Robert Lefkowitz

Origins and early life

Robert Joseph Lefkowitz was born in the Bronx on 15 April 1943, the only child of Max Lefkowitz, an accountant in the Manhattan garment district, and of Rose, an elementary school teacher.

Work and career

In his Nobel autobiography he writes plainly that he is Jewish: all four of his grandparents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and his grandmother's brother, Rabbi Solomon Polachek, headed the theological seminary of Yeshiva University. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959 and from Columbia College in 1962, at nineteen, and took his medical degree at Columbia in 1966, never doubting that he would be a practising physician.

To meet his draft obligation during the Vietnam War he joined the Public Health Service and went to the National Institutes of Health, where in 1968 he began attaching radioactive iodine to hormones to track down their receptors. After training in cardiology in Boston he joined Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 1973, and within a year his team had a radioactive tracer that opened the adrenaline receptors to direct study.

In the 1980s Brian Kobilka, a cardiology fellow in the laboratory, isolated the gene for the β-adrenergic receptor, which turned out to resemble the light receptor of the eye, revealing a family of receptors that look and work alike. About a thousand human genes code for these G-protein-coupled receptors, which respond to light, flavour, odour, adrenaline, histamine, dopamine and serotonin, and about half of all medicines act through them.

His laboratory also discovered the kinases and β-arrestins that switch these receptors off, and he has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1976.

Recognition

In 2012 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Brian Kobilka, for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors, and in 2021 he told his story in a memoir, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm.