The incredible life of Eugenia Priest of Lustig, the tireless researcher who fought against gender prejudice

The bus line 80 covers from Barrio Sarmiento, in La Matanza to Barrancas de Belgrano, in the city of Buenos Aires. It was the one that an elderly woman drank every day in the Belgrano neighborhood to go to work at the Angel H. Roffo Oncology Institute. Her name was Eugenia Sacerdote de Lustig, she was a researcher emeritus at CONICET and the University of Buenos Aires, a pioneer in the in vitro tissue culture technique in the country and one of the first to experience, in her own body, the vaccine against poliomyelitis.

Born in Turin on November 9, 1910, when she finished the girls’ high school, she had the “crazy idea of ​​continuing” university studies. But the doors of the university were only open to graduates of male high schools. With her cousin Rita Levi Montalcini – 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine – in a hectic year where they studied 12 hours a day, they took all the exams: Latin, Greek, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics. Within a year they were received and could enter university.

They wanted to enter medicine. To reassure her widowed mother, she told her that she would study mathematics. It was inconceivable for a woman to dedicate herself to medicine. A vocation was born to the young Eugenia when she discovered what a hospital was like from the inside when she had to take care of a brother who had suffered an accident. The atmosphere captivated her.

With their cousin they fought against everything. In the faculty there were only 4 out of 500 males, and both their classmates and the professors accepted them easily. They were the subject of every practical joke imaginable (which was not called bullying at the time). They even bribed the doorman to enter through a side door to avoid the daily harassment of his teammates.

She was 24 years old when it was received and had to defend her thesis with the fascist shield pinned to her blouse. He worked in a chair of anatomy and histology, in 1937 he married and the following year his daughter was born. She moved to Rome in hopes of getting a job as a doctor.

Since his entire family is of Jewish origin, when Benito Mussolini implemented the laws of racial persecution, her husband Maurizio Lustig, engineer and his brother lost their jobs. Her doctor’s card was disabled. The only way out was to emigrate: they could not go to the United States, which had the quotas covered. As the Pirelli factory, where her husband worked, would open a copper smelting plant in Argentina, they went there, after waiting months for a visa that cost a fortune.

Finally, the plant in Argentina did not open then, and her husband was employed at Pirelli in Brazil and they lived there for a year and a half.

When he arrived in Argentina, he did not get the medical school to recognize him for his Italian title. Nor was his primary and secondary studies valid. The couple with their little daughter rented an apartment on Chirimay Street, in the Caballito neighborhood. When his other children were born, he did not have time to study all the subjects again and he thought he could do research, because they did not require a qualifying degree. It began in the chair of Histology and Embryology. He first worked pro bono and then earned a meager salary. Two years later she was appointed teaching assistant.

In 1947, the director of the Ángel Roffo Institute suggested that she do research on cultured cancer cells, something she had already done in Italy. Three years later it was used at the Malbrán Institute to cultivate on living cells. This is how he divided his days between these two institutes.

Working at Malbrán, she was surprised by the polio epidemic. He diagnosed with live cells, with the enormous risk of contagion that this entailed. He did it until midnight with his technique, Catalina. Children died every day and she sent her children to live with relatives in Uruguay, where she traveled on Saturday night and returned on Sunday.

The World Health Organization sent her a scholarship to the United States and Canada to learn about the studies she was developing Jonas salk, where they experimented with monkeys. Upon his return, he set out to convince the health authorities that the vaccine had to be tested on people. As he encountered resistance, he wanted to lead by example. She and her children were vaccinated.

In 1958, as a result of a union conflict, he resigned from Malbrán and when the rector of the UBA Risieri Frondizi He called a contest of professors for all the faculties, he presented himself for the position in the chair of Cellular Biology, in the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences. The rector himself sent her the recognition of her medical degree. Of all the awards and recognitions she received, for her that was the most important, as she confessed years later.

On July 29, 1966, the fateful night of the long canes, he had gone in search of a public telephone to warn his family that he would be late for a meeting between teachers. In his absence, the police detained everyone. He was out of work again.

She won the competition for head of the Oncological Research department at Roffo, where she retired in 1986. She also served as a researcher at Conicet, where she was distinguished as an emerita. Her husband passed away in 1970.

First it was a tumor in one eye that was treated in the United States. Then a familial degenerative maculopathy left her blind. She replaced reading with cassettes that were sent to her periodically and she was a member of a library for the blind. Friends who read specialized publications to her kept her informed of advances in science.

THe was 90 years old when he set out to study the mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alhzeimer, together with neurologists and biochemists. In a journalistic interview they asked him how long he was going to continue: “Until I get my head off”.

She always remembered that when she finished elementary school in Italy, as a prize they took her to see a cinema. He went to see a movie that stuck with him for life: it told the story of an Italian boy who traveled to Argentina to find his mother, who made a living as a cook. The story moved him to tears and he could not imagine that decades later she would make history in scientific research in that distant country where even a line of groups would distinguish her as an illustrious passenger.

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