Camila

· 27 Jun 2021

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Humberto Fernandez Moran

#expertise Venezuelan scientist. Inventor of the diamond blade, he was a pioneer in electron microscopy techniques and decisive in the scientific modernization process in his country, where he founded the Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research (IVNIC).

Humberto Fernández conducted his first studies between the Zulian capital, Curaçao and New York. In 1936 he entered the German College of Maracaibo and the following year he left for Germany, where he finished high school at the Schulgemeinde Wichersdorf high school in Sallfeld. At the age of fifteen he began his medical studies at the University of Munich. During World War II, six days before the Normandy landing (1944), in a basement and under air bombardment, he graduated in medicine with Summa cum laude.

The following year he revalidated his degree at the Central University of Venezuela and worked at the Maracaibo Psychiatric Hospital, although not for long, because he traveled to the United States to specialize in neurology and neuropathology at George Washington University in Washington D.C. From there he moved to Stockholm in 1947 and worked at Serafimer Hospital with neurosurgeon Herbert Olivecrona. He also began his research in electron microscopy in the laboratories of the Nobel Institute of Physics, invited by Professor Manne Siegbahn (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924) and also at the Institute for Cell and Genetics Research of the Karolinska Institute.

During this period in Sweden, he invented the diamond blade for ultramicrotomy (ultrathin sectioning of biological and metal materials that allowed subcellular structures to be observed) and developed the concept of cryoultramicrotomy (using low temperatures), which would later lead him to invent the electron cryomicroscope. Thus, he managed to observe at an almost atomic level the structure of complex biological (or inanimate) systems in a hydrated state and at very low temperatures, which until then was considered unlikely. In his work The Diamond Blade for Ultrathin Sectioning, published in 1953, Fernández Morán signed as a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Department of Biophysics of the Central University of Venezuela, whose chair he founded in 1951. In Stockholm, she married Swedish Anna Browallius, with whom she would have two daughters. He returned to Venezuela in 1954.