Candid Science II

The following sections are included:

• FOREWORD

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

James D. Watson (b. 1928, Chicago) is President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. He is most famous for his discovery, jointly with Francis Crick, of the double helix structure of DNA in Cambridge, England, in 1953. Watson and Crick and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nuclear acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” Dr. Watson's career included stints at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University and from 1968 to 1993, he was Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was also the Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health from 1989 to 1992…

Maclyn McCarty (b. 1911) is Professor Emeritus at The Rockefeller University in New York City. He graduated with an A.B. in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1933 and with an MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1937. He worked with Oswald T. Avery (1877–1955) in the early 1940s on the transforming principle. Their research culminated in the publication of the paper by O. T. Avery, C. M. MacLeod, and M. McCarty, “Studies of the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 1944, 79, 137–158. This work showed for the first time that DNA is the genetic material…

Joshua Lederberg (b. 1925) is University Professor Emeritus and Sackler Foundation Scholar at The Rockefeller University in New York City. He got his B.A. degree from Columbia College in 1944 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1947. He was Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin (1947–1959) and Professor of Genetics and also of Biology and Computer Science at Stanford University (1959–1978). He was President of The Rockefeller University between 1978–1990. Dr. Lederberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 “for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria.” (The other half of the Nobel Prize was shared by George W. Beadle and Edward L. Tatum “for their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events.”)…

Arthur Kornberg (b. 1918) is Professor Emeritus (Active) at the Department of Biochemistry of Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1959 with Severo Ochoa “for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.” Arthur Kornberg got his B.S. degree in 1937 from the City College of New York and his MD in 1941 from the University of Rochester. He served in the United States Public Health Service from 1942 till 1953 at the National Institutes of Health, and in brief leaves at New York University College of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri and at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1953–1959, he was Professor and Head of Microbiology in the Washington University School of Medicine and from 1959 he has been at Stanford University, in 1959–1969 as Founder and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry. Dr. Kornberg is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London). He has received the National Medal of Science (1979), the Gairdner Foundation Award (1995), and has many other distinctions. Dr. Kornberg has been very much involved in biotechnology companies. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Kornberg's office in the Beckman Center at Stanford University on May 12, 1999…

Frederick Sanger (b. 1918 in England) studied in Cambridge and received his B.A. degree in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1943. He retired from the U.K. Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1983. Dr. Sanger is the only person who has ever received two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. He received his first Nobel Prize in 1958 (unshared) “for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin.” He then received a second Nobel Prize in 1980, jointly with Walter Gilbert of Harvard University, “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids” (The other half of the 1980 chemistry Nobel Prize went to Paul Berg “for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA.”) Dr. Sanger is Fellow of the Royal Society (London), Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and a member of many other learned societies. His many awards include the Copley Medal and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (London) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Since 1981 he has been a Companion of Honor (U.K.; membership restricted to 65), and since 1986 he has been a Member of the Order of Merit (U.K., membership restricted to 24)…

François Jacob (b. 1920 in Nancy, France) is at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1965 jointly with André Lwoff (1902–1994) and Jacques Monod (1910–1976) “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.”…

Walter Gilbert (b. 1932) is M. Loeb University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1980 with Frederick Sanger of Cambridge University “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.” (The other half was awarded to Paul Berg of Stanford University “for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA.”)…

Benno Müller-Hill (b. 1933, Freiburg, Germany) is Professor of Genetics, Emeritus, at the Institute of Genetics of the University of Cologne, Germany. He studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Munich and got his Ph.D. in 1962 in the chemical laboratory of the University of Freiburg. He did postdoctoral work in Howard Rickenberg's laboratory at Indiana University in Bloomington and in the laboratory of James Watson and Walter Gilbert at Harvard University. In 1968, he returned to Germany and joined the Institute of Genetics of the University of Cologne as full professor. At Harvard University, Dr. Müller-Hill isolated the first transcription factor, the lac repressor and he has worked on it ever since. He wrote a book on it: The lac Operon: A Short History of a Genetic Paradigm [Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1996]. This book is a unique combination of modern science, science history, and personal anecdotes…

Marshall Warren Nirenberg (b. 1927) is Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his B.S. degree in zoology and chemistry in 1948 and his M.S. degree in zoology in 1952, both from the University of Florida, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1957. He has been at NIH since 1957 and has held his present position since 1966…

