Juan Negrín López
(Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, 1892 - París, 1956)

Juan Negrín López was born into a middle class family of merchants. In 1906, he moved to Germany to study medicine at the University of Kiel, and then to Leipzig, at the famous Institute of Physiology where he studied with Theodor von Brücke. The Institute, created by Carl Ludwig in 1865, was a world-famous research center that attracted scientists from around the world.

Negrín’s scientific work in Leipzig focused on the activity of the adrenal glands and their relationship with the central nervous system. His research sought to determine the direct neural control of glucose levels, and identify a mechanism of indirect regulation through adrenaline levels in the blood.

Negrín obtained his Ph.D. in Leipzig (1912) and worked as research assistant, but declined a position as Privatdozent and left Germany because of the Great War in1915. During this period, he worked with
Pi Sunyer’s physiology research team in Catalonia and published in the Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Biología. He planned to continue his research in the United States, in the physiology laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and at Cornell University. He requested financial support to the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE); instead, its president, Santiago Ramón y Cajal offered him to head the General Physiology Laboratory newly opened in the Residencia de Estudiantes (1916), located next to the laboratories of General Chemistry, Microscopic Anatomy, Serology, and Bacteriology. A few years later, the Residencia’s lab joined the network of scientific laboratories of the JAE.

Negrín continued his studies at the University of Madrid and obtained his second Ph.D. with a dissertation on “El tono vascular y el mecanismo de la acción vasotónica del esplácnico” (1920).
He became Professor of Physiology in 1922.

The conditions of the General Physiology Laboratory were not optimal, but Negrín created an excellent library with books by Spanish and foreign specialists, periodicals, and scientific monographs. The equipment was adequate, and the research team designed new instruments that were later made at the Instituto Torres Quevedo. Some of them were presented to the international scientific community; the stalagmometer, an instrument for determining exactly the number of drops of liquid passing through the blood vessels, was exhibited at the International Congress of Physiology in Paris (1920).

In the laboratory, Negrín and his disciple J. D. Hernández Guerra, taught physiology to students of medicine. They formed a team of specialists that earned international recognition, such as José Miguel Sacristán, and J. Corral, and their young assistants, Ramón Pérez-Cirera, Francisco Grande Covián, Blas Cabrera Sánchez, Rafael Méndez, José García Valdecasas, and Severo Ochoa.

They focused their research on the nervous system, conducting experiments on sympathetic nerve endings, vasomotor reflexes, regulation of vascular tone, the glands, the receptors, and the analysis of biological fluids, vitamins, diet and its deficiencies, and muscle physiology.

Negrín’s closest collaborator was J. D. Hernández Guerra, whose research focused on cardiac action of pancreatic extracts, urination and vitamins. In 1928, he published, in collaboration with Severo Ochoa, Elementos de Bioquímica para la docencia universitaria. José Miguel Sacristán, whose interest was brain physiology, established a scientific link with Negrín and Achúcarro, and obtained a grant to study with Alzheimer and Kraepelin in Munich. Ramón Pérez-Cirera was formed at the Collêge de France in Paris, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Cambridge, Rostock, Berlin and Estonia, where he studied electrophysiology and muscle physiology. Francisco Grande Covián obtained a grant from the JAE to study at the Institute of Physiology (Freiburg), Copenhagen, Lund, London, Heidelberg, and Göttingen. Rafael Méndez was a fellow in Koenigsberg and Edinburgh, and later expanded his studies in Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Switzerland.

Severo Ochoa worked with Negrín as an intern his laboratory, and as assistant professor in his chair in physiology in the university. He obtained a grant from the JAE to study in Glasgow, Berlin, Heidelberg, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), University College (London), and the Marine Biological Station at Plymouth.

Negrín’s collaborators and disciples were also Blas Cabrera Sánchez, José Puche Álvarez, J. Corral, J. García Valdecasas, and many others who started their research in Negrín’s laboratory and later became world-known figures in physiological and biochemical research. Juan Negrín’s great accomplishment was to promote a school of physiology whose members achieved great prestige despite their dispersal into exile.

Exile was also Negrín’s destination. He had been President of the Republican government from May 1937 to March 1939. He went to Paris, where he organized the Servicio de Evacuación de los Republicanos Españoles (SERE), and in 1940 he moved to London where he lived for five years, combining politics with science. He delivered a lecture at The British Society for the Advance of Science on "Science and Government," and collaborated with J. B. S. Haldane in his research on the effects of pressure on the body. In 1949, he attended the congress of the British Physiological Society in London. He died of heart failure at the age of sixty-four in Paris and was buried privately in the Père Lachaise cemetery.