Alfred Gilman · Science & Medicine
Awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for the discovery of G-proteins and their role in cellular signal transduction.
1941, New Haven, Connecticut, USA — 2015, Dallas, Texas, USA
United States (Virginia · Texas)
Alfred Gilman is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for the discovery of G-proteins and their role in cellular signal transduction.
Origins and early life
Alfred Goodman Gilman was born in New Haven on 1 July 1941, into a Jewish family, the son of Mabel Schmidt and of Alfred Gilman, a professor at Yale who that same year published, with Louis Goodman, the pharmacology textbook still known as Goodman and Gilman; the son was given the co-author's name as his middle one, and said later that he had been born with a scientific silver spoon in his mouth, or perhaps a pestle.
He read biology at Yale, then took a joint medical and doctoral degree at Case Western Reserve under Earl Sutherland, and worked with Marshall Nirenberg at the National Institutes of Health before teaching pharmacology at the University of Virginia from 1971 and chairing the department at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas from 1981.
Work and career
The problem he inherited was half-solved. Martin Rodbell had shown in the early 1970s that GTP was somehow required for a hormone at the cell surface to produce an effect inside, but nobody had the thing that used it. Working with mutant cells that could not respond to hormones at all, Gilman isolated the missing protein, showed that restoring it restored the response, and named the family G proteins — the switch that sits between a receptor and the interior of the cell, held off until a signal arrives and then turning itself off again after a fixed time.
About a third of all drugs approved in the United States act on receptors that speak to them. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Rodbell, and died in Dallas on 23 December 2015.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
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Awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for the discovery of G-proteins and their role in cellular signal transduction.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
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