Daniel Nathans (1928–1999) was University Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and Senior Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1950 from the University of Delaware and an M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 1954. He has been at Johns Hopkins University since 1962. In 1978, Dr. Nathans shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Werner Arber and Hamilton O. Smith “for their discoveries concerning restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics.” He was a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and a recipient of the National Medal of Science. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Nathans's office at Johns Hopkins University on April 2, 1999. Dr. Nathans died in Baltimore on November 16, 1999…

Paul Berg (b. 1926 in New York City) is Cahill Professor in Cancer Research in the Department of Biochemistry and Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 “for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA.” This was a shared Nobel Prize, the other half being awarded jointly to Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequence in nucleic acids.”…

Kary B. Mullis (b. 1944 in Lenoir, North Carolina) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This was preceded by the Japan Prize, which he won also in 1993. Kary Mullis graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology, majoring in chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. We recorded a long conversation on November 4, 1997, at the home of Kary and Nancy Mullis in La Jolla, California. The following excerpts^* from our conversation are mostly on topics that are not or are less elaborated in his autobiographical book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Pantheon Books, New York, 1998)…

Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1929 in New York) is President of Neurosciences Research Foundation and Director of The Neurosciences Institute and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1972 (with Rodney Robert Porter, for their discoveries concerning “the chemical structure of antibodies”). He earned his B.S. degree at Ursinus College in 1950, his MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954, and his Ph.D. at The Rockefeller Institute in 1960…

César Milstein (b. 1927 in Bahía Blanca, Argentina) is a retired (active) Member of the Staff of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge, U.K. Dr. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 “for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies.” The co-recipients were Niels K. Jerne (1911–1994) and Georges J. F. Köhler (1946–1995), both of the Basel Institute of Immunology, Switzerland…

Alfred G. Gilman (b. 1941, New Haven, Connecticut) is Professor and Chairman at the Department of Pharmacology, Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Molecular Neuropharmacology, and Regental Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1994 with Martin Rodbell (1925–1998) “for their discovery of G proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells.”…

Günter Blobel (b. 1936 in Waltersdorf/Silezia, then in Germany) is John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor at The Rockefeller University and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York City. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1999 “for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.” He received his M.D. degree from the University of Tübingen in 1960 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. He has been at The Rockefeller University since 1967. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (1983), the Leopoldina (a German science academy in Halle; 1983), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), and the American Philosophical Society (1989), among others. He received the Gairdner Foundation Award in 1982, the Warburg Medal of the German Biochemical Society in 1983, and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1993, just to mention a few of his many decorations. In 1994, he founded the “Friends of Dresden” Society and has served as its President ever since. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Blobel's office at The Rockefeller University on May 9, 2000…

George K. Radda (b. 1936 in Györ, Hungary) is British Heart Foundation Professor of Molecular Cardiology at the University of Oxford and he is the Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC). After having started his university studies at Eötvös University in Budapest, he left Hungary after the 1956 Revolution and graduated from the University of Oxford in chemistry (B.A., 1959; Part II Chemistry, Class I, 1960; D. Phil. and M.A., 1962). He did postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley and has held various positions at the University of Oxford since 1961, rising to his present position in 1984. Professor Radda has been associated with Merton College, Oxford, since 1961, becoming Professorial Fellow in 1984. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1980 and Member of the Academia Europaea in 1999, and he has won numerous awards and distinctions. He has also held various science policy making positions, becoming Chief Executive of the MRC in 1996. We recorded our conversation at the MRC headquarters in London on February 11, 2000…

Max Ferdinand Perutz (b. 1914 in Vienna, Austria) is a Member of the Scientific Staff of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, U.K. He founded this laboratory and served as its first Chairman between 1962 and 1979. Dr. Perutz was co-recipient (with John C. Kendrew) of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 “for their studies of the structures of globular proteins.” Dr. Perutz is Fellow of the Royal Society (London), Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, Member of the Pontifical Academy, Foreign Member of the French Academy of Sciences, and member of many other learned societies. His many distinctions include the Royal Medal (1971) and the Copley Medal (1979) of the Royal Society. Since 1988, he has been in the Order of Merit of the U.K. whose membership is restricted to 24. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Perutz's office in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge on September 17, 1997.^* It was then augmented in February 2000…

Richard Henderson (b. 1945, in Edinburgh, Scotland) is the Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom (MRC LMB). He got his B.Sc. in physics from the University of Edinburgh and has been with the MRC LMB since 1966, first as a Ph.D. student of Cambridge University and later as a staff member. Between 1970 and 1973, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1998. He has been awarded several prizes including the 1993 award of the Louis Jeantet Foundation in Geneva and the Aminoff Prize (Sweden) jointly with Nigel Unwin in 1999…

