Gregorio was one of my very best friends.  We met when we were both medical students.  He was a year or two ahead of me, but we were part of a group of classmates who included Mauricio Goldenberg, Leon Berlin, Luisa Rosenberg, and Antonio Berinstein (not a medical student himself, he later became my brother-in law).  Gregorio was tall, thin, and handsome; his face was sensitive and compassionate.  If this suggests that I was taken with Gregorio, let me admit that I was.  But it was more than his physical appearance; it was his sheer intellectual power.  He was by far the brightest of us and by far the most interested in the basic science of medicine.  It is a testament to Gregorio's aptitude for science that he was the favorite student of Bernardo Houssay, the only Argentinean of my time who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. 

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It wasn't simply Gregorio I fell in love with.  I fell in love with his family, a most unusual one.  His mother had died of tuberculosis after giving birth to three children.  Gregorio's widowed father and his children combined households with Gregorio's aunt and her seven children.  Father and aunt presided over a warm and loving home; as far as I know, neither had a love interest in the other.  Dinner at the Webers' was a treat.  Not only was the food delicious, but the intellectual stimulation was enchanting.  I was close to Gregorio's sister, Freda, a philologist, and his older sister, a chemist. 

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One of Gregorio's greatest gifts to me was to introduce me to Sibelius.  He gave me a 78 rpm album of the Sibelius violin concerto.  It remains one of my favorite compositions.  Indeed, just as I was preparing this memoir, I heard it played by Vladimir Repin and the Boston Symphony.  It reminded me of how it added to my infatuation with Gregorio.  We became an item. His family was delighted, and so was mine. 

 

We spent wonderful vacation weeks several times in the mountains of Cordoba, where Gregorio's father owned a home.  Remembering those weeks of hiking, swimming, and horseback riding brought back the happiness we found in each other. 

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We might have married then and there, but Gregorio won a scholarship to Cambridge.  We agreed that marrying and living apart didn't make sense.  In principle, we were to wait for each other.  Several years later, he married in England and didn't return to Argentina.  By then, I had taken a Fellowship to study child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in the US (there was no program in Argentina in the late 1940s).  At Hopkins I met the wonderful man who was to become my husband.  Nonetheless, we remained good and warm friends.  His family visited ours when we lived in Maryland.  Later, Gregorio spent a sabbatical year in Boston.  He, my second husband (I had become a widow), and I spent a number of wonderful evenings together. 

 

Gregorio more than fulfilled our prophecies for him by becoming a distinguished scientist.  He was a Professor first at Sheffield University and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, surely the highest accolade an American scientist can get.  We were present when he received the Rumford Premium from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.  We were delighted at the recognition that came to him. 

 

In his later years, he spent some months each year in Buenos Aires doing research and teaching, but he never moved from Illinois.  At his end, when he was dying of a malignancy, he told me at the same length about a deep sense of peace with his death he had come to through readings in Buddhism.