(Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1924 - Stockholm, Sweden, 1999) Venezuelan scientist. Inventor of the diamond blade, pioneer in electronic microscopy techniques and decisive in the process of scientific modernization of his country, in which he founded the Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research (IVNIC).
Humberto Fernández made his first studies between the Zulian capital, Curacao and New York. In 1936 he entered the German School of Maracaibo and the following year he left for Germany, where he finished high school in the Schulgemeinde Wichersdorf high school in Sallfeld. At the age of fifteen he began his medical studies at the University of Munich. At twenty-one, six days before the landing of Normandy (1944), in a basement and under a low aerial bombardment, he graduated in medicine with Summa cum laude.
The following year he revalidated his degree in the Central University of Venezuela and worked in the Psychiatric Hospital of Maracaibo, but not for long, because he traveled to the United States to specialize in neurology and neuropathology at George Washington University in Washington D.C. From there he moved to Stockholm in 1947, and worked at the Serafimer Hospital with the neurosurgeon Herbe rt Olivecrona. He also began his research in electron microscopy in the laboratories of the Nobel Physics Institute, invited by Professor Manne Siegbahn (Nobel Prize in Physics 1924) and also in the Institute of Cellular Research and Genetics of the Karolinska Institute.
During this period in Sweden he invented the diamond blade for ultramicrotomy (ultra-thin sectioning of biological and metallic materials that allowed the observation of subcellular structures) and developed the concept of cryoultramicrotomy (using low temperatures), which later led him to invent the electronic cryomicroscope . He managed to observe at a near atomic level the structure of complex biological systems (or inanimate) in a hydrated state and at very low temperatures, which until then was considered improbable. In his work The diamond blade for ultra-thin section, published in 1953, Fernández Morán signed as a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Department of Biophysics at the Central University of Venezuela, whose chair was founder in 1951. In Stockholm he married The Swedish Anna Browallius, with whom she would have two daughters. In 1954 he returned to Venezuela.
That same year, with the help of the then Minister of Health Pedro Gutiérrez Alfaro, Fernández Morán dedicated himself to developing the project of a center for neurological and cerebral training and research. In 1958 Fernández Morán was asked to accept the position of Minister of Education, which he exercised for ten days, until January 23, the day of the fall of dictator Perez Jimenez.
This brief relationship with power would relentlessly pursue him and serve as an excuse to discredit any of his achievements as a scientist; Would eventually force him, in mid-1958, to take the route of voluntary exile. He gave the address of the newly founded IVNIC (Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research) to Dr. Marcel Roche and the following year the institute was extended to other areas of research, renamed the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC).