An Obituary to Ivan Izquierdo (1937–2021)

Photo courtesy of Camila Cunha, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). The science community has lost one of its giants. Neurobiologist Ivan Izquierdo died on February 9th at his home in Porto Alegre, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Ivan was recognized primarily for his role in uncovering the molecular and neurochemical mechanisms underlying different stages of memory formation and extinction in several brain areas. Ivan Antonio Izquierdo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on September 16th 1937, the son of Juan Antonio Izquierdo of Spanish descendancy, and Margarita Gobic, who was born in Croatia. A young Ivan owed an interest in memory from reading the famous Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who would remain one of Ivan’s greatest inspirations throughout his life. In particular, one of Borges’ short stories, Funes the Memorious, described the life of Funes, a man with perfect memory, and the troubling consequences that had on his life. As a high school student, Ivan attended many public lectures by Borges and approached him several times for short conversations. In 1955, Ivan entered the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Medical School as a student. Despite the country being then ruled by a military dictatorship, UBA had a vibrant biomedical research scene, with a faculty that included two Nobel Prize winners, physiologist Bernardo Houssay and biochemist Luis Leloir. Excited to have an opportunity to, in his own words, “bite from the apple of research”, Ivan went to Professor Houssay and asked to join his team. He considered this event as the beginning of his career as a researcher. Ivan was already working in neuroscience in the late 1950s and early 1960s, supervised by his own father Juan, also a neuroscientist, when he conducted his Ph.D. research in pharmacology as part of the UBA M.D./Ph.D. program for medical students. After two summer research internships at the University of São Paulo in Ribeirão Preto in 1958 and 1959, he started feeling at home in Brazil. Shortly after graduating, in 1962, Ivan was awarded a fellowship to do postdoctoral work at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), under the supervision of Pepe Segundo. Before moving to the US, however, Ivan made two trips to the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre where he met his future wife Ivone de Moraes. They got married 1 year later and went to live together in Los Angeles. Ivan and Ivone would remain married for 57 years until his death. At UCLA, Ivan conducted electrophysiological experiments involving conditioning during sleep in cats. He later moved to John Green’s laboratory to become a pioneer working on synaptic facilitation, where he contributed to the early basis of what would later become the field of research on long-term potentiation (LTP) as one of the cellular bases of memory. Ivan eventually moved back home to Argentina in 1964. In 1967, he was hired as Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Córdoba, where a new and promising research center was being launched. However, due to political turmoil in Argentina at the time, in 1973 Ivan, Ivone and their two sons decided to emigrate to Porto Alegre, where Ivan was hired as Professor of Pharmacology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). With the exception of serving as a Professor for a few years at the São Paulo Medical School (now Federal University of São Paulo, UNIFESP) between 1975 and 1977, and a period in Ottawa, Canada in 1978, Ivan would live in Porto Alegre until the end of his life, heading his Center for Memory at the UFRGS Department of Biochemistry until his retirement from the university in 2003. However, still at the peak of his energy and creativity, it did not take long for him to take on a new position as a Professor and Scientific Director of the newly established Brain Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUCRS) medical school in Porto Alegre, a position he held for the rest of his life. Ivan’s arrival at UFRGS radically transformed the landscape of biomedical science, not only at the university, but the entire region. Ivan’s drive led students and faculty members to pursue ambitious science. The many students he mentored directly (Ivan supervised 62 PhD. theses throughout his career) or inspired, went on to become scientific and academic leaders themselves, launching new successful neuroscience laboratories and graduate programs in dozens of institutions in Southern Brazil and beyond. It would be no exaggeration to say that South American neuroscience is imprinted with the way Ivan thought about and did science. Ivan, together with his students and collaborators made many important discoveries and countless crucial contributions to our understanding of memory, including the description, in the 1970s and 1980s, of how memories are regulated by endogenous opioids and benzodiazepines. From the early 1990s on, mostly by using the simple neuropharmacological approach of selectively manipulating neurochemical systems within specific brain subareas with the use of intracerebral infusions given to rats trained in behavioral tasks (especially inhibitory avoidance, a type of aversive conditioning), Ivan’s group built an increasingly detailed “map” of the sequence of molecular events in the dorsal hippocampus that underlie or influence memory formation, retrieval, and extinction. His work also characterized how different brain areas including the hippocampus, amygdala, and cortical regions act simultaneously or sequentially to promote memory formation, and he demonstrated the mechanistic distinction between short- and long-term memories. His publication record has over 600 published articles with more than 25,000 citations. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Academy of Sciences of the Developing Word (TWAS), and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Among his multiple awards and recognitions, he was awarded the highest Presidential Medal in Brazil, given to him personally by former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Ivan had a deep interest and monumental knowledge of literature (he was a published author of short stories himself), cinema, music, history, politics, religion, and sports, and he traveled to over 70 countries during his life. Always enthusiastic about all sorts of human affairs, he was a delight to be around, his office door always open, always available to talk about anything, bringing original insights and a unique sense of humor to the conversation. Being humble, especially towards students and younger colleagues, was one of his most striking characteristics. Discussing a recent movie or soccer game among a group of students in the laboratory’s coffee spot, he was usually the humblest and funniest person in the room. In his 60s, he would still be at the laboratory bench to run experiments side-by-side with us students. All of us called him “Master”, a nickname that reflected both profound respect and personal closeness. On a more personal note, the authors of this obituary are among several couples that started dating while both were Ph.D. students in Ivan’s laboratory—with his full and enthusiastic blessing—and went on to get married. Always encouraging, supportive, and protective of his students, Ivan taught us the way we must approach science, the way to treat others with respect, and the confidence required to thrive in a scientific career. Ivan Izquierdo was a titan of neuroscience in South America and the world and a phenomenal human being who trained and inspired generations of scientists. He will be missed deeply by his students, colleagues, friends, and family around the world. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Picture courtesy of Camila Cunha, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). No relevant funding is associated with this article.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.