- Person
- Julius Axelrod
- Lived
- 1912–2004
- Field
- Pharmacology, neuroscience
- From
- American
The story
In the 1940s the most popular non-aspirin painkillers in the United States were acetanilide and phenacetin. Phenacetin was an ingredient of APC, for years the country’s favourite headache remedy. But some users developed methemoglobinemia, a dangerous condition in which the blood’s haemoglobin is altered so that it can no longer carry oxygen properly. In 1946 an institute that studied painkillers asked the New York laboratory where Julius Axelrod worked to find out why.
Axelrod was then 33, a chemist without a doctorate who had been turned away by every medical school he applied to, partly because of the quotas many schools then imposed on Jewish applicants. He was sent to consult Bernard Brodie, an expert on drug metabolism at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York. The two talked for hours, and Axelrod began working in Brodie’s laboratory.
He devised a sensitive test for aniline, a chemical known to damage the blood, and found that a small part of acetanilide is converted into it. Most of the drug, however, becomes another compound, N-acetyl-p-aminophenol. Axelrod showed that this compound relieves pain and does not cause methemoglobinemia. His first scientific paper concluded that acetanilide probably works mainly through N-acetyl-p-aminophenol and that the compound might have a distinct advantage as a painkiller. Soon afterwards he and Brodie showed that phenacetin is converted into the same compound.
N-acetyl-p-aminophenol is acetaminophen, known outside North America as paracetamol. It was later marketed as Tylenol and became one of the most widely used medicines in the world for pain and fever. According to Axelrod’s biographer, his former student Solomon Snyder, neither Brodie nor Axelrod received any royalties, because it never occurred to either of them to patent the discovery. Axelrod went on to discover how nerves recycle their chemical messengers and shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Why it matters
Acetaminophen (paracetamol), whose safety and action Axelrod helped establish, is taken every day by millions of people around the world to relieve pain and fever.
About Julius Axelrod
Son of Jewish immigrants who helped identify acetaminophen as a safe painkiller and found how nerves recycle their chemical messengers, the basis of modern antidepressants. Nobel Prize 1970.
More about Julius Axelrod
Sources
- Julius Axelrod, Biographical Memoir by Solomon H. Snyder National Academy of Sciences
- Julius Axelrod Wikipedia
- Julius Axelrod, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.