Michael S. Brown

Origins and early life

Michael Stuart Brown, born in Brooklyn on 13 April 1941 to a Jewish family, the son of a textile salesman and a homemaker, took his bachelor's degree in 1962 and his medical degree in 1966 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Work and career

At the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas he began, with Joseph Goldstein, the work of a lifetime: the two discovered that human cells carry receptors for low-density lipoprotein — LDL, the particle that ferries cholesterol through the blood — and that when those receptors are lacking, as in familial hypercholesterolaemia, cholesterol accumulates unchecked. In explaining one inherited disease they had uncovered a fundamental mechanism of cell biology, receptor-mediated endocytosis.

Brown and Goldstein shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing the regulation of cholesterol metabolism. Their findings opened the way to the statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs that became the most widely prescribed medicines in the United States, taken by some sixteen million Americans.