Aaron Klug (b. 1926 in Lithuania) is a Member of the Scientific Staff of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge, U.K. He was President of the Royal Society (London), 1996–2000. Dr. Klug was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid–protein complexes.” He grew up in South Africa, having been brought there by his parents as a child of 2. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1945, his M.Sc. from the University of Cape Town, in 1946, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1952. He worked at Birkbeck College, University of London, between 1954 and 1961 and has been with MRC LMB since 1962. He served as Director of LMB from 1986 to 1996. He was a teaching Fellow of Peterhouse (College) and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences from 1962 to 1986 and is now an Honorary Fellow…

John Thomas Finch (b. 1930 in England) is Emeritus Member of the Scientific Staff of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England. He received his B.Sc. degree (Special Physics, 2.1) from King's College, London in 1954 and his Ph.D. (Biophysics) from Birkbeck College, London in 1959. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1982. His thesis work was on X-ray diffraction studies on viruses (tobacco mosaic virus, turnip yellow mosaic virus, and poliovirus) in Rosalind Franklin's group, taken over by Aaron Klug after Franklin's death in 1958. Since 1960, Dr. Finch worked on the X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy of viruses, tRNA, chromatin and nucleosome core, ovalbumin, and DNA-protein complexes in Aaron Klug's group in the LMB, until his retirement in 1995. We recorded our conversation on February 8, 2000 in the LMB, Cambridge. My first question was about his education and start in research…

Sidney Altman (b. 1939, in Montreal, Canada) is Sterling Professor of Biology and also Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1989 with Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado at Boulder “for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA.” Since his graduate studies, Dr. Altman has been concerned with the biochemistry of nucleic acids and with the genetics of tRNA expression…

Edward B. Lewis (b. 1918) is Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor Emeritus of Biology (Active) at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained a B.A. in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota (1939) and a Ph.D. in Genetics (1942) and an M.S. in Meteorology (1943), both from the California Institute of Technology. He was corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995 “for discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.” He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London), among other memberships. His many distinctions include the Wolf Prize in Medicine (Israel, 1989) and the National Medal of Science, which he was awarded in 1990. Our conversation was recorded on February 15, 1997, in Pasadena, California, and the text was finalized by correspondence during the spring of 1998.^*…

Rita Levi-Montalcini (b. 1909 in Turin, Italy) is Director Emeritus of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) in Rome. She shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1986 with Stanley Cohen (b. 1922) of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, “for their discoveries of growth factors.” When I visited her in June 2000,^* she was 91 and still very active. We had two meetings, one at her Institute and the other at her home. She continues her research although she is no longer involved in laboratory work because of her deteriorating vision. Her and her coworkers' latest discovery is the important role of the nerve growth factor (NGF) in diseases that have to do with allergy. She received her latest honorary degree, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for this new development. Eight people are working currently in her group and they have ongoing collaboration with others in Canada, England, Poland, and the United States with further interactions in Israel and Sweden…

Lars Ernster (1920, Budapest, Hungary — 1998 Stockholm, Sweden) was Professor Emeritus of the Department of Biochemistry, Arrhenius Laboratories for Natural Sciences, Stockholm University at the time of recording our conversation on October 11, 1996. He was active in his scientific work and international interactions to the very last day of his life…

Torvard C. Laurent (b. 1930 in Stockholm, Sweden) is Professor Emeritus of Medical and Physiological Chemistry at the University of Uppsala. He was educated at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He is a Member and former President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is currently a Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry and Chairman of the Council of the Nobel Foundation. He is also Scientific Secretary of the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Professor Laurent is a Member of the Academia Europaea (London) and the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europea (Salzburg). He has been much decorated and has received many honors, including the King Carl XVI Gustaf's Gold Medal in 1994…

George Klein (b. 1925 in Budapest, Hungary) is Research Group Leader of the Microbiology and Tumor Biology Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. He started his professional career as Instructor in histology in 1945 and in pathology in 1946 at Budapest University. He was Research Fellow at the Karolinska Institute between 1947–1949. He received his MD from the Karolinska Institute in 1951 and has spent his professional career there. He was Professor of Tumor Biology and Head of Department of Tumor Biology until his retirement in 1993. In addition to shorter term visiting appointments in the United States, he was Visiting Professor of the Hadassah Medical School at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem between 1973–1993. He is a Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), he was a Member of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute between 1957–1993, he is a Member of the Academia Europaea, and many other learned societies. He is decorated with numerous awards from many different countries for his scientific research and has also received literature prizes for his increasing activities as an author. Some of his books have appeared in English, such as The Atheist and the Holy City; Pietà [MIT Press]; Live Now [Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 1997]. George Klein is a well-known personality in Sweden, not only as a scientist and writer but also because of his frequent participation in public dialogs and discussions. We recorded two conversations in Budapest, on October 2, 1999 and on September 2, 2000. First I asked George Klein to single out something from his research contributions…

