Wylie Vale Jr., Groundbreaking Endocrinologist, Dies at 70

Wylie Vale Jr., Groundbreaking Endocrinologist, Dies at 70
Wylie W. Vale Jr., an eminent endocrinologist who helped identify the hormones through which the brain governs basic bodily functions and who was involved in a combative race for the Nobel Prize, died on Jan. 3 at his vacation home in Hana, Hawaii. He was 70.


The cause was not yet known, his wife, Mary Elizabeth, said.

Dr. Vale spent most of his career at the Salk Institute in San Diego, where he led efforts to identify the group of hormones involved in bodily functions like growth, reproduction and temperature. Their discovery was a landmark in the history of endocrinology, coming after more than 30 years of bitter competition.

The Nobel Prize went to others, but Dr. Vale “really, in the long run, had the biggest impact in the field,” said Bert O’Malley, an endocrinologist at the Baylor College of Medicine.

The first part of Dr. Vale’s career was spent as the principal scientist in the laboratory run by Roger Guillemin, who was locked in a 20-year race with a rival, Andrew Schally, to identify the hormones first.

The Guillemin-Schally war, described by Dr. Schally as “many years of vicious attacks and bitter retaliation,” ended in a draw in 1977 when the Nobel medicine committee gave each man a quarter share of a prize, the other half going to Dr. Rosalyn Yalow.

But the race was not over. An unexpected second phase erupted when Dr. Vale split from Dr. Guillemin and started competing against his former mentor to find the remaining hormones.

The serene campus of the Salk Institute, a plaza that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, then became the home to two laboratories locked in a race for scientific glory, as Dr. Vale and Dr. Guillemin sought to prove that each could succeed without the other’s help.

“They sharpened their swords and went at it full bore,” said Ronald Evans, a hormone expert at the Salk Institute.

Dr. Vale’s first target was the master hormone known as CRF, or corticotrophin releasing factor, which integrates and controls the body’s response to stress. Dr. Guillemin and Dr. Schally had spent seven years trying to isolate CRF before giving up and moving on to easier targets. Dr. Vale discovered CRF in 1981 and the next year found a second hormone, called the growth hormone releasing factor, or GRF, which had also eluded the older scientists. GRF controls the body’s growth.

Endocrinologists watched in amazement as the battle over the hormones raged. But they let the fight continue, mostly because of the importance of finding the hormones, but also because the dueling labs had acquired expertise in processing hundreds of thousands of sheep, pig and beef brains obtained from slaughterhouses for the research. It was a semi-industrial operation in which few others cared to join.

Despite the pressure of the competition, first with Dr. Schally and then with his own mentor, Dr. Vale maintained his easygoing Texan style and sense of humor. By contrast, Dr. Guillemin, born in Dijon, France, in 1924, brought an immigrant’s intensity to his work. He was also, like his rival Dr. Schally, loath to share credit for his lab’s achievements with his younger colleagues.

Toward the end of the fight with Dr. Schally, Dr. Vale became disenchanted with his mentor’s single-minded quest for scientific renown. During his search for GRF, Dr. Vale wrote the chemical formula for the hormone — it had not yet been published — on a large blackboard, which the members of Dr. Guillemin’s lab could see through the window every morning as they left the Salk parking lot. The formula was a decoy, intended to mislead the rival team. Dr. Vale kept the correct version on a piece of paper in his wallet.

Dr. Guillemin was aghast at the challenge from his scientific “son,” a man whom he had trained for his doctorate. Though he succeeded in finding the CRF and GRF hormones independently, in both cases Dr. Vale’s lab beat him to the punch.

Wylie Walker Vale Jr. was born in Houston on July 3, 1941. He attended Rice University and, after hearing Dr. Guillemin lecture on the releasing factors, as the brain’s hormones are known, joined Dr. Guillemin’s lab at the Baylor College of Medicine, earning his Ph.D. in 1964.

Dr. Vale’s principal task was to detect the releasing factors’ whereabouts in the large volumes of tissue from the sheep hypothalamus, a region at the base of the mammalian brain. He helped Dr. Guillemin to his first success, the identification of TRF, or thyrotropin releasing factor. Like the other releasing factor hormones, TRF is produced in the hypothalamus and reaches its target cells in the pituitary gland, just below the base of the brain. A second hormone, which is released by the pituitary in response to TRF, controls the thyroid gland and the body’s temperature control system.

In 1970, Dr. Guillemin moved his team to the Salk Institute. Over the next three years, Dr. Vale played a central role in the lab’s discovery of LRF, the releasing factor that controls the whole reproductive system, and somatostatin, a releasing factor hormone that inhibits the body’s growth.

Dr. Vale founded two companies to exploit his discoveries. One, Neurocrine Biosciences, is testing drugs that block the action of CRF that may help manage clinical depression. The other, AcceleronPharma, is testing drugs for treating anemia.

He also served as president of the American Endocrine Society and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Besides his wife, who is known as Betty and whom he met in high school in Houston, Dr. Vale is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth Gandhi and Susannah Howieson; his father, Wylie; a brother, Shannon; and a granddaughter.

After Dr. Vale’s competition with Dr. Guillemin ended and the two men had reconciled, Dr. Guillemin recalled how a psychiatrist friend had advised him at the time to reread the Oedipus myth.

At a tribute on Dr. Vale’s 65th birthday, Dr. Guillemin quoted Freud’s analysis of the myth: “Part of any son worth his salt is planning the killing of the father he loves and taking his kingdom.”