James Rothman

Origins and early life

James Edward Rothman was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, on 3 November 1950, the eldest of three sons of Martin Rothman, a small-town paediatrician who had once hoped to do research, and of Gloria Hartnick, who ran the home and his practice. He is Jewish, as the Times of Israel and the Jewish weekly of Northern California both wrote when his Nobel Prize was announced, and he grew up helping his father, going on night house calls and measuring his patients' electrocardiograms.

He launched model rockets as a boy, finished Pomfret School a year early and entered Yale in 1967 set on theoretical physics, but his father urged him to try biology, and he graduated in physics in 1971 already working on membranes.

Work and career

At Harvard Medical School, which he entered in 1971, a histology class on the secretory pathway left him asking how cells make vesicles and how each vesicle knows where to go, and he took a doctorate in biological chemistry there in 1976. After postdoctoral work at MIT he opened his own laboratory at Stanford in 1978, and in 1984 his team described in three papers the transport of proteins between Golgi stacks in a test tube, which let them track down the proteins of the machinery.

They identified the proteins NSF and SNAP and, in 1993, their receptors, the SNAREs, which sit on the vesicle and on the target membrane and bind only in specific combinations, like the two sides of a zipper, so that each cargo reaches its destination. He moved to Princeton in 1988, to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York in 1991 and to Columbia in 2004, and returned to Yale in 2008 to head its department of cell biology.

Recognition

In 2002 he shared the Lasker basic research award with Randy Schekman, and in 2013 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Schekman and Thomas Südhof, for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.