D. Carleton Gajdusek (b. 1923 in Yonkers, New York) was corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with Baruch S. Blumberg “for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” Gajdusek studied always-fatal subacute diseases of the nervous system including the disease called kuru in communities of stone-age culture in New Guinea. He showed that kuru was transmissible and caused by a new type of infectious agent spread through cannibalism of their dead relatives. He further showed that this agent was closely related to that causing scrapie in sheep and that a rare worldwide pre-senile dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, was caused by the same atypical, unconventional “virus,” and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) is caused also by one of this group of agents…

Charles Weissmann (b. 1931) is Senior Research Scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Neurogenetics Unit, St. Mary's Hospital in London and Professor Emeritus of the University of Zürich. He received his schooling in Zürich, earning his MD in 1956 and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1961 from the University of Zürich. Following a stint at the Department of Biochemistry of New York University (1961–1967), he spent the major part of his professional career at the University of Zürich where he was director of the Institute of Molecular Biology…

Frederick Chapman Robbins (b. 1916, Auburn, Alabama) is University Professor Emeritus at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and Dean Emeritus of CWRU School of Medicine. Together with John F. Enders and Thomas Weller, he received the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their development of techniques for the growth of poliovirus in cultures of non-nervous tissue.” Their work paved the way to the development of the vaccines against poliomyelitis by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin and eventually to the almost total eradication of polio from the entire world. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1940. He served from 1942 until 1946 in the U.S. Army. He spent his residency at the Boston Children's Hospital, where the polio work was done. He became Professor of Pediatrics at WRU School of Medicine and Director of the Department of Pediatric and Contagious Diseases at Cleveland City Hospital in 1952, then Dean of the School of Medicine at CWRU in 1966. Dr. Robbins served as President of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences from 1980–1985. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and many other learned societies. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees and he has held positions in many committees especially on viral and other infectious diseases world-wide. Our conversation took place in his office at CWRU on October 4, 2000.^*…

Rosalyn Yalow (born Sussman, in 1921, in New York) received an A.B. in physics and chemistry from Hunter College in 1941 and an M.S. (1942) and Ph.D. (1945) in Nuclear Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana. She worked for decades at the Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC); her last position was as Senior Medical Investigator and Director of the Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory. She became Emeritus in 1992…

James W. Black (b. 1924 in Uddingston, Scotland, U.K.) is Chairman of the James Black Foundation and Emeritus Professor of Analytical Pharmacology, King's College School of Medicine, London. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings, both of the Wellcome Research Laboratories, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, “for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment.”…

K. Sune D. Bergström (b. 1916 in Stockholm, Sweden) is Professor Emeritus of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John Vane “for their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances.” Our conversation was recorded in Professor Bergström's home in Stockholm on October 16, 1999, and I summarize below what he told me…

John R. Vane (b. 1927 in Tardebigg, Worcestershire, U.K.) is Honorary President of the William Harvey Research Institute, St. Bartholomew's and The Royal London School of Medicine & Dentistry, Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London. He shared the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with K. Sune D. Bergström and Bengt I. Samuelsson, both of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, “for their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances.”…

Salvador Moncada (b. 1944 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) is Director of The Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, University College London (UCL), England. He graduated as Doctor of Medicine and Surgery from the School of Medicine, University of El Salvador, San Salvador, in 1970. He then received his Ph.D. degree in pharmacology from the Royal College of Surgeons, University of London, in 1973. The University of London conferred on him the D.Sc. degree in 1983…

Robert F. Furchgott (b. 1916 in Charleston, South Carolina) is Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, Health Science Center at Brooklyn and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Miami School of Medicine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1998 with Louis J. Ignarro (b. 1941, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles) and Ferid Murad (b. 1936, University of Texas at Houston) “for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system.” Robert Furchgott received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1937 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Northwestern University in 1940. He has been with the Department of Pharmacology of the State University of New York since 1956. His recognitions and awards include the CIBA Award for Hypertension Research (1988) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1996). We recorded our conversation on May 19, 2000 at the Health Science Center in Brooklyn. First I asked Professor Furchgott about his initial discovery…

The following sections are included:

• NAME INDEX