- Person
- Martin Rodbell
- Lived
- 1925–1998
- Field
- Biochemistry, endocrinology
- From
- American
The story
Martin Rodbell was born in Baltimore in 1925 to a Jewish family; his father ran a grocery store. He served as a Navy radio operator in the Second World War, writing later that as a Jew, fighting Hitler was the highest priority. He then became a biochemist and joined the National Institutes of Health in 1956.
By the 1960s scientists knew that many hormones work by making cells produce a second messenger, cyclic AMP, inside them. But how a hormone outside a cell could switch on machinery inside it was a mystery. In November 1969 Rodbell and the biochemist Oscar Hechter, talking in a Washington bar, borrowed the term signal transduction from computer science to describe the problem. Rodbell proposed that every cell signalling system has three parts: a discriminator, the receptor that recognises a hormone; an amplifier, the enzyme that makes the second messenger; and between them a transducer.
Soon afterwards his team, studying the hormone glucagon in rat liver membranes, noticed that ATP seemed to loosen the hormone from its receptor, but that traces of another molecule, GTP, did so about a thousand times more powerfully. Years earlier Rodbell had been beaten to a discovery because he trusted the purity of a chemical, and he had learned the lesson. He concluded that GTP contaminating the ATP was the real actor. In papers published in 1971 he showed that GTP was needed for the hormone's signal to reach the amplifier, and that the transducer was a distinct part of the system. Alfred Gilman later purified the protein involved, the first G protein, and the two shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
G proteins proved to be master switches used throughout the body, in hormone signalling, vision, smell and taste. They explained how cholera toxin causes deadly fluid loss by locking a G protein in the 'on' position, and why certain hereditary hormone disorders occur.
Why it matters
Rodbell's discovery underlies how scientists and drug developers understand the action of hormones, toxins such as cholera, and the many medicines that work through G protein-coupled receptors.
About Martin Rodbell
Baltimore grocer’s son who discovered how cells pass outside signals inward through GTP-driven switches, the G proteins behind sight, smell, hormones and many modern medicines. Nobel Prize 1994.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1994 NobelPrize.org
- Martin Rodbell, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Private Papers of Nobelist Martin Rodbell Added to Profiles in Science National Library of Medicine
- Martin Rodbell Wikipedia
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.