Aristides Leão
| Aristides Leão | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 3, 1914 Rio de Janeiro |
| Died |
December 14, 1993 (aged 79) Rio de Janeiro |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Institutions | Biophysics Institute |
Aristides de Azevedo Pacheco Leão (August 3, 1914 – December 14, 1993 in Rio de Janeiro) was one of the most important Brazilian biologists and scientists, one of the founders of the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the discoverer of cortical spreading depression, an electrophysiological phenomenon of the central nervous system, which received his name.
Leão was born to an intellectual family in Rio de Janeiro. He started studying medicine at the University of São Paulo, but had to interrupt it, due to a bout of tuberculosis. Under the influence of his uncle, Antonio Pacheco Leão, who was the director of the Botanical Gardens of Rio de Janeiro, he decided instead to follow a research career and went to the United States to study further. There he obtained a masters (1942) and a doctorate (1943) in physiology at the Harvard Medical School, with an experimental investigation of epilepsy in the cerebral cortex of rabbits. In collaboration with his supervisors, Arturo Rosenblueth and Hallowell Davis, he analyzed the cycle of excitability of cortex neurons (nerve cells) after the convulsive phenomena, and was the first to identify the important phenomenon of a decrease of the excitability, spread in increasing circles around the initial focus, which he named spreading depression. The phenomenon was named Leão's wave and brought him great attention after this work was published in 1944 in one of the main neurophysiology journals. For the rest of his life, Dr. Leão became one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world, and his original paper is considered one of the classics in the field.
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