Mario Luxoro Mariani
He founded Chilean biophysics in a laboratory facing the sea, in Montemar, and from it came Cecilia Hidalgo, Ramón Latorre and Francisco Bezanilla.
In 1963, in a laboratory facing the sea, someone injected trypsin into the giant axon of a squid. Trypsin digests proteins. If the nerve's excitability depended on membrane proteins, it should disappear.
It disappeared almost instantly. The result was published in Nature and was one of the first pieces of evidence that proteins —not lipids— are what let ions pass through the membrane. Today those proteins are called ion channels.
Chemical engineer, medical student, MIT doctorate
He was born in Santiago on 1 February 1926. He qualified as a chemical civil engineer at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in 1948 and then went on to study medicine at the Universidad de Chile without completing the degree. In 1953 he won a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, and in 1957 he completed his doctorate at MIT: several sources describe him as the first Chilean to earn a doctorate abroad.
He returned to Chile to do something that did not yet exist. Biophysics was not a discipline in the country; Luxoro founded it, starting with the chair of Medical Physics at the Faculty of Medicine.
A laboratory facing the sea, which is where the squid are
The Montemar Laboratory of Cellular Physiology was not an aesthetic choice. The squid giant axon is the classic experimental model of electrophysiology —it is thick enough to inject things into— and to work with squid you have to be where the squid are.
There, with Eduardo Rojas, he carried out the 1963 experiment. From then on his work turned to intracellular calcium and to mathematical models of excitation-contraction coupling in muscle fibre, and of excitation-secretion coupling in chromaffin cells.
- First demonstration that proteins, not lipids, are involved in the flow of ions across the nerve membrane (Nature, 1963, with Eduardo Rojas).
- Founded the Montemar Laboratory of Cellular Physiology.
- Driving force behind, and founder of, the Faculty of Sciences at the Universidad de Chile; its dean between 1968 and 1972.
- Director of the Graduate School of the Universidad de Chile between 1996 and 2002.
- Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Chile's national prize for the natural sciences), 2000.
What he really left behind
His laboratory produced Cecilia Hidalgo, Ramón Latorre and Francisco Bezanilla: two Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales laureates and one of the most cited electrophysiologists in the world. It is an unusual concentration of talent for a country that, barely twenty years earlier, had no biophysics at all.
In my view, Mario Luxoro was one of the pillars of scientific research in Chile, and we owe him the formation of the most influential group in Chilean science.
Francisco Bezanilla, UCLA, translated from Spanish
He died on 27 December 2016, aged 90. The dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Víctor Cifuentes, praised, in bidding him farewell, "his conception of education as an instrument of freedom".
What the sources do not quite settle
He received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in 2000.
Confirmed by five independent sources, including the Universidad de Chile.
He died on 27 December 2016, aged 90.
Confirmed by the Universidad de Chile and the Sociedad de Biología de Chile.
He was the first Chilean to earn a doctorate abroad.
Several sources repeat this, including the Universidad de Chile, but none explains how that claim to precedence was verified.
This page does not quote him directly.
No direct quotation from Luxoro was found in the sources consulted. The interview published by Biological Research on the occasion of his Premio Nacional would be the natural source, but it was not accessible. Rather than attribute words to him, the entry prefers to say they are missing.
- Universidad de Chile. Perfil oficial de Premios Nacionales
View source → - Universidad de Chile. Obituario institucional
View source → - Sociedad de Biología de Chile. In memoriam de la sociedad científica
View source → - Biological Research · SciELO. Entrevista con motivo del Premio Nacional 2000
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Mario Luxoro Mariani — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/mario-luxoro
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author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Mario Luxoro Mariani — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/mario-luxoro},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}