Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin was born in
Stockholm, the son of two noted scientists,
Hans von Euler-Chelpin, a professor of
chemistry, and
Astrid Cleve, a professor of
botany and
geology. His father was German and the recipient of
Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929, and his maternal grandfather was
Per Teodor Cleve, Professor of
Chemistry at the
Uppsala University, and the discoverer of the
chemical elements
thulium and
holmium. Von Euler-Chelpin studied
medicine at the
Karolinska Institute in 1922. At Karolinska, he worked under Robin Fåhraeus in
blood sedimentation and
rheology and did research work on the
pathophysiology of
vasoconstriction. He presented his doctoral thesis in 1930, and was appointed as assistant professor in pharmacology in the same year, with the support of
G. Liljestrand. From 1930 to 1931, von Euler-Chelpin got a Rochester Fellowship to do his post-doctoral studies abroad. He studied in
England with Sir
Henry Dale in
London and with I. de Burgh Daly in
Birmingham, and then proceeded to the continent, studying with
Corneille Heymans in
Ghent,
Belgium and with
Gustav Embden in
Frankfurt,
Germany. Von Euler liked to travel, so he also worked and learned
biophysics with
Archibald Vivian Hill, again in London in 1934, and
neuromuscular transmission with G. L. Brown in 1938. From 1946 to 1947, he worked with
Eduardo Braun-Menéndez in the
Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental in
Buenos Aires, which was founded by
Bernardo Houssay. His unerring instinct to work with important scientific leaders and fields was to be proved by the fact that Dale, Heymans, Hill and Houssay went to receive the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. In 1981, von Euler became a founding member of the
World Cultural Council. From 1930 to 1957, von Euler was married to Jane Anna Margarethe Sodenstierna. They had four children: Hans Leo, scientist administrator at the US
National Institutes of Health; Johan Christopher, anesthesiologist, Serafimer Hospital, Stockholm; Ursula Katarina, Ph.D., curator at The Royal Collections, The Royal Court, Stockholm, Sweden; and Marie Jane, Chemical Engineer,
Melbourne, Australia. In 1958, von Euler married countess
Dagmar Cronstedt, a radio broadcaster who had during the
Second World War worked at
Radio Königsberg, broadcasting German propaganda to neutral Sweden. ==Research==