Sune Bergström

Bergström was officially married to Maj Nelly (nee Gernandt) Bergström. The couple had one son, Rurik Ernest Detlof Bergström, who later became an established businessman. Nelly died in 2007.

Bergström also had an extramarital relationship with Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo. They had a son, Svante Pääbo, born out of wedlock. His visited them on Sundays and his official family did not know anything about this liaison.

Svante Pääbo later grew up to be evolutionary geneticist and worked extensively on Neanderthal genome. However, father and son barely knew each other and Svante was mostly brought up by his mother.

Karl Sune Detlof Bergström was born on January 10, 1916, in Stockholm, Sweden, to Sverker Bergström and his Wera (Wistrand) Bergström. He had two siblings; Edman and Folke Bergström.

In 1934, Bergström passed out from secondary school and joined Karolinska Institute, also known as the Royal Caroline Institute. There he started working as an assistant to biochemist Erik Jorpes, who at that time was researching on the clinical use of heparin.

Jorpes encouraged young Bergström to study the biochemistry of lipids and steroids. Impressed by his work, Jorpes arranged a one-year fellowship for him and with that he joined the University of London in 1938.

Here, Bergström started working on bile acids with Dr G.A.D. Haslewood at Hammersmith Postgraduate Medical School. Subsequently, he received a British Council fellowship to continue his work at Edinburgh. Unfortunately, his fellowship was cancelled with the onset of the World War II and he had to go back home.

Fortunately, in 1940, he received a two-year Swedish-American Fellowship and with that he went to the United States. In the first year, he worked in the University of Columbia in New York City as research fellow. Then in 1941, he moved to the Squibb Institute for Medical Research in New Jersey.

In 1944, Bergström was made a Docent of Physiological Chemistry by Karolinska Institute. Subsequently, he began his career as an Assistant at the Biochemical Department at the same institute. Working with Hugo Theorell, he developed a purification process for lipoxygenase in 1945.

In October 1945, while attending a meeting of the Physiological Society at Karolinska, Bergström met Ulf von Euler, who was then working on prostaglandins, a lipid compound found in most animals, including humans. Impressed by his work on purification of lipoxygenase, Euler gave him some prostaglandins extracts for further purification.

Although he started working on it immediately he soon had to put the project on hold for quite a few years. First in 1946, he received another fellowship and left for Switzerland, working as a research fellow at the University of Basel for one year.

Then in 1947, Bergström came back to Sweden as the Professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Lund. Here his first task was to rebuild the research facilities, which had fallen into disuse. Once that was done, he started his research on prostaglandins.

By 1957, working with his doctoral student Bengt Samuelson and others, Bergström was able to isolate and purify two prostaglandins, named PGE and PGF. The study was first to describe the chemical structure of this lipid compound.

Bergström’s work on prostaglandins is undoubtedly his most important contribution. It was because of his work that prostaglandins are now being widely used in many medical conditions such as birth control, abortion, pain relief, and blood clots.

Although prostaglandins were first discovered by Ulf Von Euler, Bergström was first to establish that prostaglandins are groups of chemical compounds found almost in every tissue of animals, including the human beings. He was also first to identify number of these compounds and describe their chemical structures.

Once it was established that prostaglandins had many clinical applications he started working on its biosynthesizing process and collaborated with pharmaceutical companies for mass production of prostaglandins based drugs. He also helped WHO to use the drug for female health.