Houssay was renowned as a physiologist for his work on the endocrine system and in particular the pituitary gland, and shared the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.
From 1948 to 1952 Weber carried out independent investigations at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry at Cambridge, supported by a British Beit Memorial Fellowship.
[4] To this end, he invested considerable time and effort in synthesizing a fluorescent probe that could be covalently attached to proteins and which possessed absorption and emission characteristics appropriate for the instrumentation available in post-war England.
In the early 1960s, Irwin “Gunny” Gunsalus, then the head of the Biochemistry Division of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited Weber.
Gregorio Weber joined the University of Illinois in 1962 and built a research program that continued actively until his death from leukaemia on July 17, 1997.
Weber’s early description of proteins in solution as “kicking and screaming stochastic molecules” has, in recent years, been fully verified both from theoretical and experimental studies.
These contributions were recognized by the American Chemical Society in 1986, which named Weber as the first recipient of the Repligen Award for the Chemistry of Biological Processes.
He and his collaborators demonstrated that most proteins made up of subunits can be dissociated by the application of hydrostatic pressure, and opened, in this way, a new method to study protein–protein interactions.
It was created by a bequest to the Academy from Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, in 1796 - previously awardees include J. Willard Gibbs, A.A. Michelson, Thomas Edison, Robert W. Wood, Percy Bridgman, Irving Langmuir, Enrico Fermi, S. Chandrasekhar, Hans Bethe, Lars Onsager and other highly original thinkers.