Sábato, Ernesto R., 1911-2011

Ernesto Sabato June 24, 1911, Rojas, Argentina – April 30, 2011, Santos Lugares, Argentina; studied at Colegio Nacional de La Plata, met Pedro Henríquez Ureña; 1929 he started college, attending the School of Physics and Mathematics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata; active member in the Reforma Universitaria movement, founding "Insurrexit Group" in 1933 – of communist ideals – together with Héctor P. Agosti, Ángel Hurtado de Mendoza and Paulino González Alberdi, among others; 1933 he was elected Secretario General of the Federación Juvenil Comunista (Communist Youth Federation; In 1934 he started to doubt communism and Joseph Stalin's regime. The Communist Party of Argentina, which had noted this, sent him to the International Lenin School for two years; In 1938 he obtained his PhD in physics from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Thanks to Bernardo Houssay, he was granted a research fellowship in atomic radiation at the Curie Institute in Paris; In 1939 he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Once in 1940 he came back to Argentina intent on leaving physics behind;