Gabriella Morreale, the renovator of experimental Endocrinology in Spain.
Gabriella Morreale was born on April 7, 1930 in Milan, daughter of the Sicilian biologist and diplomat Eugenio Morreale and the Milanese Emilia de Castro, also a biologist. She lived in Vienna and Baltimore before settling in Malaga at the age of 11. In 1953 she married Spanish physician and surgeon Francisco Escobar del Rey, becoming a Spanish citizen.
Morreale devoted her life to the study of the role of iodine and thyroid hormones in fetal and infant brain development. In the 1970s she initiated the routine measurement of TSH and thyroid hormones in heel blood of newborns to prevent mental deficiency due to untreated congenital hypothyroidism. Simultaneously, she demonstrated the importance of maternal thyroid hormones and the mother's access to iodine in fetal brain development, helping to define the nutritional iodine requirements of pregnant women.
Together with her husband, Francisco Escobar del Rey, she conducted numerous epidemiological studies in all regions of Spain that provided in-depth knowledge of the problem of iodine deficiency and its psychosocial consequences. In 1976 they both initiated a nationwide prevention program for mental deficiency due to congenital hypothyroidism based on the heel prick test, which allowed early diagnosis and treatment with thyroid hormone of a very large number of children who would have inevitably developed profound mental deficiency if they had not been treated. A few years later, UNICEF adopted the test and began to apply it worldwide, and since 1990 the WHO has included iodine consumption during pregnancy and early childhood in its table of rights. According to Juan Bernal and M.ª Jesús Obregón of the Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas Sols-Morreale in Madrid, "Her work has had a great impact on public health actions that have prevented thousands of cases of mental retardation".
Morreale spent time at the Department of Endocrinology of the University of Leiden (Holland) at the invitation of Professor Andreas Querido. In 1957 she joined the CSIC at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas and founded the Thyroid Studies Section of the Instituto Gregorio Marañón (1963-1975). In 1975, as a Full Professor, she moved with her group to the Faculty of Medicine of the UAM and was a key figure in the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas in 1984, through the joint of the experimental Endocrinology group, directed by her, and the Institute of Enzymology, directed by Alberto Sols. Gabriella Morreale remained active until she was 80 years old, the last years of her life as an honorary doctor.
Morreale has trained numerous scientists in the field of thyroid hormone endocrinology, both from a basic and applied point of view. According to her biography, it is possible to define her as the founder of experimental and molecular Endocrinology in Spain, together with her excellent collaborators.