The Principal of the Universitat de València, Mavi Mestre, described Santiago Grisolía as “a beautiful person and an indisputable authority for Valencian, Spanish and world science”. Grisolía, a graduate of the Universitat de València, died on Thursday at the age of 99, after a life devoted to scientific research. For the last 25 years he has been the president of the Valencian Council for Culture.
Mavi Mestre said: “It is, and will always be, a great pride for our institution that Dr. Grisolía graduated in Medicine at the Universitat de València, and that he has been part of our university community as doctor ‘honoris causa’ since 1973. He will always be part of our history”.
Santiago Grisolía was born in Valencia in 1923, and graduated in Medicine from the UV in 1944. After obtaining his doctorate at the University of Madrid, in January 1946 he furthered his studies in the United States at New York University with Severo Ochoa. It was at this university that he began his research into carbon dioxide fixation, a subject he never abandoned.
He has published more than 400 scientific papers and around 30 popular articles. He also carried out a great deal of teaching and research over many years in many European and American countries. Professor of biochemistry and biology at the University of Chicago (1946), Wisconsin (1948) and Kansas (1954), where he became a professor and extended his research on the urea cycle and demonstrated that citrulline is an intermediate in this cycle.
President of the Scientific Coordination Committee of the Human Genome Project for UNESCO, he was vice-president of the Board of Trustees of the Valencian Foundation for Biomedical Research and advisor to the President of the Generalitat (Valencian Government) for Science and Technology. He has chaired the Valencian Council for Culture since 1996 and the advisory boards of the Menéndez y Pelayo International University in Valencia and the Science Museums of Cuenca and Valencia.
