Photographs from the Dr. Michael Somogyi Collection

Dr. Michael Somogyi was born in Austria-Hungary in 1883 and earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Budapest in 1905. After immigrating to the United States, Somogyi worked as a Biochemistry Assistant at Cornell University Medical College from 1906 to 1908 before returning to Budapest to become chief chemist of the Municipal Laboratory. Somogyi earned his Ph.D. from the University of Budapest in 1914 and subsequently returned to the United States in 1922 in the wake of ongoing political turmoil in his homeland. While serving as an instructor in biochemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, Somogyi collaborated with Drs. Phillip A. Shaffer and Edward Adelbert Doisy on the development of a new method for preparing insulin of a sufficient quantity and quality viable for the treatment of diabetes. Somogyi’s work at Washington University inspired a life-long interest in the treatment and cure of diabetes and over the course of his career he published over seventy papers on subjects ranging from the determination of glucose in blood and urine to the physiology of the behavior of insulin and other hormones. Somogyi is best known for his theory, first presented at a medical society meeting in 1938, that excessive insulin treatment could destabilize diabetes; this theory, that hypoglycemia begets hyperglycemia, eventually became known as the “Somogyi effect.” In 1926, Somogyi became the first biochemist appointed to the staff of the newlyopened Jewish Hospital of St. Louis and remained there as director of the clinical laboratory until his retirement in 1957. Dr. Somogyi died in 1971 in St. Louis at age 88.