Robert Furchgott

Origins and early life

Robert Francis Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 4 June 1916, the son of Arthur Furchgott, who owned a department store, and Pena Sorentrue; he was Jewish and lived most of his life in Woodmere, on Long Island. He graduated in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1937 and took a doctorate in biochemistry at Northwestern in 1940.

Work and career

He taught pharmacology at Cornell, at Washington University in St Louis, at the State University of New York in Brooklyn for more than thirty years, and finally in Miami. In 1978 an experiment gave him a result he could not explain: a substance relaxed blood vessels only when the thin inner lining of the vessel was left intact. He named what the lining released endothelium-derived relaxing factor, and spent years trying to identify it.

It turned out to be nitric oxide — a gas, and a poison in exhaust fumes, used by the body as a signal to tell blood vessels to open. That finding underlies the treatment of angina and, unexpectedly, the drugs for erectile dysfunction. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1998. He died on 19 May 2009.