Our group originally started over forty years ago. A major founding milestone was the postgraduate study of Dr Jose Viña with the late Sir Hans Krebs at the University of Oxford. This has led the whole Group to a “metabolic-oriented approach to problems” as could not be otherwise stemming from Sir Hans Krebs.

Upon his return to Spain, Dr Viña started a small group in the University of Valencia that has been working, on and off, for the last thirty-five years. Sometimes Dr Viña was away from the University of Valencia, but the seed of the Group had been sown.

Very seriously established scientists like Dr Federico Pallardó (former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine – University of Valencia), Dr Juan Sastre, Dr José Estrella, Dr Guillermo Sáez, all of them professors of biochemistry or physiology at the University of Valencia, the late Dr Navarro, University of Cadiz and Dr Juan Llopis, University of Albacete, started their scientific work in this group and later established their own successful independent groups.

Some twenty years ago the major hard-core members of the Group in its present form came to the laboratory and these include Dr Ana Lloret, Dr Mari Carmen Gomez-Cabrera, and Dr Consuelo Borrás. All three are now very well established scientists and form the backbone of the Group. Other permanent members include Dr Juan Gambini, Dr Marta Inglés, and Dr Gloria Olaso. For over twenty years we have been blessed by the help of Marilyn Noyes; she has been integrated in the Group for all these years and we hope for many more to come.

Our collaborations with many colleagues, indeed friends, in Spain are so frequent that we would not like to highlight any particular one of them. We are delighted to have all these friends around the country.

We have established close connections with other labs around the world. Some examples include the labs of Dr Giovanni E Mann and Dr Malcolm Jackson in the UK, Dr Giuseppe Poli in Italy, Dr Helmut Sies and Dr Tilman Grune in Germany, Drs Delamarche in France, Drs Boveris and Dr Fraga in Argentina, and Dr Bruce Ames, Dr Packer, Dr Orr and Dr Li Li Ji in the US.

There is a continuous renewal of our Group and we are happy to have had temporary members on the team from different areas of Spain (not only Valencia) and also from France, Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, the Sahara, and Japan. The names of Dr Frédéric Derbré, Dr Gaetano Serviddio, Dr Diana Rus, Dr Jelena Marcovic, Dr Nancy Mora, and Dr Mika Jikamaru are just a few examples of this international collaboration.

All these most interesting people came to us and enriched the pleasant spirit of this team. We consider ourselves to be a “scientific family” and hope we will continue contributing to biomedical research and enjoying life at our laboratory.