Introducing Nicolas G. Bazan, the 2007 recipient of the Proctor Medal.

It is my honor to introduce this year’s recipient of the Proctor Medal, Nicolas G. Bazan. By any measure, Nic is a big man. A welcome from him usually includes a big bear hug. He also has a huge appetite for life, for curiosity, for innovation, for the growth of young scientists, and for food and music. As a consequence, his work has been extraordinarily honored with prizes similar to today’s Proctor Medal. These honors have come from nearly every scientific organization involved in neuroscience and lipid biochemistry. Nic’s early work brought him international attention because of his important observation that brain areas affected by stroke release arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acids. By age 28, having completed his studies in medical school and postdoctoral studies at Harvard and in New York and Toronto, he returned to Argentina to set up a biochemistry institute in Bahia Blanca. He built the institute during a dark period in Argentinean history in the 1970s, when a military junta made intolerable assaults on human rights. Many who openly opposed the regime simply disappeared, including his wife Haydee’s brother-in-law. He chaired or spoke at many national and international meetings in Argentina, Europe, and the United States. In the course of his travels he acquired very close friends who would soon turn out to be extremely valuable. His international renown also brought him to the attention of the ruling military junta. They were uncertain whether they could control this brilliant man who had so many friends outside of Argentina. I met him for the first time during a symposium marking the dedication of the new Cullen Eye Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in February 1978. Three years later, Nic returned to Argentina from a meeting in Virginia only to learn that he had been fired from his directorship of the biochemistry institute and from his professorship at the University of the South. This elicited international furor with letters in Science and three articles in Nature as well as wide coverage in the Argentinean press as it began to regain its independence (Fig. 1). Nic fought back throughout the spring of 1981, claiming he had no association with the opponents of the government, although he had protested against prior arbitrary firings of other faculty. About that time, several of us received letters from Herb Kaufman announcing a search for a professor to serve as director of research in his new Department of Ophthalmology at Louisiana State University Medical School. Herb was going to a meeting in Brazil. The late Dr. Richard Lolley, then at UCLA, encouraged Herb to contact Nic, and Nic flew incognito to Brazil. The meeting was productive. Then, in June 1981, Nic learned that not only wasn’t he going to get his job back, but his life and the lives of his family were threatened. He was being followed and was receiving ominous phone calls. He called his friend, Gene Anderson in Houston, collect, at night, from a pay phone in Buenos Aires. Gene called me about Nic’s urgent call and said he was waiting for a call back at that phone booth. Gene confirmed Herb’s support. I had a friend in Washington, DC, whom I had met when we were at Cal Tech in 1969. She referred me to a friend in the State Department who then directed me to the head of the Argentine desk. He knew of Nic’s plight and that his two oldest daughters were U.S. citizens, since they were born here while Nic was in training in the 1960s. He assured me that Nic would be contacted immediately at the phone booth.