Joseph Goldstein

Origins and early life

Joseph Leonard Goldstein was born in Sumter, South Carolina, on 18 April 1940, the only son of Isadore and Fannie Goldstein, and grew up in Kingstree, a town of five thousand where the family ran a clothing store. His parents belonged to the small Jewish community of Kingstree, where the Goldsteins took over Silverman's department store in 1936, and in 1985 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency named him among the three American Jewish Nobel laureates of that year.

Work and career

He studied chemistry at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, graduating in 1962, took his medical degree in Dallas in 1966 and trained at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he met Michael Brown. At the National Institutes of Health, from 1968 to 1970, he cared for patients with the severe inherited form of familial hypercholesterolemia and discussed their cases at length with Brown. After two years of medical genetics in Seattle, he returned to Dallas in 1972 to head the medical school's first division of medical genetics, and persuaded Brown to join him there.

In 1973 the two discovered the LDL receptor, which lets cells take up the particles that carry cholesterol in the blood, then showed how cells balance the cholesterol they make against what the diet supplies, and how inherited defects upset that balance.

Recognition

The 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Brown and Goldstein “for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism”, work that laid the basis for the statin drugs taken by millions. In 1993 their laboratory identified the SREBPs, proteins that switch on the genes for making cholesterol and fats, which also explains how statins work. Chairman of molecular genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center from 1977, he was still working beside Brown when the university marked fifty years of their partnership in 2022.