Carlos Chagas

Chagas was the son of José Justiniano das Chagas, a coffee farmer at Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, and Mariana Cândida Chagas (née Ribeiro de Castro), both of Portuguese descent. where the family spent half of their times. He was the eldest of four children, and his father died when he was four years old. At age seven, his mother enrolled him to Jesuit boarding school in São Paulo. In 1888, a political turmoil erupted as Emperor Dom Pedro II declared abolition of slavery. Chagas was compelled to leave the school. His mother then transferred him to a nearer Catholic school called San Antonio, where he completed up to his secondary studies. Chagas entered the School of Mining Engineering at Ouro Preto, but suffered from beri-beri in 1895 that incapacitated him from continuing those studies. While recovering in Oliveira, his uncle Carlos Ribeiro de Castro, an established physician, persuaded him to take up medicine. For the dissertation research, Fajardo introduced Chagas to Oswaldo Cruz (1872–1917) founder of the Manguinhos Institute (which was later renamed after Cruz) who would be most suitable to guide him. This led to a lasting friendship between Chagas and Cruz, and Chagas's lifelong association with Cruz's institute. == Early career ==

After a brief stint as a medical practitioner in the hinterlands, Chagas accepted a position in anti-malarial campaigns. In 1905, he worked under the Docas de Santos company in the port authority of Santos, São Paulo, with the mission of fighting the malaria epidemic, which was affecting its workers. With successful malaria prevention, the company was able to complete construction on the port. There, he introduced an innovation, which consisted in using pyrethrum, an insecticide, to treat households, with surprising success. His published work on this method served as the basis of prevention of malaria all over the world, and was adopted by a service of the Ministry of Health in Brazil, which was established expressly for this purpose. In 1906, Chagas returned to Rio de Janeiro and joined the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, where he worked for the rest of his life. In 1907, there was an outbreak of malaria at the Minas Gerais hinterland, largely affecting railroad workers and greatly hampered the construction on new railway from Rio de Janeiro to the city of Belém in the Amazon. The Brazilian government asked Cruz for help. Cruz immediately assigned Chagas, with an assistant, Belisario Penna, to make the investigation. Camping at Lassance, a small town near the São Francisco River, Chagas stayed there for two years and was able to contain the infection after a year of work. ==Major discoveries ==

Chagas disease and King Albert I of Belgium at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in 1920 in 1925 During his investigation of malaria in Lassance, Chagas observed the peculiar infestation of the rural houses with a large hematophagous insect of the genus Triatoma, a kind of "assassin bug" or "kissing bug" (barbeiro, "barber" in Portuguese, so-called because it sucked the blood at night by biting the faces of its victims). In his "Historic Restrospect", Chagas described:On a journey to Pirapora and while spending the night in an engineers' camp Dr. Belisario Penna and I first made the acquaintance of the barbeiro, shown to us by Dr. Cantarino Motta, chief of the engineering committee. Once we heard of the blood-sucking habits of this insect and of its proliferation in human dwelling-places, we became very interested in knowing its exact biology and above all in ascertaining if by any chance it were, as I immediately supposed, a transmitter of any parasite of man or of another vertebrate. in honor of Oswaldo Cruz and later that year as Schizotrypanum cruzi, and then once again as Trypanosoma cruzi. Chagas's initial suspicion that the parasite could infect human and other vertebrates was proven right: he soon found the parasites in the blood of a cat. a two-year-old girl whom he had seen in the same hut where that cat had been a few weeks before. Chagas heart disease Upon discovering Trypanosoma cruzi as the parasite of humans, Chagas additionally discovered that the parasite was responsible for a deadly heart disease now known as Chagas heart disease or Chagas cardiomyopathy. In 1909, he reported in the Brazilian medical journal, Brazil Médico, a case of human trypanosomiasis and noted the association with severe heart disease. In 1910, he further noticed that the parasitic infection could be classified into at least three different conditions, chronic heart disease, brain disorder, and thyroid problem, especially of goiter. He made an autopsy report of an individual with heart failure whom he found to have heavy trypanosome infection that was associated with blood cell accumulation (interstitial mononuclear cell infiltration) in the heart. Trypanosoma minasense and Pneumocystis Chagas was also the first to discover the parasitic fungal genus Pneumocystis in the lungs of his experimentally trypanosome-infected guinea pigs. In 1908, he reported in Brazil Médico the blood sample of marmosets had protozoan parasites that he named Trypanosoma minasense. He also described in it that the parasite was associated with another protozoan but which he could not identify. At the time, he did not recognize it as a separate organism from the protozoan he had identified, but believed it as part of the life cycle stage of the protozoan. Therefore, he described both the fungi and the protozoan as Schizotrypanum cruzi. The original name of the species Pneumocystis carinii was later changed to Pneumocystis jirovecii when it was established that the parasite is a fungus that causes human infection. Chagas followed the literature closely and quickly confirmed the distinction, whereupon he again adopted the name Trypanosoma cruzi for the protozoan. == Personal life ==

Chagas was a studious student. At the medical school, he was nicknamed "two-candle student" as he would use up two candles every evening for reading as there was no electricity in Rio de Janeiro at the time. It was during his medical course that his teacher, Miguel Couto, introduced him to a relative, Fernando Lobo. He eventually married Lobo's daughter, Iris. One of his sons, Carlos Chagas Filho (1910–2000), became an eminent and internationally recognized scientist in the field of neurophysiology and president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Another son, Evandro Chagas (1905–1940), was also a physician and researcher in tropical medicine, who died in a plane crash at 35 years of age. His name is honoured by the important biomedical institution Instituto Evandro Chagas, in Belém, state of Pará. ==Later life and death==

and Carlos Chagas Filho After the death of his mentor in 1917, Chagas accepted Cruz's directorship of the institute, a post he held until his own death in 1934. From 1920 to 1924, he became the director of the Department of Health in Brazil, the set up of which he initiated. Chagas was very active in organizing special health-care and prevention services and campaigns for the Spanish flu epidemics, sexually transmitted diseases, leprosy, pediatrics, tuberculosis, and rural endemic diseases. He created a nursing school and was the founder of the concept of sanitary medicine, the first chairman of tropical medicine and the graduate study of hygiene. Chagas died in Rio de Janeiro from a heart attack in 1934, at the age of 55. s banknote == Awards and honours ==

Chagas was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and received the prestigious Schaudinn Prize for the best work in protozoology and tropical medicine, on June 22, 1912. The contenders included Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), Emile Roux (1853–1933), Ilya Mechnikov (1845–1916), Charles Laveran (1845–1922), Charles Nicolle (1866–1936), and Sir William Boog Leishman (1865–1926), several of whom had already received or would receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Chagas was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1913 and 1921, but never received any. commemorating the day Chagas discovered T. cruzi from Berenice. == Nobel Prize controversy ==

Chagas' discovery was recognized at home and abroad as one of the most important achievements in parasitology. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize each time by only a single Brazilian nominator. In 1913, 63 scientists were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the top two nominees having received nine and eight nominations, respectively. In 1921, 42 scientists were nominated for the award, the top four nominees having received 11, nine, seven, and seven nominations, respectively. A hundred years after the discovery of the disease, speculation still remains regarding the two official nominations of Carlos Chagas for the Nobel Prize. ==References==