When Alejandro Madrigal was a teenager, he went from door to door selling clothes and shoes to help support his family, little did he imagine that he would be decorated by the Queen of England.
“I had to look for all kinds of trades,” says this Mexican doctor. “But it was a period that helped me a lot and medicine came looking for me.”
And he “fell in love” with her. The “crazy” desire to study was not compared to what frustrated an elementary school teacher who hit him with a ruler for writing with his left hand.
With his “left-handedness and dyslexia” he reached universities such as Harvard, Stanford, University College London, and became a world leader in brain transplantation. bone marrow.
And it is his contribution to the scientific field that opened a space for him in the list of figures whose achievements and services to the country are recognized by the monarch.
“I couldn’t believe it, one never expects these things to arrive,” Madrigal tells BBC Mundo with the letter in hand.
Isabel II complies 70 years on the British throne. (Photo: EPA)The letter informed him that his name had been “commended to Her Majesty the Queen for the honor of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Birthday Honors List ″.
OBE means: Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and is one of the categories of a recognition system to the extraordinary work of civilians and members of the armed forces.
Madrigal was the founder and scientific director, for 24 years, from the Research Institute of the British Anthony Nolan Foundation, which is specializes in fighting blood cancer.
As a researcher and professor he has made contributions in the field of hematology at University College e of London (UCL) and at the Royal Free Hospital of the University of London.
He led the European Association for Bone Marrow Transplantation and has received multiple distinctions.
This is his story.
The Master’s Memory
Madrigal grew up in Mexico City and has very nice memories of his childhood with his family, but not of elementary school.
Madrigal grew up in Mexico City, lived in the Juárez neighborhood. (Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)“I arrived very excited and happy on the first day of school because I saw that my older brother returned home very happy”.
“When teacher Méndez saw me grab the pencil with my left hand, he told me that he couldn’t do it in his room”.
He tried to write with his right hand, but unconsciously moved the pencil to the left, something that the teacher interpreted as an “act of rebellion”.
He snatched his pencil and told him that he would not tolerate “insolent people”.
“Besides, with dyslexia I began to have problems writing certain words. The teacher put me at the blackboard to write hours and hours with my right hand”.
“He told me a phrase that always bothered me: ‘You carry shame on the soles of your shoes’ and I made him sit in the back of the room, looking at the wall”.
Together with his brothers. (Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)Attempts to writing with the left hand often ended in insults, hitting the palm of the hand with a ruler and days without recess.
“Hopefully, education has changed, but it was a fairly difficult that led me to a very complicated start in the educational system”.
“I hated primary school, I didn’t feel skilled in many things, I wasn’t good at soccer and secondary school wasn’t either the best”.
A mission
To the 17 years, suffered “one of the greatest losses”.
His father died of a heart attack when he was in one of his many trips around the country selling different types of products.
C Like his other three brothers, he had to work.
Madrigal on the day of his graduation at UNAM. (Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)That is the time when he went from house to house with a suitcase full of things, when he was a waiter and when he tried to open a restaurant with his family that “failed”.
He won a scholarship to study computing and that allowed him to get a job in programming.
“I started studying like crazy, I finished high school with a degree of excellence and then came UNAM (National University Autonomous University of Mexico)”.
“As Neruda says in his poem that poetry came looking for him, I say that medicine found me. I already felt that I had a mission”.
With 19 years old, I was going to college in the morning and shortly before 3: 00 in the afternoon he left the class.
“I had to travel practically all of Mexico City to get to work. Sometimes I had to hitchhike because I didn’t have money for the truck.”
His workday ended at night and he reviewed the subjects at dawn. “But I was in love with my career”.
“The best university in the world”
The economic situation in the house began to improve and the good grades became, “to their surprise”, a constant.
He met María Elena when he was 14 years and married at 14. He has been a great support in his career. (Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)He went to Tijuana to do internships in a hospital.
“A teacher asked me what I was going to do next and I answered that I wanted to go to the best university in the world.”
“He laughed and told me: ‘And what is that university?’ and I replied: ‘Well, I don’t know, which one would it be?’ To which he replied: ‘Harvard’ and I said: ‘Ah well, that one, I’m going there’”
The teacher laughed again and said: “Alejandro, I’m inviting you to lunch, you have a hole in your shoe and are you going to Harvard?”
The answer was a resounding: “yes”.
And he got it. Harvard accepted him, after winning a scholarship from the World Health Organization (WHO).
At the university American met professors Baruj Benacerraf, a Nobel laureate in Medicine born in Venezuela, and Edmond Yunis, a prominent immunology and cancer researcher, who would become his mentor.
“I arrived with basic English, I studied it whenever I could. Sometimes, I didn’t understand them at all, the advantage was that Edmond is Colombian”.
“He was at Harvard and he was the happiest person in the world”.
Like a daisy
Then came a doctorate at the University of London, a postdoctoral degree at Stanford University and a job opportunity that he saw in an advertisement for Nature magazine and that ended up marking his destiny.
In London, a city that made it his home. (Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)Among some 60 candidates, was chosen to lead, from 1993, scientific research in the Anthony Nolan organization, created in 1974.
The son of its founder, Shirley Nolan, was born with a rare blood disorder called Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome and the only way to save it was with a bone marrow transplant.
What no relatives were compatible, he began the search for a donor, but did not find one and Anthony died, at the age of seven, in 1979.
In the process of searching, Shirley helped conceive a pioneering system: the first registry of bone marrow donors in the world for the treatment of leukemia and other types of cancer.
According to the organization, this registry “has helped 11. people to receive a transplant that saved their lives”.
The favorite flower Anthony’s was the daisy.
“Shirley put it as a symbol (of the foundation) because a daisy has many petals and, even if you take one away, it will still be a daisy: you can give marrow.”
“I took that message to the whole world, to the conferences I went to, and I started to generate records, to help several countries to create them and currently there are 40 millions of donors around the world”, he tells me Madrigal.
Training along the way
The doctor also helped establish the first umbilical cord bank in the United Kingdom, for transplant purposes and research.
“In the Antony Nolan there are some ,000 laces and that has saved many patients”, indicates Madrigal.
In 2020, was appointed honorary member of the European Society of Blood and Marrow Transplantation Bone in recognition of his contributions in the field of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT).
“I was fortunate to study at well-known universities and that is why they tell me that I have a very good pedigree, but when they ask me which university I love the most, I say that it is UNAM”, says Madrigal.
“ It opened doors for me and changed my universe”.
The researcher has published more than 70 articles in specialized magazines and has given hundreds of conferences in more of 50 countries.
In his house he shows us the pictures he has painted and the two books he has written: Us and Days of Rage.
(Photo: COURTESY: ALEJANDRO MADRIGAL)
He says that his “fight to the death” is against cancer.
Currently, he is working on a project to develop cell therapies against different types of this disease. age, not just leukemia.
After the withdrawal of Madrigal by Anthony Nolan, its director, Henny Braund, gave a speech in his honor.
He listed several achievements and added that his legacy went beyond science: “More than anything, his contribution the world of individuals who have been given a second chance at life directly thanks to his research cannot be underestimated”.
And he concluded: “On behalf of Anthony Nolan, the community global scientist, the patients whose lives you have saved, you will never be forgotten. Thank you”.
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