Dedication to Ranwel Caputto
Scientists cover a wide spectrum of personalities. At one end are those who are spectacularly clever, know all the answers, but rarely discover new facts. At the other are those who are quiet, profound, and have the ability and the luck of making discoveries. Undoubtedly, Ranwel Caputto is near the latter end of the spectrum. Without haste and without getting nervous, he has had many successes in his career. His style in research is not the systematic type, nor does he bother too much about details. I have the recollection of a talk with him many years ago in connection with cancer research. He was saying that he was tempted to get into the field, so I asked him how he would tackle such a difficult problem. He said: "Well I think I would start playing about with cancer cells, and then something might come out of it." He never did any work on cancer, but he did play around with mammary glands, Vitamin E, nervous tissue, gangliosides, and several other materials. In each of those fields, he contributed with signal advances.
Dr. Caputto was punctually born on the 1st of January, 1914, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he studied medicine at the University of Cordoba, where he was graduated in 1940. In Cordoba he started research with Dr. Alberto Marsal on the alkaline phosphatase of the mammary gland. In 1945, he was awarded a British Council Fellowship and he went to the biochemical laboratory of Cambridge University. There he worked with Malcolm Dixon and was successful in crystallizing triosephosphate dehydrogenase of muscle. Crystallizing an enzyme in those times was a rather important feat. On his return to Argentina, he became a member of a group formed by C. Cardini, L. Leloir, A. Paladini, and R. Trucco which succeeded in isolating glucose 1-6 diphosphate, uridine diphosphate glucose, and other sugar nucleotides. Dr. Caputto's contribution was invaluable, since he carried out some of the crucial experiments and produced some of the best ideas.
In 1953, he left for U.S.A. and worked first at the University of Ohio and then at that of Oklahoma. Those were productive years, during which he was interested in vitamin E and gastric juice proteins.
Back in Cordoba in 1963, he initiated a strong research group in the university, a group that became one of the best in Latin America and the nucleus of the faculty of Cordoba University.
The main field of research of that group has been that of brain gangliosides, their mechanism of biosynthesis, their properties, their role in membrane structure, and their changes under stimulation of nerve cells. Besides that, the addition of amino acids to tubulin was studied and yielded novel results. In all these fields, the contributions of the Cordoba group have been very important.
For those of us who have had the privilege of working with Dr. Caputto, it is a pleasure to wish him the best on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.