{"id":204472,"date":"2015-12-02T15:15:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=204472"},"modified":"2015-12-02T17:36:25","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T19:36:25","slug":"the-tropical-disease-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-tropical-disease-scientist\/","title":{"rendered":"The tropical disease scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FCW_Hildebrando_Hildebrando\"L\u00c9O RAMOS<\/span>Published in October 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

Researcher and public health physician Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva died on September 24, 2014, in S\u00e3o Paulo at the age of 86. He had been previously hospitalized for pneumonia at the Heart Institute (InCor) in S\u00e3o Paulo. Hildebrando did not respond to treatment and suffered multiple organ failure. The researcher’s coffin was available for viewing only by family and friends, as reported by one of his closest friends, parasitologist Erney Plessmann de Camargo, researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP). \u201cI met Hildebrando at the USP School of Medicine in 1959, and we worked together on many research projects,\u201d said Camargo, who collaborated with Hildebrando on malaria research in the state of Rond\u00f4nia.<\/p>\n

A professor emeritus at USP and at the Federal University of Rond\u00f4nia, Luiz Hildebrando was one of the most respected specialists in tropical medicine in the world. He spent most of his career at the Pasteur Institute in France, where he moved after being persecuted by the military government established in Brazil in 1964, when he was an associate professor at the USP School of Medicine. He returned to Brazil in the 1990s and began research on malaria in Rond\u00f4nia.<\/p>\n

He completed his degree in Medicine at USP in 1953, and the following year he traveled with parasitologist Samuel Pessoa to Miseric\u00f3rdia de Pianc\u00f3, in the scrublands of the state of Para\u00edba, where he helped organize the Parasitology Laboratory and taught classes in the field at the new Jo\u00e3o Pessoa School of Medicine. There he studied the epidemiology of schistosomiasis and Chagas disease from 1954 to 1956. It was in this location that, through the lens of a microscope and the light of an amateurish electrical connection, he saw the parasite Schistosoma mansoni<\/em>, which was very common along the northeastern coast, but until then had never been seen in the scrublands. For the first time, he felt “the aesthetic thrill of discovery,” as he recounted in an interview in 2013 when he won an award from the Conrado Wessel Foundation in the Medicine category, the twelfth time that the honor had been given.<\/p>\n

\"Hildebrando_luizFAMILY ARCHIVES<\/span>Invited to become an assistant professor of parasitology at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP), he returned to S\u00e3o Paulo and carried out research on chemotherapy for American trypanosomiasis from 1956 to 1960. After passing the exam to become an associate professor, he obtained a grant from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to carry out post-doctoral research. He spent a year at the Free University in Brussels. In 1962 and 1963 he worked at the Pasteur Institute with researcher Fran\u00e7ois Jacob, who, along with Jacques Monod, had just published their model for the regulation of gene expression in prokaryotes that would earn them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1965. He returned to Brazil in late 1963 and set up the Laboratory for Protozoa Genetics at the USP School of Medicine with researcher Erney Camargo.<\/p>\n

Then came the military coup. A militant communist since adolescence, Luiz Hildebrando was imprisoned for three months on the ship Raul Soares after having been reported for collecting money and giving asylum to individuals being hunted. He was fired from his university post by an act of Governor Ademar de Barros on the last day on which Institutional Act No. 1 was in force. He returned to Paris and to the Pasteur Institute, but in 1967, spurred by a campaign to repatriate scientists, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he taught a course in Brazil on molecular genetics at the USP Biochemistry Department. The following year, he accepted a position as professor in the Genetics Department at the USP Ribeir\u00e3o Preto campus, researching the genetics of unicellular eukaryotes. In 1969, he was again discharged, this time by Institutional Act No<\/sup>. 5, and he returned to Paris and his positions at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Pasteur Institute. During his exile, he became a key well-known intellectual for Brazilian exiles in France as the political secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party in Paris.<\/p>\n

In 1971, he was appointed Head of the Cell Differentiation Unit in the Molecular Biology Department of the Pasteur Institute. In 1976, he was invited by Jacques Monod, director of the Pasteur Institute to organize a new unit for Experimental Parasitology. The unit was established in 1978 to carry out research on the molecular biology of malaria parasites, especially Plasmodium falciparum<\/em>. It was a period of intense activity, with a team that carried out studies in experimental models and human volunteers on malaria vaccine candidate molecules.<\/p>\n

In 1990, while still in Paris, he organized a research team in Rond\u00f4nia in collaboration with Erney Camargo. He retired from the Pasteur Institute in 1996 and decided to return to Brazil. He was hired as a full professor of parasitology by USP in 1997, and assumed management of the research programs in Rond\u00f4nia, in USP\u2019s active front in the Amazon. Over the course of a decade, under his capable direction the percentage of malaria cases reported in Rond\u00f4nia decreased from 40% to 7% of the total number of cases of disease in the Amazon region.\u201d He went on to establish the Center for Research in Tropical Medicine (Cepem) under the Rond\u00f4nia Health Department, and founded the Tropical Pathology Research Institute (Ipepatro), which brings together specialists and researchers trained in the graduate programs at the Federal University of Rond\u00f4nia. Ipepatro was absorbed by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and became one of the five new Fiocruz units in 2009. Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva was married and had five children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hildebrando was one of the most respected parasitology experts in the world","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[209,229,260],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-204472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-biology","tag-epidemiology","tag-public-health"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204472"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=204472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}