Randy Schekman

Origins and early life

Randy Wayne Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 30 December 1948, the eldest child of Alfred Schekman, a mechanical engineer at General Mills, and of Esther Bader, and grew up on the north side of Minneapolis. He grew up Jewish, with the Hebrew name Ruvain after his grandmother Rose, Hebrew lessons, Sabbath dinners at his grandparents' and holidays at their Conservative synagogue; his mother's parents came from a village in Bessarabia, and most of their families were murdered when the Nazis overran Eastern Europe.

In 1959 his parents moved the family to Southern California, where a toy microscope and a jar of pond water opened the microbial world to him.

Work and career

He studied at UCLA, with a year at the University of Edinburgh, took his doctorate on DNA replication with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford and, after two years in San Diego, joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. There he chose yeast to ask how cells export their proteins, and from 1979 he and his students isolated mutants in which secretion stopped and vesicles piled up, finding 23 secretion genes at first and more than 70 in the end.

In 1989 one of these genes, SEC18, turned out to match NSF, a protein James Rothman had found in mammals, the first link between their two lines of work and a sign that the system is as ancient as it is universal.

Recognition

In 2002 he shared the Lasker basic research award with Rothman, and in 2013 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Rothman and Thomas Südhof, for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells. He gave his share of the prize to endow a chair in basic cancer research at Berkeley named for his mother Esther and his sister Wendy, both lost to cancer, and he chairs the scientific advisory board of Aligning Science Across Parkinson's, the disease his wife Nancy lived with for twenty years.