The Severo Ochoa Chapter of the Spanish Honor Society is named for a Nobel Prize winning hispanic biochemist.
Severo Ochoa was born on September 24, 1905, in Luarca, Spain. He grew up in Malaga, Spain, where he received a private school education in preparation for entrance into Malaga College, which is comparable to an American high school. It was here that Ochoa first became interested in the biological sciences. He received his B.A. from Malaga in 1921, after which he spent one year studying the prerequisite courses for medical school. In 1923 he enrolled at the University of Madrid's Medical School.
By the end of his second year in medical school, Ochoa had decided on a profession in biological research and began to work under his physiology teacher at a nearby laboratory. He received his medical degree in 1929 and shortly began work at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. After doing research for several years in laboratories all across Europe, Ochoa and his wife, Carmen Garcia, decided to move to the United States, partly a consequence of the Spanish Civil War; he became an American citizen in 1956.
Ochoa became interested in DNA research in the 1950s and began to focus on the newly discovered RNA molecule. He researched the involvement of enzymes in combining nucleotides into long chains of nucleic acids. In 1955 he developed a method for synthesizing RNA molecules in the laboratory, the first time such a thing had been done. For his work, Ochoa shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Arthur Kornberg in 1959. Kornberg had applied Ochoa's techniques to the synthesis of DNA molecules.
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