Santiago Grisolía was born in Valencia on the 6th January 1923. After graduating in Medicine from the University of Valencia (1944), he did his doctorate thesis in Madrid (1949).
At the age of 22 he left for the USA, having already published several experimental studies. He was professor Ochoa´s first graduate student in the Chemistry Department of the University of New York, where he worked on the fixation of carbon dioxide, a subject he would never abandon thereafter. He was a lecturer in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for many years at the University of Kansas, as well as at Chicago and Wisconsin, making classic discoveries in this university about the urea cycle, which have both fundamental and practical importance.
Alongside this work, he continued with his studies on carbon dioxide fixing and demonstrated that citrulline is really an intermediary in urea synthesis, a fact which was also in debate at that time.
He is a corresponding member of the Academies of Science of Madrid and Cordoba (Argentina), and of the Belgian Academy of Medicine. He is, furthermore, an honourary professor of the faculty of Medicine at Valencia and doctor "honoris causa" of a number of Spanish universities, as well as Florence and Siena, in Italy.
He has published more than four hundred scientific reports, and around thirty explanatory articles, likewise doing a vast amount of teaching and research work over many years in a wide range of European and American countries.
He is currently the distinguished Sam E. Roberts Professor at the University of Kansas, has been director, since 1980, of the International Programme of Molecular Cytology at the same university, Counsellor of the Biomedicine Institute of The Cell Surface Research Foundation in London, Chairman of the UNESCO Committee for Scientific Coordination for the Human Genome Project, director and founder of the Researcher Training School, covered by the Reciprocal Cooperation Agreement between the University of Kansas and the Institute of Cytology Research in Valencia, of which he is currently the director.
Grisolía´s work has concentrated on subjects such as the enzymology of the nitrogen metabolism (urea cycle and the breakdown of pyrimidines), the metabolism of phosphoglycerates, the replacement and intracellular breakdown of proteins and the control of tubuline synthesis in the brain.