I want others to understood this, but it is not easy to explain: this is not a very noteworthy deed, and we hardly know even a little.Collection: Team
I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little.Collection: Humility