Sune K Bergstrom

Sune K Bergstrom
(1916)

Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of numerous prostaglandins, which are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals. Bergstrom was the first to demonstrate the existence of more than one such compound and to determine the elemental compositions of two of them.
Bergstrom was educated at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, where he was awarded doctoral degrees in medicine and biochemistry in 1944. He held research fellowships at Columbia University and the University of Basel, then returned to Sweden to accept a professorship of chemistry at the University of Lund.

In 1958 Bergstrom returned to the Karolinska Institute, where he became dean of the medical faculty in 1963 and rector in 1969. After retiring from teaching in 1981, he continued to conduct research. He was also chairman of the Nobel Foundation (1975-87) and chairman of medical research at the World Health Organization (1977-82).