Scientific biography: Up to 1945

Training as a chemist and biochemist

The Spanish scientist Faustino Cordón Bonet was born in Madrid in 1909. He studied Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid, from which he graduated in 1931. When the Spanish Civil War broke out he was preparing his application for the Organic Chemistry Chair. However, at the end of the war he was unable to continue his academic career and went into experimental research for the private industrial sector.

With his teacher Fernando Calvet and other colleagues at the Zeltia laboratory. Porriño, Galicia, 1943

From 1941 to 1945 he worked at Zeltia laboratories. His director was Dr. Fernando Calvet (a biochemist who had trained with the Nobel laureates Euler and Wieland and had been stripped of his chair at the university because of his political opinions), whom F. Cordón always considered to be his mentor. With him he achieved a sound training as an experimental chemist and learned to develop his rigorous capacity of observation in the laboratory.

His first experimental work was to analyse why certain commercial brands of insulin were highly unstable when dissolved. He discovered that the cause was the existence of a pancreatic enzyme which he called insulinase, and he documented its characteristics.