Early Life and Activities
Born in Bucharest, he was the first of four children of father Costache Paulescu and mother Maria Paulescu. He displayed remarkable abilities as early as his first school years. He learned French, Latin and Ancient Greek at an early age, so that a few years later he became fluent in all these languages and was able to read classical works of Latin and Greek literature in the original. He also had a particular gift for drawing and music and special inclinations towards natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry. He graduated from the Mihai Viteazu High School in Bucharest, in 1888.
In the autumn of 1888, Paulescu left for Paris, where he enrolled in medical school. In 1897 he graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and was immediately appointed as assistant surgeon at the Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours Hospital. In 1900, Paulescu returned to Romania, where he remained until his death (1931) as Head of the Physiology Department of the University of Bucharest Medical School, as well as a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Bucharest.
In 1916, he succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. After a gap during World War I, he resumed his research.
From April 24 to June 23, 1921, Paulescu published four papers at the Romanian Section of the Society of Biology in Paris:
- The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a diabetic animal by way of the blood.
- The influence of the time elapsed from the intravenous pancreatic injection into a diabetic animal.
- The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a normal animal by way of the blood.
An extensive paper on this subject - Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation - was submitted by Paulescu on June 22 to the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in Liège, Belgium, and was published in the August 1921 issue of this journal.
The method used by Paulescu to prepare his pancreatic extract, as published in the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in 1921, was similar to a procedure described by the American researcher Israel S. Kleiner in an article published in 1919 in Journal of Biological Chemistry. Using his procedure, Kleiner had been able to demonstrate significant reductions in the concentration of blood and urinary glucose after intravenous injections of his extract.
Furthermore, Paulescu secured the patent rights for his method of manufacturing pancreine on April 10, 1922 (patent no. 6254) from the Romanian Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Read more about this topic: Nicolae Paulescu
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or activities:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“...I have never known a “movement” in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various “uplifting” activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)