Ola Didrik Saugstad – An Oxygen Radical

the first to publish this theory in European Surgical Research in 1980. In 1984, he returned to the Department of Pediatrics at Rikshospitalet University Hospital in Oslo and in 1986 was appointed as Consultant Neonatologist. In 1991, he became full Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Department of Pediatric Research at Rikshospitalet, the largest pediatric research institute in Norway. His main focus was on how oxidative stress could injure preterm infants, coining the term ‘the oxygen radical disease of the newborn’ in which he speculated that retinopathy of Ola Didrik Saugstad was born in 1947 and grew up in the hills surrounding Oslo with his two sisters and brother. His father was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo and his mother a high school teacher. In his younger days, football in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter were passionate activities. Nowadays he is a dedicated runner and skier. In 1973, after graduating as MD from the University of Oslo, he became a research fellow in Uppsala, Sweden, with Prof. Gösta Rooth (1918–2008) as his supervisor and mentor. There he developed a new method for measuring the purine metabolite hypoxanthine in small volumes of blood. He showed that hypoxanthine is elevated in blood after intrauterine hypoxia and his PhD thesis ‘Hypoxanthine as an Indicator of Hypoxia’ (1997) was based on these findings. After this he trained as an intern in the Department of Pediatrics at Ullevål University Hospital from 1979 to 1984, interrupted by a oneyear postdoctoral studentship in the Division of Perinatology/Neonatology at the University of San Diego, California, supported by a Fogarty stipend from the National Institutes of Health. In San Diego, under the tutorship of Louis Gluck and Mikko Hallman, he first became involved in surfactant research. He also pursued his ideas on reoxygenation injury caused by free radicals generated by the hypoxanthine-xanthine oxidase system. By the end of the 1970s, Ola Saugstad and co-workers believed that a burst of oxygen free radicals was produced during post-hypoxic reoxygenation and they were Published online: October 2, 2008 formerly Biology of the Neonate